Why are we all so burned out in Charlotte? Here’s what we can do about it.
In Charlotte — and really, across the country — we are all a little overtired at the end of a work day. Who else can’t relate to having a quiet evening on the couch interrupted with endless work emails, texts or calls?
But beyond the occasional irritation or moments of fatigue, real burnout in the workplace can become a serious phenomenon when prolonged stress leads you to feel overwhelmed and a depletion of emotional resources.
A new study by Dnovo, with a relatively small sample size of 2,040 U.S. adult workers and 800 Canadian adult workers across various industries, ranked Charlotte as the 4th-most burned-out city in the U.S., after Sacramento, Washington and Los Angeles.
Denver, Tampa and Nashville ranked as the least burned out.
That same study indicated 62% of remote workers would quit rather than return to an office, while a Moodle study found 66 percent of U.S. employees reported being burned out in 2025, and Talker Research found that a quarter of people are burned out by age 30.
People are certainly feeling it here: Charlotte has been cemented as one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas for decades, and Mecklenburg County doubled its population between 1990 and 2015. In part, this is due to an ever-growing workforce and economic opportunity across sectors like finance, health care and more. But are workers footing the bill at the expense of their health and well-being?
Fighting burnout
Daniel Grano, department chair of Communication Studies at University of North Carolina-Charlotte and part of the core faculty for the Health & Medical Humanities program, said burnout can be tough to combat.
“There are positive steps we can take, including taking work off of people’s plates, or shifting assignments,” he says. “Burnout often doesn’t resolve from short reprieves. So, how can we get to a bigger change in the underlying conditions of one’s work?”
Many of the changes that workers point to as helpful, like remote work for example, are going away as quickly as they came on the scene.
If study after study shows that if people are happy at work, they’re also more productive, why does the modern work environment seem to counteract that at every step? And do enough employers care about their team’s well-being more than they do the perceived bottom line with maximal output?
Burnout in Charlotte
Reporting on this topic locally proved challenging — almost as if by simply mentioning the term “burnout” in the request for interviews, individuals were reminded of just how intensely they were experiencing the phenomenon.
Just as frequently, interviewees declined to speak about the topic, expressing fears about their employer seeing their words about the workplace in print.
Nedra Tawwab, a Charlotte-based therapist and clinical social worker, explains burnout as something that “happens when people become emotionally exhausted or overwhelmed.”
“Burnout is a state of mental, physical and/emotional fatigue,” she said. “Burnout occurs as a result of feeling overwhelmed and hopeless that things will improve … and can deplete the joy from interactions that were once enjoyable. Burnout can impact your energy level toward people, tasks and responsibilities.”
But unhappy employees aren’t just an issue to be resolved at the individual level (say, with self-care or personal boundaries). The problem often demands resolution at the institutional level and comes at a heavy cost to businesses. Unhappy employees are more likely to miss work or quit, or to stay in their role but disengage from the workplace.
“For these reasons, supporting employee happiness should be seen as a strategic investment in the organization’s future,” said Brent Reed, an organizational researcher and educator in Charlotte studying how workplace experiences affect well-being.
What causes burnout?
There are plenty of factors contributing to high levels of burnout: A culture that glorifies productivity, the amount of working hours, trying to achieve work-life balance when many individuals can be reached 24/7 by phone or email, commute times and even the stress of access to quality health care and childcare services.
A 2025 Forbes article reported that the top reasons for burnout across all age groups include: having more work than time to do it, not enough resources, a poor economy impacting well-being and taking on too much due to labor shortages.
According to recent population data, the most common fields of employment for Charlotteans are finance and insurance, and health care and social assistance. Together, those four comprise over 100,000 workers in a city that most recently clocked in at over 920,000 residents.
A 2024 Medius report cited that, in a recent survey of financial professionals, 60% said they were looking for a job outside of the industry, with 53% of them attributing that in part to high levels of burnout and poor work-life balance.
And, as many already know, health care workers have also been deeply taxed in recent years. A study by the CDC showed that 46% of health workers reported feeling burned out often or very often in 2022, compared to 32% in 2018.
