Invisible work draining best employees: HBR
MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES — The cognitive and emotional work employees do invisibly — managing tasks, relationships, and mental coordination — is driving burnout and turnover at rates leaders have systematically failed to measure.
According to Leah Ruppanner and co-authors, writing for Harvard Business Review, most organizations track hours and output but remain blind to the mental load underpinning both.
The mental load leaders are not measuring
Leah Ruppanner, professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne and founder of LightenLab, wrote alongside five workplace researchers to identify the cognitive burden leaders routinely overlook.
“Most leaders assume they understand employee workload by tracking hours, deadlines, and performance metrics,” she wrote.
The mental load they overlook — defined in the article as ‘the ongoing cognitive and emotional effort required to manage tasks, relationships, and coordination at work and at home’ — fragments attention and creates persistent exhaustion.
The result, the authors found, is reduced focus, slower decision-making, and elevated risk of burnout and attrition across the workforce.
The authors found that mental load operates as a hidden driver of disengagement — invisible to traditional workload frameworks, but felt acutely by the employees who carry it.
Leaders must redesign work, not just reduce it
“Managing mental load is less about reducing work itself than about redesigning how it is structured and distributed, so employees can sustain focus, effectiveness, and engagement,” Ruppanner and colleagues wrote.
Leaders can start by identifying where employees absorb disproportionate cognitive and coordination burdens that fall outside their formal job descriptions.
74% of employees say they have experienced burnout, according to a 2026 report by Spring Health, with 61% of human resources (HR) professionals reporting that employee burnout has increased in the past year.
High performers carry the heaviest invisible loads — and are the most likely to leave organizations that fail to acknowledge or address them.
For business process outsourcing (BPO) providers managing distributed offshore teams, invisible workload is a particular organizational risk: remote employees often absorb elevated coordination and communication demands without those burdens appearing in any formal metric.
When top offshore talent carries disproportionate mental load — bridging time zones, translating client expectations, and managing ambiguity — without recognition, the burnout trajectory Ruppanner describes plays out across oceans.
BPO firms that build explicit mental load audits into performance management will be better positioned to retain the high-skill workers their service delivery depends on.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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