Your people did not sign up for burnout.

On paper, the deal looks simple. You pay fairly, offer flexibility, talk about wellbeing. They give you effort, focus, and loyalty.

In reality, a very different deal is running the place.

It sounds more like this.

“I will quietly trade my evenings, my focus, and a piece of my health as long as I still believe this is worth it. The moment it stops feeling fair, I will look engaged on the surface and start leaving in my head.”

That is the hidden agreement your employees are actually making. You will never see it in an offer letter. You will see it in late night messages, shorter replies, colder tone, and the slow fade of people who used to be on fire for the work.

If you are a CPO or CEO, your job is not to install another wellness program. Your job is to rewrite that agreement.

The Deal You Think You Made Is Not The Deal They Feel

Leaders love the official story.

“We care about people.”

“We are serious about sustainability.”

“We want you to bring your whole self to work.”

Then the quarter heats up. Deadlines move in without warning. The same three people catch every stretch project. Messages tagged “quick thing” hit at 9:47 p.m. Promotions go to the ones who never flinch, not the ones who protect capacity.

Your people can do the math. They are not listening to your town hall. They are watching the pattern.

Research on the psychological contract has been clear for years. When employees feel that the promises around support, fairness, or workload are not kept, trust drops, commitment slides, and exit intentions spike. Meta analysis from Zhao and colleagues tied this sense of broken promises directly to emotional exhaustion and withdrawal here.

Your people might not know the term “psychological contract.” They feel the breach in their body.

Here is how it shows up in the real world.

The engineer who was once first to volunteer now answers every new request with “If we push this other thing.”

The manager who used to fight for stretch goals now quietly rounds timelines up.

The high performer who always said yes still says yes, but their messages lose warmth. Jokes disappear. Their work is still good. Their belief is not.

Their agreement changed. You just did not hear the conversation.

How Burnout Starts As A Quiet Renegotiation

Burnout rarely begins with someone collapsing at their desk. It begins with a private decision.

“I get it. They are never going to fix this. So I will fix it for myself.”

That moment is rational. It is self defense.

Christina Maslach describes burnout as exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense that you are no longer effective. You have already seen this pattern in your own people. They are still shipping, still hitting numbers, but the edge is gone. They care, and they are cooked.

Now connect that to the daily environment.

Your best people carry invisible jobs no one named and no one rewards. They run informal project management, smooth conflicts, translate fuzzy strategy into real work, and hold emotional space for teams that are running hot. You praise them in all hands. You also quietly use them as a pressure valve for bad planning.

Over time, the story you tell about work moves further away from the way work actually feels. Maslach and others have shown that burnout spikes exactly in that gap, when people’s values and the lived reality of the job no longer match.

At some point, high performers stop believing that extra effort will be met with protection or fairness. That is the breach. The agreement flips from “I am all in” to “I will not let this place drain me dry.”

They do not announce it. They just stop raising risks early. They stop taking on unscoped favors. They start doing clean, safe work instead of bold, messy work.

By the time engagement scores dip, they have been gone for months.

The Real Cost Of A Broken Agreement

Here is the brutal part.

Your company can survive a few people quitting. It cannot survive your best people staying and silently downgrading the deal in their head.

When the hidden agreement breaks, three things happen inside your culture.

1. Energy Turns Into Insurance

People still work hard, but the goal shifts. It is no longer about moving the company forward. It is about not getting blamed.

You see more “should be fine” in project threads. More hedging. More cover your back moves. Workplace’s own data across companies shows that this kind of language rises long before attrition or engagement metrics move.

2. Candor Gets Quiet

Why would someone surface a real risk if the last person who did got labeled “negative” or ended up owning the fix alone.

People learn a simple rule. Speak up only if you are ready to carry the whole weight. So real concerns go underground. Problems get discovered later, when they are expensive.

3. Passion Starts To Hurt

High performers are hit hardest. Studies on work passion from Robert Vallerand point out an important split. When passion is flexible, people can love their work and still walk away for rest. When it turns rigid, work fuses with identity and people keep pushing even when it damages them.

