Your designer just told you they’re burnt out. Stop sending them to yoga.
The real problem isn’t their resilience. It’s more likely your asinine approval process.
That meditation app subscription you bought for your design team? It’s about as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Your designers aren’t burning out because they lack mindfulness. They’re burning out because your organizational design is fundamentally broken.
As a creative leader, I’ve watched this re-run a few too many times. A talented designer starts showing signs of exhaustion. The response? “Take some time off! Use the wellness room! Have you tried our new breathing app?”
Meanwhile, that designer is trapped in a Kafkaesque approval process where twelve stakeholders need to sign off on button colors while artificial deadlines create perpetual emergency mode.
Burnout is an organizational design failure, not a personal weakness.
A recent study suggests, in the US alone, companies are projected to spend nearly $95 billion on corporate wellness by 2026, yet designer burnout has increased dramatically since the pandemic. Why? Because we’re treating symptoms while the disease (dysfunctional work systems) metastasizes unchecked. It’s like prescribing aspirin for a broken leg and wondering why the patient can’t walk.
A study with randomized trial tracking of 30,000 employees through a comprehensive wellness program, after 18 months of yoga classes, nutrition workshops, and stress reduction seminars, found virtually no difference in health outcomes, productivity, or burnout between participants and the control group.
The only measurable change? A tiny uptick in self-reported exercise habits. That’s it. Billions spent for people to occasionally remember they should probably move more. Smart.
We’ve been solving the wrong problem. It’s not that designers lack resilience. It’s that we’ve built systems that would burn out a robot.
What’s actually burning out your designers.
Almost all companies, where you have some level of creative work all fall into one or more of these classic traps:
The autonomy crusher.
Your designer just spent three weeks perfecting a solution. Now they need approval from product, engineering, marketing, sales, the CEO’s assistant, and probably someone’s particularly opinionated beagle. Each round of feedback contradicts the last. By the time anything ships, it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of compromises that nobody believes in.
This creates what psychologists call learned helplessness: a state where people feel their efforts don’t matter and ultimately disengage.
What should be changing your view on work is this: designers with high autonomy often work more hours yet report substantially less burnout than those working standard weeks under micromanagement. When people control their work, long days become energizing rather than depleting.
Startup teams routinely pull all-nighters during launches yet maintain fierce loyalty and energy. Why? Because they own their decisions. Meanwhile, your designer working reasonable hours in a Fortune 500 company is ready to rage-quit because they need three approvals to change a hex code.
You don’t need a 9-9-6 schedule to get ahead. You just need a little trust in people.
Context-switching: The silent productivity vampire.
Every time your designer gets interrupted, they lose several minutes getting back into flow. Your designers aren’t just switching between tasks — they’re bleeding cognitive energy with every Slack notification, every “quick question,” every meeting that could have been an email.
Chronic context-switching causes a massive productivity drop and accelerates burnout faster than raw overwork. Why? Because every switch burns glucose in the brain. By 3 PM, your designers are running on fumes, not because they worked hard, but because they never got to work at all.
I watched a design team track their context switches for a week. The average designer jumped between 14 different projects daily. These weren’t collaborative hand-offs — they were drive-by requests, urgent-but-not-important fires, and what we call “seagull management.”
Decision fatigue in the hierarchy maze.
Either your designers drown in trivial decisions nobody else wants to make, or they can’t make any decisions without escalating to the C-suite. Both extremes cause burnout.
Humans make roughly 35,000 decisions daily. In rigid hierarchies with unclear decision rights, designers either agonize over choices without guidance or develop learned helplessness because everything requires sign-off from someone four levels up who responds to emails monthly.
The very people with decision authority (your senior leaders) are also burning out from decision overload.
The fix: clarify who owns which decisions, empower people to decide at the lowest reasonable level, and streamline approval chains.
The feedback vacuum.
Want to watch a designer’s soul leave their body? Have them work on something for six months, ship it, then never tell them what happened. Did users love it? Hate it? Did it even launch? Who knows! They certainly don’t!
This isn’t just demoralizing — it’s clinically linked to burnout. Psychologists call it “effort-reward imbalance.”
Evidence shows that when workers understand how their role contributes to the big picture and receive recognition for progress, they report substantially higher fulfillment and dramatically lower emotional exhaustion.
Employees who feel their work has meaning are four times more likely to be engaged and far less prone to burnout. Yet most designers have better visibility into the office coffee consumption than their work’s outcomes.
Three things we’re still getting wrong about burnout.
Myth 1: “It’s about work-life balance.”
Gallup found something that should revolutionize how we think about burnout: engaged employees with autonomy can work substantially longer weeks with lower burnout than disengaged employees working standard hours.
Read that again. It’s not the hours. It’s how you’re managed during those hours.
I’ve seen game development teams cheerfully endure brutal crunch periods because they’re building something they believe in with people they respect. Same hours at a bureaucratic agency where every decision dies in committee? Instant burnout, even with “healthy boundaries.”
Jeff Bezos called it in his infamous commentary: Work/life isn’t about “balance.” It’s about creating systems that energize each other rather than suck it out.
Myth 2: “Some people just aren’t resilient enough.”
This myth is particularly insidious because it lets organizations off the hook. “That designer couldn’t hack it” becomes the narrative, not “our approval process would break anyone.”
