A recent national survey on employee engagement by Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace finds that 95% of HR leaders say employee burnout is undermining their retention efforts. For 87% of the 614 HR leaders surveyed, including chief human resource officers, HR vice presidents and HR directors and managers, improving retention is a high or critical priority in the next five years.

But, 20% of survey participants don’t see much being done by this year, citing other priorities that need to be addressed first. “Employee burnout has reached epidemic proportions,” says Charles DeWitt, vice president, business development at Kronos. “While many organizations take steps to manage employee fatigue, there are far fewer efforts to proactively manage burnout.”

HR may not be in a position to effectively address all factors contributing to burnout, but they can play a crucial role in mitigating or reducing its negative consequences. The top three factors leading to burnout are unfair compensation (41%), unrealistic workload (32%), and saddling workers with too much overtime and after-hours work (32%).  

“Still, HR leaders also identified key burnout factors falling under talent management, employee development, and leadership that should be in their control, including poor management (30%), employees seeing no clear connection of their role to corporate strategy (29%), and a negative workplace culture (26%),” the Kronos survey notes. 

And while hashing out a strategy that gives equal weight to retention and recruitment may make business sense, the survey results point to a big divide in these two areas. Boosting investment in recruiting technology by 2020 is listed as a goal by 97% of survey participants and 22% of this group plan to spend 30% to 50% to make upgrades. 

“However, budget was continually cited by HR leaders as a deterrent to programs that would benefit retention of existing talent,” the survey finds. Businesses need to make retention their “biggest priority” this year, says Dan Schawbel, partner and research director at Future Workplace. “Managers should promote flexibility, and ensure that employees aren’t overworked, in order to prevent employee burnout that leads to turnover,” Schawbel says. 

Joyce Maroney, director of The Workforce Institute at Kronos, writes for Forbes that companies must place retention and recruitment as equally important. “This will break the disruptive and costly cycle created by turnover,” she writes. “Instead of trying to keep ahead of churn, HR can focus their energies on building great teams and developing great leaders in an engaging environment.”

Mollie Lombardi, co-founder and CEO of Boston-based HR research and analyst firm, Aptitude Research Partners, says companies that promote a ‘more with less’ approach are more likely to see burnout become a problem, according to the Society For Human Resource Management. 

“Even if you work a job where you’re not checking e-mail all the time, as a society we are more and more inundated with incoming streams of information, which can lead to a general sense of being overwhelmed, making individuals more susceptible to burnout,” Lombardi says.