Burnout Is Killing Climate Progress—Here’s How We Fix It

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Burnout is rampant in the climate space. 

Burnout itself is the “prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job” (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). A recent study of climate professionals found that 96% report “high” or “very high” levels of burnout (Climate Critical, 2023). Anecdotal evidence is also telling. As a colleague at a climate tech startup recently confided:

“Everyone here is fried—and we’re not even to market yet.”

Sometimes burnout feels inevitable. The stakes are high, timelines are aggressive, and climate work is often complex and underfunded.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Many organizations rely too heavily on the mission to keep people engaged. They assume stress is the price to pay for impact. This mindset fuels a vicious cycle: the burnout doom loop. Self-sacrifice leads to exhaustion, exhaustion impedes performance, talent turns over, and the climate movement suffers.

Burnout prevention isn’t about better wellness perks or resilience workshops. As long as we perceive wellbeing as separate from work itself, it will remain a hopeless act of triage. When grafting a tree, no one expects the new branch to transform the root stock itself.

Workplace wellbeing is the same. It is rooted in the work itself. Wellbeing should be the natural byproduct of one’s interaction with their work. And healthy work cultures emerge from well-designed organizations and work structures.

It’s about cultivating a healthy foundation and root system. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Streamline Processes
2. Support People
3. Reinforce Purpose

Streamline Processes 

Burnout prevention starts with effective leadership. All of us have experienced the impact leaders have on job satisfaction. And leadership itself can be loosely divided into interpersonal relations and work process determination. Together, relationships between people and their work processes are the foundation of a company’s culture, and company culture is closely correlated with burnout (Johnson & Shamroukh, 2024).

Ensuring business strategies are aligned with operations is something only a leadership team can do. Strategy and operations create a company’s baseline for success. Clean business processes are only possible when there is a clear business strategy to guide them. Confusing workflows, constant pivots, and unclear expectations are exhausting. But when work is well structured, people know their time and effort is being put to good use and this is an excellent defense against burnout.

Support People

Nothing is worse than a toxic work culture or persistent effort without positive feedback. One MIT study revealed that company culture is 10x more predictive of turnover than compensation (Sull, Sull, & Zweig 2022). When people feel empowered with resources, autonomy, and effective leadership, they’re naturally engaged. Burnout is just as much about the way we work as it is what work we’re doing.

Therefore, it’s imperative that work priorities are “vertically integrated” for individuals and teams. Tools like process mapping, Pareto’s Law, and Parkinson’s Law help us strategize, prioritize, and time block. Process mapping creates end-to-end visibility of the work itself. We can then use a tool like Pareto’s Law to determine what aspects of our work make us most effective. Finally, we can use those insights along with Parkinson’s Law to determine how we should be spending our time.

It’s also important that work priorities are “horizontally integrated” across teams and departments. When organizations adopt something such as the Maker vs. Manager schedule, they create shared expectations regarding how time is viewed, valued, and spent. Peak performance is rare but can be preserved and promoted with things like uninterrupted time blocks for deep focus and a consistent meeting cadence.

Are these tools and concepts new? Absolutely not. But implementing them well is challenging because it requires us to consider the unique context of climate work. At the intersection of people and processes lies the long-standing balance between technical solutions and adaptive challenges. Too often, organizations neglect this balance. This is especially true in the climate space where speed and scale are paramount. However, until we get this right, climate work will continue to burn people out.

Reinforce Purpose

The data is clear: people crave a sense of purpose in work and life (Populace, 2019). But a strong mission doesn’t justify a daily grind that ends in burnout. The mistake in the climate space is leaning on it too heavily and inadvertently asking people to sacrifice their wellbeing at the altar of the climate movement. This is as unsustainable as many of the environmental practices we’re trying to transform.

Instead, purpose should act as a compass that helps align people and work processes. It is the intangible binding agent of company culture. For those of us who’ve devoted ourselves to this movement, our “why” is clear. That greater purpose can (and should) clarify difficult decisions about what work to do and how the work gets done. Ultimately, anchoring to a shared purpose improves work outcomes and leads to greater impact.

Think of soil in an ecosystem. It nourishes plants and, in turn, sustains life. But its power lies in its openness; it doesn’t dictate how plants take root or grow. It simply holds space with the intention to serve. Purpose in an organization should work the same way—not as a rigid force shaping every move, but as a foundation that allows people to connect with it in their own way. When this happens, organizational impact becomes the inevitable outcome of healthy people performing their best.

What’s Possible with Well Structured Work

Applying these principles works for any organization regardless of size or industry. A recent client of ours in a high growth industry was managing over $100M in annual revenue, but they were working 80+ hours per week for months on end to keep up with the demand. They were highly engaged (by necessity), but burning out. The CEO reached out asking about our employee wellbeing work. A quick assessment and audit of their internal systems revealed the truth we see time and again: the problem wasn’t a lack of wellbeing practices, it was ineffective work processes. This is common in the climate space. Wellbeing practices won’t be effective, or even retained, until chaotic work processes are resolved.

We started with process mapping and outlined every step in the business from beginning to end. It was challenging, but revealed the exact reason they were working 80+ hours a week—everyone was working more than they needed to. Without a crystal clear understanding of their work processes, they were unable to identify and address the leverage points that ultimately reduced their work hours and eliminated their burnout symptoms. From there, every line item received a primary, secondary, and tertiary responsible party. At that point, cross functional-training ensured everyone could stay in their lane, and feel confident there would be no gaps in coverage.

High growth had hindered their ability to think critically about how their work should be structured. With the additional capacity, they identified the most important tasks within every function of the business and prioritized them accordingly. The company adopted individual time blocking and took the next step by coordinating their schedules to optimize their time across the organization.

The results speak for themselves. Within a few short months, they cut 80+ hour weeks to 40, increased wellbeing and engagement, morale stabilized, and they escaped the burnout doom loop. In addition, they inadvertently increased their revenue because they now knew what made them most effective. Perhaps most importantly, they got their time back. Company culture improved because of the lives people were now able to live outside of work. They could actually clock out and take PTO without keeping their laptops open 24/7. They implemented a monthly MDO (mental day off) for everyone at the company and increased team building initiatives like annual retreats and community volunteering.

Summary

In the climate community, we often assume that stress and burnout are inevitable. Stress may be, but burnout doesn’t have to be. It’s often caused by poorly organized (and operationalized) work. Well structured work elevates performance, and that leads to scaled climate solutions. 

In essence, every path that leads to burnout can be rerouted with 2 simple steps: 

1. Knowing what to work on 
2. Knowing how to focus

As Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, famously states, “Time is more important than tech.” We have the technology to solve the climate crisis—we know what to work on. Aside from climate policy, the primary bottleneck is our ability to scale solutions quickly—which hinges on how we design our work and our organizations. How we organize ourselves and our companies is not only the taproot to addressing climate change, but the key to solving burnout within the climate movement.

Yes, we must scale climate solutions rapidly. But that won’t happen if the organizations driving them are crumbling from within.

Preserving life on this planet is our responsibility. To do that, we must learn to scale up without burning out.

Ian C. Williams is the Founder and CEO of Still Point Insight, where he helps mission-driven organizations streamline operations and business processes to maximize employee engagement and impact. He is also the author of Soil & Spirit, which Forbes named #1 of 3 books inspiring leaders to create change.