Check the system before you check the person: who carries the most night pages, how much of the week is toil, whether anyone has had a real break. Then talk to people regularly and ask specific questions. This is a management checklist, not a diagnosis, and it cannot replace professional support.
Check the load
- Who has held the pager most often this quarter?
- How many pages came outside working hours, and who received them?
- What share of the week is repetitive manual work? Google's SRE book aims to keep toil below 50 percent of an engineer's time.
- Has anyone gone more than a few months without leave?
- Are there open roles that leave a gap everyone is covering?
Check the signals
The WHO describes burn-out in terms of exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy. Practical signs you might notice:
- Camera off, quieter in meetings, fewer ideas offered
- Short, bitter replies to routine requests
- More small errors than usual
- Stops volunteering for interesting work
- Alerts closed faster with less analysis
None of these prove anything. Any could be a bad week. A pattern over several weeks is worth a conversation.
Have better one to ones
Questions that work better than "how are you":
- What was the most draining thing this week?
- Which part of the job do you want to do more of?
- If I could remove one recurring task, which would it be?
- Do you feel you have time to finish what you start?
- Is the on-call schedule working for you?
Then act on at least one answer, soon. People stop answering if nothing happens.
Act on the system
- Rebalance rotation. Offer time off after rough shifts.
- Remove or automate the top source of toil.
- Cap overtime and protect leave.
- Say no to new work, or trade it for something else.
- Rotate people between reactive and project work.
What not to do
Do not announce a wellness day and leave the pager rota unchanged. Do not hand someone a resilience course as a substitute for fixing load. And do not discuss someone's health with the team.
A monthly rhythm
Put the load checks on a monthly calendar, ten minutes each: pager distribution, toil sample, leave taken, and the open role gap. Write down one change you will make from what you see. Over a year, that adds up to twelve small improvements.
Share the same summary with your own manager. If the numbers show a team over capacity, the useful message is concrete: which two projects would you drop, or what extra headcount closes the gap. Evidence makes it easier to protect the team.
Quick check
What if someone says they are burnt out?
Listen, thank them, ask what would help, and involve HR or employee support resources. Do not promise confidentiality you cannot keep, and do not try to diagnose.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
