How worker nervousness masquerades as efficiency, then backfires

Half of the American workforce says that anxiety about the state of the world is hurting their focus, according to a recent Burson study. And 57% say that anxiety motivates them to work harder. 

However, this flash of productivity is a double-edged sword that can produce short-term operational gains but long-term losses at significant material cost. 

Among American employees, 34% say anxiety at work undermines loyalty to their employer, and 53% of workers agree that if they knew they could find a position with comparable pay, they would seriously consider leaving. The data demonstrates that anxious workforces tend to overcompensate with high performance before quitting, rebelling or failing. 

In other words, your team may be motivated by fear to work hard, but they may then leave you the first chance they get, imposing a significant downstream cost to ailing reputation. The average cost of turnover is now $45,236 per position – up nearly $10K year over year – according to a 2026 Express Employment Professionals-Harris Poll survey. 

That attrition cost is more than the cost of replacement. It’s also the negative Glassdoor reviews, the chatter on Blind and the intangible opportunity cost of a former employee telling a rockstar would-be hire to take their skills elsewhere.  This is where the internal discontent bleeds into external conversation, and, thus, dings reputation at a material cost to the business.

Stakeholder view of a company as an employer, what Burson calls the Workplace component of Reputation Capital, is in fact the most underutilized lever of corporate reputation, and companies who best capitalize on workplace can squeeze 11.8% more value out of the $7 trillion Reputation Economy.​

When anxiety builds inside the workforce, compounded by leaders who either add to it or fail to quell it, it does not just affect output, it affects credibility built from the inside out. 87% of Burson study respondents say crisis response reveals more about what a company stands for than ordinary communication​, and 76% say they lose respect for a CEO who changes public positions under the kind of outside pressure that comes with a rapidly swinging geopolitical pendulum. 

Leadership guru Brene Brown has long cautioned CEOs that fear-based management has a short shelf-life. To sustain a fear-based performance culture, leaders must continuously ratchet up the threat to stability and calm, making the operational feats unsustainable and further corroding organizational trust.  

Brown positions this as systems theory in which the workplace is intertwined with societal, governmental and economic forums. When one of those systems weakens, there is a knock-on effect that ripples into the workplace – and not always in a good way.

Burson’s research demonstrates a ladder of escalating worries that support Brown’s theory. 36% of employees are extremely worried about not earning enough money to keep up with the rising cost of living. Similar economic stressors like finding a new job if they get laid off, employer reductions of healthcare or retirement benefits, or simply not advancing in their career at pace significantly outrank worries about the impact of AI. 

In fact, anxiety about AI being used to evaluate performance outranked concern about their job being replaced or significantly changed by AI, at 28% and 24% respectively.

This brand of anxiety isn’t just a mood; it’s a productivity cost. While respondents said they are working “harder,” they also cited the impact of anxiety on the quality of their work. 35% of American workers say it’s harder for them to focus or be productive, and 38% say it makes them less willing to go above and beyond. 

Importantly, the anxious workforce cuts across job levels and educational attainment, but the generational differences are stark, with Gen Z employees feeling the effect of anxiety most (62%), compared to 50% of Millennials and 45% of Gen X employees.  

All of this points to the need to segment workforce feedback loops by age, tenure and perception of external realities to better understand what might be looming beneath typically generalized employee engagement surveys. These might include more frequent pulse checks that delve into how employees feel about the outside landscape and its effect on their role and work, as well as questions to gauge whether leaders are doing enough to demonstrate authentic, consistent leadership amid turbulent times. Leaning into AI tooling, companies can also consider leveraging agentic focus groups to test internal messaging with personas that account for the external and internal operating realities employees face.

There are few macro signals of a quieter socio-economic landscape ahead that will somehow lessen the proclivity of anxiety in life and work – or the need for leaders to rise to the moment. Therefore, smart leaders will put systems in place that help provide more nuanced workforce performance and engagement metrics, so management teams aren’t fooled by fear-fueled false positives. 

Because by the time you get to an exit interview, it’s simply too late. 

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.