Burnout as a warning sign
Reed, who researches workplace well-being at the organizational level, points out that “although burnout is often seen as a personal issue, it is more commonly a reflection of problems in the work environment. It typically signals that something is misaligned in how work is organized or managed … burnout is not just a personal concern — it can be a warning sign that something in the workplace needs attention, and ignoring it can come at a significant cost to employers.”
Reed also notes that burnout is neither unique to capitalism nor an inevitability of it, although, he says, “certain features can make [burnout] more likely, especially when there is constant pressure to do more with less.
“The push for efficiency, productivity and short-term results can come at the expense of employee well-being if organizations are not intentional about how work is designed and how people are supported … So, while broader economic forces can shape the landscape of work, organizations still have a great deal of influence.”
Remote work as an accessible solution
The topic of remote work came up over and over again in the discussion of burnout at work.
For some, remote work has been the answer to much of what caused them burnout in the first place. In one of the largest studies of working-from-home professionals, published in the journal Nature, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are just as productive, as likely to get promoted and are significantly less prone to quit.
Remote work is also an accessible option for workers with disabilities and those who have long covid or other health issues that make working in person a risk. “Remote work can also expand access to talent by removing barriers that affect many people, such as caregiving responsibilities, chronic health conditions, disabilities or living far away from major employment hubs,” Reed said.
But as more return-to-office mandates hit employees, that option could disappear. One of the largest examples of this happened at Amazon, an employer of 1.56 million people worldwide. In January, leaders announced that all employees were required to work five days a week in the office.
“Remote work can be a powerful tool for reducing burnout because it gives employees greater autonomy and flexibility,” Reed said.
“Recent research also challenges the notion that remote work harms productivity. Most studies find it has no negative impact, and some suggest it even improves productivity.
“That said, there can be some tradeoffs … All considered, the best approach is to align the work arrangement with the nature of the work. If there are no compelling reasons to be on-site, requiring a full return to the office can undermine employee satisfaction without offering any clear benefits. If working together in person adds some value, a hybrid model may be ideal.”
Less than a year ago in July 2024, Mecklenburg County Manager Dena Diorio issued a directive to end the county’s telework policy, and all employees were officially ordered to return to their offices five days a week.
When Mecklenburg County announced the full-time return to the office, IT project manager Tom MacFarlan told Queen City News in a Feb. 29, 2024, interview that he “felt betrayed” after the significant amount of work he and his peers put in earlier in the pandemic and expressed concern about the county being able to keep and hire workers without the “perk” of being able to work from home.
Who bears the burden?
Of course, working remotely has never been an option for plenty: Roughly two-thirds of all U.S. jobs in the U.S. cannot be performed remotely, so mitigating burnout has to come in other ways.
According to 2022 research published in Business Horizons on how to prevent and combat employee burnout and create healthier workplaces, some of the interventions beyond remote work options that have proven effective for organizations include:
Providing stress management interventions
Allowing employees to be active crafters of their work
Cultivating and encouraging social support
Engaging employees in decision-making
Implementing high-quality performance management.
And while rates of burnout are demonstrably high amongst Charlotte’s city workers, bankers and health care professionals, the toll extends far beyond those industries.
Pressure to perform
A 2022 study on racial and ethnic differences in burnout found a higher prevalence of burnout among African Americans (30%) compared to Caucasians (18%), and employees who represent any minority group often experience pressure to perform at a higher level.
This is also true for workers with disabilities, whether it be physical, sensory, intellectual/developmental, mental/behavioral or a combination of these. The most recent data indicates that one out of every four Americans reports living with a disability.
Caroline Rogers is the coordinator for Disability Outreach at UNCC, and she said simply needing to advocate for appropriate accommodations at work can be taxing.
“I know I was nervous every time I had to disclose [my disability],” she said. “There’s a stigma that if you have a disability, employers won’t want to hire you or won’t be willing to accommodate you ... I hear it all the time from students — they’re scared to disclose their disability because they want to get a job.”
“What’s often overlooked is that accommodations aren’t just about compliance — they’re key to supporting employees in doing their best work,” she said.
“Many effective accommodations are low-cost and simple, such as providing a chair for someone who needs to sit or offering flexible scheduling ... When people are given the support they need, they’re empowered to contribute fully, which ultimately benefits both the individual and the organization.”
