There’s good news and bad news on the employee burnout front. First the good news: Far fewer U.S. workers say they’re burnt out today than a few years ago. According to new research from Eagle Hill Consulting, the numbers dropped from 58% in August 2020 to 45% in August 2023.

The bad news: Forty-five percent of workers experiencing burnout — nearly half of the entire workforce — is still really high. (Workload and staffing shortages are the most common causes cited.) It’s important to remember that burnout isn’t just normal work stress; it leads to health problems, absenteeism, errors, and turnover. Check out our 10 Ways to Prevent Employee Burnout.

“Work spouse”: Is it time to divorce ourselves from the phrase?

Not helping: How “unhelpful help” backfires on managers

Marriott: The hotel conglomerate started as a root beer stand

(Source: Shutterstock)

The concept of a work marriage, a platonic 9-to-5 friendship between employees of the opposite sex, dates back to the golden-age romance movie The Office Wife. But it wasn’t popularized until a 1987 Atlantic essay described a “work wife” as “the woman in your office who … has lunch with you pretty often,” “waits for you to finish up so that you can go down in the elevator together,” and “tells you things about her other (home) husband that he wouldn’t want you to know.”

Cringe, right?

Rooted in an era when office gender dynamics were far more imbalanced — and same-sex couples couldn’t yet legally wed — it’s understandable that half of Americans say work marriages are “not okay,” according to a 2023 Newsweek poll. 

However, while 57% of millennials feel having a work spouse is wrong, only 39% of Gen Z agrees. Could the phrase be falling back in favor, albeit with a modernized definition? Here are both sides of the argument.

The Case Against ‘Work Spouse’

Referring to a co-worker as your wifey or hubby — no matter how much fun they are to gossip with — is bizarre, especially if you have an actual wife or husband. Labels shape perception and thinking of someone in this way could even foster an inappropriate attraction (again, especially if you have an actual wife or husband!).

There is also the fact that women already face unfavorable biases when it comes to receiving promotions and respect in the office. Being known as some dude’s “work wife” might not exactly help.

And besides, why can’t people of different genders be friends without awkwardly, jokingly romanticizing it? Got a good work friend? Just call ‘em your good work friend … because that’s what they are.

The Case (Kind Of) for ‘Work Spouse’

Many of the hallmarks of a healthy marriage (communication, trust, respect, and the ability to resolve conflict) are also necessary for strong professional partnerships. A 2014 study found that employees were more productive, less absent, burned out at lower rates, and experienced higher job satisfaction in “a culture of companionate love — feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others — at work …”

Heck, with the business world’s newfound march toward improved mental health, sharing those qualities with a favorite colleague is more than OK. 

Plenty of female employees have comfortably adopted the “work wife” title for their No. 1 favorite person to DM on Slack. (Fewer straight men refer to one another as “work husbands,” but hey, office-bro marriages might lead to a better workplace, too.) As with literal marriage a decade ago, maybe we just need to expand our idea of what a work marriage can be.

🤿 DIVE DEEPER

• How to Work With Your Spouse Without Filing for Divorce

• Simple Ways to Be a Good Co-Worker

• Are Your Employees Bringing Out the Best in One Another?

Dr. Ben Baran is an Associate Professor at Cleveland State University and co-founder of Elevating What Works.

Employee stress costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars each year. One evidence-based way to alleviate it is for supervisors to be understanding, so it’s natural that many managers try to help their direct reports.

But what if your help isn’t helpful … or worse yet, is harmful? What if by trying to reduce stress, you’re actually increasing it?

It turns out that there’s something called “unhelpful help,” which is ineffective and even counterproductive. Although this is a relatively new area of research, studies thus far illustrate what it is about help that makes it helpful — or not. To ensure help isn’t harmful, a manager should:

• Ask whether the recipient wants help. Don’t impose your support on other people; doing so can make them feel like you’re interrupting their own efforts to solve the problem. Simply ask if someone would like your assistance.
• Phrase your advice in a careful way. Sometimes when people try to help others, they make the other person feel inadequate. Those feelings can then result in even more stress. Be kind and avoid talking down to people when offering assistance.
• Focus on the solution. Dwelling excessively on the cause of the stress can amplify the employee’s worries. It’s OK to discuss the problem, but move quickly on to exploring a positive path forward.

One of the problems with unhelpful help is that you might be engaging in it without realizing it, so help yourself to the above checklist first.

(Source: Shutterstock)

In 1927, J. Willard and Alice Marriott — work spouses as well as actual spouses — began serving ice-cold A&W Root Beer for patrons sweating through Washington, D.C.’s sultry summers. They soon added hot foods to the menu, giving their nine-stool stand the old-timey name The Hot Shoppe.

The business expanded with numerous locations, but it wasn’t until 30 years later that the Marriotts made a big shift by opening a motel in Arlington, Virginia. Today the Marriott brand has more than 8,200 properties across nearly 150 countries.

So the next time your kids ask to open a soda stand on the sidewalk, just let them.

If you want to follow in Marriott's footsteps, beware this customer service mistake the brand infamously made back in 2017.

• 1958: Momofuku Ando marketed the first package of instant ramen noodles, Chikin Ramen.
• 1987: The Dow Jones hit a record high of 2,722.42. Less than two months later, the Black Monday sell-off was its second-ever triple-digit decline.
• 1991: Linus Torvalds announced his plans to create a new computer operating system, which would become Linux. 
• 2007: A New Jersey teenager was the first person to “jailbreak” an iPhone, allowing its use on networks other than AT&T’s (the exclusive provider at the time). 

Written by Tess Barker, Dan Ketchum, and Ali Saleh. Comic by John McNamee.

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