Satisfaction Scores Miss the Burnout That Quit Letters Catch
Every HR team has lived this: engagement numbers looking respectable while three of the best people resign within a quarter. It is less a measurement failure than a category error — burnout is not dissatisfaction. Burned-out employees often still believe in the mission, like their colleagues, and rate the company kindly; what they cannot do is keep the pace. Measuring happiness misses them precisely. Measuring capacity finds them early.
This pulse is the capacity instrument. Quarterly, two minutes, seven questions — built to flag unsustainable pace while it is still a workload conversation instead of a counteroffer negotiation.
The Seven Questions
- Sustainability, head-on. Could you keep up your current pace for another year without it costing you? One opinion scale — the headline number, and the only answer that matters when it is a firm no.
- After-hours reality. A yes/no: have evenings or weekends been work time more than a few times this month? Self-reported, imperfect — and still the earliest consistent signal most teams get.
- The leave ledger. Multiple choice: how much of your vacation did you actually take last quarter? Untaken leave is deferred burnout with a receipt.
- Energy, today. A one-tap energy rating — worth less as a single reading than as a downward line across quarters.
- Coverage. When you are out, does work pile up or transfer? Teams without real coverage answer this question by never leaving.
- Stay intent. Are you actively imagining working somewhere else? Asked quarterly, answered honestly about half the time — and even half is earlier than any exit interview.
- One open field: what single workload change would help most? The rebalancing ideas live here — specific and free.
Reading It as a Heat Map, Not a Verdict
Individual answers stay private; the pulse’s value is the team-level picture in the response archive: the group whose sustainability averages sagged two quarters running, the department whose leave usage collapsed after a big delivery, the quiet team whose stay-intent answers went from confident to hedged. Each pattern points at a different intervention — workload rebalance, backfill, deadline triage — and the pulse tells you which conversation to have with which manager.
Guard the instrument’s honesty: no manager should ever see who said what, and the first time a candid I can’t keep this pace meets anything other than help, the pulse stops receiving candor. The broader satisfaction context sits in the employee satisfaction use case and the satisfaction templates collection.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't quarterly too frequent for a two-minute survey?
Frequency is the feature — burnout develops in weeks, and short length is what makes the cadence sustainable. Fatigue comes from length, not from brevity repeated.
Won't 'I can't keep this pace' answers be punished by managers?
Only where leadership lets them be. Aggregate-only reporting and the anonymity rule exist precisely to make candor survivable — and leadership’s visible response to the first hard answer sets the price of every future one.
How is this different from an engagement survey?
Engagement measures commitment; this measures capacity. The burned-out believer rates engagement well and sustainability terribly — which is exactly the pairing this pulse exists to catch.
Can we run it more often than quarterly?
Monthly for teams in known crunch periods — a launch, a migration, a hiring gap — then back to quarterly. A permanent monthly pulse stops being a pulse and becomes wallpaper.