The Dutch financial newspaper FD recently published a piece about the real cost of burnout for employers. The numbers are striking.
Every sick day costs approximately €360 in salary alone. A burnout takes an average of 330 days to recover from. Stress-related absence has risen 43% in the past five years and now accounts for a quarter of all sick days in the Netherlands.
One employer in the article paid almost €100,000 in salary continuation for a single employee. Another described watching a growth plan fall apart because new hires had to cover work instead of building something new.
The article ends with advice from an occupational health expert: invest in your work culture, spot the signals early, act quickly when something is wrong.
Good advice. But it does not tell you how.
The thing about the signals
The employer whose employee eventually burned out said something that stayed with me. He described how her performance had been declining for months before she went off sick. He attributed it to a mismatch with her manager. He was busy with other things. When she finally stopped working, his response was: I could have seen that coming.
That is not a failure of care. That is a failure of visibility.
The signals of burnout are almost never dramatic. They do not announce themselves. They look like quietness in someone who used to be vocal. A slight drop in the quality of work from someone who used to be precise. A pattern of last-minute cancellations. Shorter answers in conversations that used to go somewhere. Someone who used to push back on decisions and has stopped.
None of these things look like burnout. They look like a bad week, a difficult season, a personality trait. They are easy to explain away. And in a fast-growing company where everyone is stretched and the next quarter is already being planned, they get explained away.
Until they do not.
The structural problem nobody addresses
The FD article raises a question that it does not fully answer: if 80% of sick leave is not primarily work-related, why are employers carrying the full financial burden?
It is a legitimate question. But it obscures something important.
The fact that burnout has causes outside the workplace does not mean the workplace is neutral. A person who is already under pressure at home becomes a person who cannot afford a single additional demand at work. A team culture where nobody says when things are too much removes the early warning system. A founder who models working at maximum capacity makes it very hard for his team to do anything else.
The workplace does not cause the burnout. But the workplace determines whether the pressure finds somewhere to go before it accumulates past the point of return.
That is where the real preventive work happens. Not in an app. Not in a wellness budget. In how the team talks to each other, how the leader responds when someone says it is too much, and whether there is actually a culture where that sentence can be said at all.
What I see in the companies I work with
The founders who call me after someone burns out almost always describe the same pattern in retrospect.
The person gave signals. The signals were not heard, or were heard and not acted on, or were acted on with practical solutions, a lighter schedule, a different project, that addressed the surface without touching what was underneath.
What was underneath was almost always something that had not been named. A relationship in the team that was not working. A role that had grown beyond what the person was equipped for. A sense that the pace of the company had permanently exceeded what any human being could sustain. A feeling of not being able to say no without consequences.
None of these things get addressed in a conversation about workload. They get addressed in a different kind of conversation. One that requires the leader to ask something harder than "how is the project going." And to actually be prepared for the answer.
Most leaders want to have that conversation. Most do not know how to start it. And in a culture that rewards always having the answer, it is surprisingly difficult to be the first person to sit with a question you cannot immediately solve.
The return on prevention
The occupational health expert in the FD article says a relatively small investment on the front end, coaching, a preventive consultation, a targeted intervention of €1,500 to €2,000, can prevent weeks of sick leave.
That is true and it undersells the point.
The return on building a team culture where people can actually say when something is wrong is not just the €100,000 you do not spend on salary continuation. It is the decisions that get made with better information. The people who stay because the environment is honest enough to be worth staying in. The founder who stops spending energy managing what is not being said and uses it for something else.
That is not a wellness initiative. That is a business decision.
The FD article ends with a quote from the occupational health expert: "Sometimes it is simply a matter of having a conversation."
He is right. The conversation is the intervention.
The question is whether the culture you have built makes that conversation possible. Whether the people around you believe, based on evidence rather than stated values, that saying something difficult will not cost them something important.
If you are not sure, that is worth finding out before someone else pays the price.
The FD article "Een werknemer met een burn-out? Dat loopt in de papieren" was published in May 2026.
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com