The toxic habit of measuring employee value by sacrifices rather than actual output is quietly destroying your top talent.
EXPERT OPINION BY LEIGH ELENA HENDERSON, FOUNDER, HRMANIFESTO
Somewhere along the way, exhaustion became a badge of honor at work.
The person who stays latest gets quietly celebrated. The one who skips vacation is seen as committed. The employee who answers emails at midnight gets promoted while the one who leaves at five—despite finishing everything on their list—gets labeled as someone who “isn’t that hungry.” We have confused burning out with showing up. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve been paying for that confusion for longer than you realize.
When suffering becomes the standard
Burnout doesn’t get rewarded because organizations are malicious. It gets rewarded because cultures, over time, start measuring effort by visibility rather than output. And the most visible form of effort is sacrifice.
When a leader pulls an all-nighter to hit a deadline and shares it proudly in a team meeting, they’ve just set a standard—whether they meant to or not. When the person who works the longest hours consistently gets the highest performance rating, the message lands clearly even if it’s never spoken aloud: your worth here is measured by what you’re willing to give up.
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So you give things up. Sleep. Weekends. Boundaries. Health. Time with the people you love. And you do it because the culture has taught you, reliably and repeatedly, that this is what loyalty looks like.
What it’s actually costing you
Here’s what nobody tells you when you’re deep in a culture that rewards burnout: it doesn’t just take your energy. It takes your identity.
You stop knowing what you actually enjoy because you haven’t had time to enjoy anything in months. You stop having opinions about your own career because you’ve been too busy surviving someone else’s priorities. The version of you that had ambitions and boundaries and a life outside of work starts to feel like a distant memory—someone you used to be before this job got its hands on you.
Source: www.inc.com