Most modern companies unintentionally push people into the rigid side. You talk about “changing the world” then quietly use that belief to justify one more sprint and one more exception. Over time, passion stops feeling like energy. It feels like a leash.

The broken agreement is now a business problem. You just keep calling it engagement.

Why Wellness Programs Keep Failing You

This is where most companies flinch.

Instead of touching the real agreement, they install programs around it.

Yoga classes. Meditation apps. A resilience workshop with nice slides.

None of those are bad. They are just not the point.

If your people believe the real deal is “we will squeeze everything we can out of you and then hand you a breathing app,” they will play along and never trust you.

Meta analysis from Halbesleben showed that what protects people from burnout is not posters about support. It is the felt reality that the organization actually has their back through concrete support, sane load, and real backup from managers here.

Your people are not asking for more coping strategies. They are asking you to stop putting them in situations they have to cope with every week.

So if you are serious about burnout, stop asking how to help people “handle it better.” Start asking where you are breaking the agreement and how to fix that system.

How To Rewrite The Hidden Agreement Before People Walk

This is where CPOs and CEOs actually earn their title.

You cannot delegate this. You cannot brand your way out. You have to change how work runs.

1. State The Real Deal In Plain English

In your next all hands, say the quiet part out loud.

Spell out what people can expect when they go above and beyond. Trade offs. Protection. Recovery. Not just “thanks.”

Example.

“When we ask for a sprint, we commit to naming what will slow down, to a real cooldown period afterward, and to not always leaning on the same three people.”

If you say it, you then have to live it. That is the point.

2. Audit Promises Against Reality

Put your values next to your calendars and your message logs.

If you claim “we respect boundaries” and half your leadership team sends messages after hours, you have your answer.

Use tools like Workplace to see the pattern. Rising after hours load. Shrinking tone warmth. More tension and less appreciation. Those are early signs that the agreement is slipping long before exit interviews show you the bill.

3. Install Trade Off Rules At The Top

Every time an executive says “this is urgent” without naming what moves, they are writing a new line in the hidden agreement.

Set a hard rule at the leadership table.

No new cross functional priority gets green lit unless someone states which work will pause, who will own the shift, and how recovery will work after the push.

If you cannot say what slows down, you are not leading. You are just throwing weight on the system and hoping your most committed people absorb it.

4. Make Invisible Work Official

Ask every team a simple question.

“What do you do here that is not in your job description, but the team would feel it if you stopped.”

You will see the same names over and over. Emotional anchors. Fixers. Shadow project leads. Culture carriers. All unpaid. All at risk.

That work is not free. Put a number on the hours. Then either carve it into the role, share it across the team, or stop doing something else so it fits.

When people see you recognize and rebalance that hidden load, the agreement shifts. They start to believe you again.

5. Change Who Gets Celebrated

Right now, your informal heroes are probably the ones who never say no.

Flip that.

Start highlighting the manager who hands work back when the team is maxed. Praise the engineer who says “I can do it next sprint, not this one.” Call out the leader who shuts the laptop at a sane hour and tells the team to do the same.

You teach the whole company how the agreement works by who you spotlight.

The Question Every CPO And CEO Has To Answer

Here is the real test.

If your three most committed people vanished tomorrow, how much of your true operating system would disappear with them.

Not the org chart. The real system. The unscoped work. The emotional labor. The cross functional glue. The late night fixes. The sense making after every strategic zigzag.

If the honest answer is “a lot” then your company does not have a burnout problem. It has an agreement problem.

You have been living off the quiet extra your best people keep giving while you tell yourself the deal is fair.

The good news is simple.

What you designed, you can redesign.

Rewrite the agreement so that caring deeply does not quietly cost people their health. Use real data to see when the deal starts to crack. Make sure the story you tell about work matches the way work actually feels.

The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones with the loudest mission statements or the slickest wellness campaigns. They will be the ones where the agreement is honest, the load is visible, and your best people can stay excellent without burning out in the process.

If you are a CPO, your job is to walk into the CEO’s office with that truth and a concrete plan.

If you are a CEO, your job is to listen, then prove to your people that the deal just changed in their favor.

They are already holding up their side of the bargain.

The next move is on you.