The top burnout drivers are all organizational failures: inadequate support, unfair treatment, unreasonable deadlines, unclear roles, unmanageable workload. None of which can be solved by yoga.
The World Health Organization explicitly defines burnout as resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” separating it from personal mental issues. Survey after survey about burnout causes find the top issues are all organizational: high workload, inefficient processes, and unclear goals.
Unfair treatment at work makes people more than twice as likely to experience severe burnout. No amount of resilience can overcome a toxic boss or a perpetually understaffed team.
Myth 3: “Time off will fix it.”
Your burnt-out designer takes a two-week vacation. They come back refreshed, energized, ready to create. Within 72 hours, they’re back in the same toxic soup of endless approvals and context-switching chaos.
Vacations provide temporary relief, but employees often come back to the same dysfunctional environment and quickly relapse. As Gallup warns, “unless you address the root causes, that ‘personal day’ might just give the employee enough breath to realize it’s the workplace that’s the problem.”
True recovery from burnout requires changing the work conditions, not just pausing work.
A system redesign that actually works.
The evidence is overwhelming that burnout is an organizational design problem at its core. While personal wellness habits and resilience are helpful, they are simply no match for a poorly designed work system.
Stop fixing your designers. Start fixing the system that’s breaking them.
1. Start with decision rights.
Map out every approval your designers need. I guarantee you’ll find absurdity. I once ran into a team needing seven approvals to change error message copy but only one to spend $50,000 on stock photos.
Give designers explicit decision rights over their domain. Not suggestions, not recommendations. Actual decisions. Start small if you must. Let them own typography choices without committee approval. Watch what happens to their energy.
Research backs this up: A European tech company faced high designer burnout. Instead of sending everyone to resilience training, the new VP of Design held workshops where designers mapped their biggest pain points. They identified excessive approval layers and unclear project priorities as top stressors.
Leadership consolidated approval steps and instituted quarterly planning to clearly rank projects. Over the next year, designer turnover dropped, and self-reported burnout improved dramatically.
Academic studies confirm that participatory organizational interventions (where employees actively collaborate to improve their work conditions) can reduce burnout for over a year in a sustained way. People support what they help create.
2. Protect focus time like you protect revenue.
At KAYAK, our “No Meeting Fridays” aren’t just a nice gesture. They’re an organizational acknowledgment that deep work requires protection. You must defend these boundaries militantly.
Many employees credit it with lowering stress and increasing productivity.
Create explicit context-batching rules:
Morning blocks for deep creative work (zero meetings before noon). Designers need uninterrupted time when their brains are fresh, not fragmented into 30-minute chunks where they’re constantly preparing for or recovering from meetings.
Afternoons for collaboration and feedback. This is when energy naturally dips anyway. Use it for the interactive work that doesn’t require the same depth of concentration.
Dedicated time for learning and experimentation. Google’s Site Reliability Engineering teams cap repetitive manual work at half of engineers’ time, preserving the rest for meaningful work. This practice has been critical in reducing turnover and burnout.
Then (and this is crucial) measure and celebrate focus time like you do sprint velocity. What gets measured gets managed.
3. Build continuous feedback loops.
Your designers should know what happened to every significant piece of work they produced. Not through some annual review, but continuously, viscerally, immediately.
One team I worked with installed a massive dashboard showing real user feedback on recent launches. Another created “design impact reports” (monthly one-pagers showing how design decisions affected actual metrics). A startup I advised holds monthly “design wins and sins” where they collectively examine what worked and what flopped.
When designers see their work’s impact, even failure becomes learning rather than void-screaming. In short, burnout flourishes in a vacuum of feedback and purpose, whereas frequent recognition and visible impact energize teams.
4. Eliminate the systemic waste.
Here’s what actually creates waste in design teams: late-stage spec changes, endless revision cycles, projects that get killed after months of work, and handoffs where context gets lost.
Map your actual workflow. Where do designs get stuck? What percentage of your team’s time goes to rework versus new work? When do projects typically derail?
Then fix the upstream causes:
Lock critical decisions earlier. If brand guidelines keep changing mid-project, that’s not a design problem. Lock them before design starts.
Include designers in discovery, not just execution. When designers only see specs after they’re “finalized,” they inherit constraints that create impossible problems later. By then, everyone’s committed to a bad direction.
Create handoff protocols. A simple Figjam or Notion doc explaining decisions, rejected alternatives, and open questions prevents weeks of rework when someone new joins the project.
Track and publish waste metrics. How many design hours went to work that never shipped? How many revisions were caused by late stakeholder input? Make these numbers visible. What you measure, you can fix.
This is systems thinking: treat burnout triggers as design problems. The goal isn’t to make your designers more resilient to chaos. It’s to design out the chaos.
Stop fixing your designers. Start fixing the system that’s breaking them.
Tomorrow, walk into your office (or open Zoom) and ask your design team this question: “What would you change about how we work if you could wave a magic wand?”
Then (and this is the radical part) actually do it!
Start with one thing. One approval you can eliminate. One meeting you can kill. One feedback loop you can create. One small systemic change that acknowledges the truth: burnout isn’t a designer problem.
It’s a design problem.
And unlike your designers, this one’s actually yours to solve.
Hi, I’m Oscar! I’m a founding designer at momondo, I’ve won a Material Design Award for Innovation, and I write articles to help design leaders succeed.