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Employee Burnout
Why does it matter and what should you look for?
Ann Leymon
March 20, 2025 • Time to read: 4 minutes
Welcome to Balanced Scales, a monthly newsletter sharing high impact summaries of research on criminal justice topics. Do you have a topic you’d like me to cover? Respond to this email and tell me what’s on your mind.
Rooted in Research: Employee Burnout
Key Takeaway: Employee burnout is bad not just for the individual, but for the organization, the clients, and the community as a whole.
The Findings
Burnout is caused by long-term stress that surpasses a worker’s ability to cope.
37% of correctional staff experience burnout - higher than many other occupations, including police. This means higher levels of depression, substance use, relationship problems, and suicide rates.
It’s hard to precisely measure the impact of burnout, but we do know that it results in poor job performance including lower productivity, lack of empathy, and high turnover.
Why It Matters (what’s the bottom line?)
Better Public Safety: Reducing burnout means better job performance by correctional staff. Corrections staff are the primary folks working with AICs, and have an incredible potential to encourage, increase prosocial skills, and ultimately reduce recidivism and future crimes. This has a clear impact on community safety and collateral damage of justice system involvement.
Financial Impact: Reducing turnover of corrections staff saves money in human resource costs. Improving job performance to reduce recidivism also saves money in costs throughout the justice system (policing, courts, and corrections costs).
Policy Implication: A review of existing studies found that organizational factors are the most significant in reducing burnout - specifically, organizational structure and climate. This is good news because we can work on organizational factors.
Need More?
📄 Burnout in the news: Criminal justice staff including COs were not given the same appreciation that nurses and other essential workers were during the pandemic. The gratitude clearly made a difference for those workers.
Data in Practice: Protecting Against Burnout in Your Agency
Here’s what I would recommend if I were working with you:
Share recidivism data with staff on a regular basis (at least annually), highlighting the anti-recidivism number. Focusing attention on the number of past clients who haven’t been rearrested or reconvicted is a quick reframe that might help.
Conduct a burnout assessment of your staff, either through a survey or through management meetings. Many are available. Even if you don’t suspect widespread burnout now, having historical data to compare will help if you notice signs later.
Highlight the stories of successful clients. Police officers, POs, COs, and jail staff often see the same people repeatedly, creating the strong feeling that their work doesn’t have an impact. To counter that, keep in touch with folks who have completed their sentence and are living prosocial lives. Honor and celebrate them by inviting them to speak, or just to come for a coffee break.
Work in Motion: We’re preparing a burnout-focused evaluation offer. Read on if you are concerned about burnout in your agency!
Little known fact: I studied work and organization issues before moving to criminal justice. As I worked on this newsletter, I realized I could do more for you.
If you are seeing signs of burnout in your agency (depressed affect, apathy towards clients, increased absenteeism), we will conduct an assessment and provide recommendations for specific organizational actions you can take to reduce burnout. Best of all, we don’t just assess and report - we will help implement the suggestions AND we will track important metrics (including recidivism, absenteeism, and turnover) to provide clear data on the impact of our work.
Since this is a new service, our first client will get a steep discount. Book a time to discuss here: calendly.com/annleymon
Thanks so much for reading.
Peace,
Ann