Employee burnout is a serious problem, and employers need to start taking it as such seriously. “This is a historic time; we’ve never been through anything like this. Our mental health and our physical health are really being taxed,” Darcy Gruttadaro, the director of the American Psychiatric Association Foundation’s Center for Workplace Mental Health, said. “If there was ever a time to raise these issues, it’s now. If you’re experiencing burnout, and you’re trying to ignore it, that will eventually catch up with you.” However, most of the purported “burnout solutions” address the symptoms rather than the root causes and place the onus of solving burnout on the employees experiencing it rather than the employers causing it. Prevention of burnout is the solution, and only leadership can effectively implement strategies to mitigate it. Think of a canary in a coal mine. If the canary is getting sick, we don’t talk about methods for making the canary tougher; we ask what’s wrong in the mine. Leadership needs to be effective at setting boundaries and modeling the behavior they want to see in their employees. Effective communication is also key. Workers need to feel comfortable communicating their struggles to their higher-ups and need to know that their concerns are taken seriously and addressed appropriately.