Every year, right around late May, the same quiet tension settles into hospitality teams. Summer is coming. The pace is about to pick up, the shifts are about to stretch, and the the guests are about to arrive with vacation energy that your team has to match for months.

Meanwhile, their friends are posting beach photos. Their families are planning trips they won’t be joining. Group chats are filling up with cookout invitations they’ll have to decline. And somewhere in the back of their mind, a familiar thought surfaces: everyone else gets to enjoy summer. I get to work through it.

The Weight That Doesn’t Show Up on the Schedule

If you’ve spent any time in hospitality, you know this feeling. It’s not just physical exhaustion. It’s the mental weight of being in an all-hands-on-deck environment while the world around you appears to be on pause. Some people find a way to make peace with it over time. Others carry a low-grade resentment that shows up in their tone, their patience, and their willingness to go beyond the minimum. And some develop coping strategies that look fine on the surface but aren’t doing them any favors underneath.

This is the conversation most leadership teams skip over. Not because they don’t care, but because the answer feels obvious: “That’s the job.” And while that’s technically true, it doesn’t make the drain any less real.

What’s Happening Inside Your Team

Hospitality peak season burnout doesn’t always begin with the workload. It starts with the internal resources your team is drawing from every time they engage with a guest, absorb a complaint, cover a coworker’s shift, or push through a day when they’d rather be anywhere else.

Think of your team members’ capacity for true engagement as something that expands and contracts based on what’s happening around them and inside them. When someone is well-rested, emotionally supported, and working in an environment that feels fair, that capacity is large. They handle the difficult guest with grace. They recover quickly from a hard interaction. They bring warmth that’s real, not performed.

When that capacity shrinks, and it always does over the course of a long season, those same interactions start to cost more. The patience that came naturally in week one takes real effort by week eight. The smile becomes a performance. They’re physically present but emotionally somewhere else entirely.

Just Part of the Job

Hospitality Action’s 2025 survey of UK hospitality workers found that 47% describe burnout as simply “part of the job,” rising to 62% among junior employees. Under-resourcing and understaffing ranked as the top workplace challenge, cited by 57% of respondents, a 21% surge from the year before. As we noted in an earlier article, a separate U.S. survey by Axonify found the identical burnout number among American frontline hospitality managers, with 68% saying their team members have directly expressed burnout to them. Two continents, same story.

Those numbers aren’t surprising to anyone who’s worked a peak season. But they point to something important: the drain isn’t just about the workload. It’s about the accumulation of small things that nobody notices until the person is already depleted.

What Nobody Brings Up in the Huddle

The obvious drains are easy to name. Long shifts. Difficult guests. Short staffing. Schedule unpredictability.

But there’s a whole category of drains that rarely come up because they’re invisible. There’s the team member whose “bully voice” replays every tough interaction long after the shift ends. Or the person who watches a newer hire get praised for something they’ve been doing quietly for months. And then there’s the emotional labor of staying warm and present with a guest who’s being rude, then immediately resetting to do it again with the next one.

And then there’s the social cost: working weekends and holidays while everyone in your personal life operates on a completely different calendar. Missing the Fourth of July barbecue. Seeing your college roommate’s vacation photos from the break room. Knowing that the summer everyone around you looks forward to is the season you power through. That weight is mental and emotional, not physical, and it accumulates in ways that no time-off policy fully addresses.

What Fills the Tank

The good news is that energy isn’t just drained. It can also be replenished. And leaders have more influence over that replenishment than they often realize.

Recognition that’s specific and timely matters more than most leaders think. Not a generic “great job” at the end of a shift. A moment where a manager says “I saw how you handled that family at check-in. The way you noticed the kids were tired and adjusted your whole approach. That mattered.” That kind of specificity tells someone saw their effort, not just their output.

Feeling trusted makes a real difference. When a team member knows they have permission to make judgment calls, as we explored in our article on giving your team a compass instead of a map, the work starts to feel like theirs rather than something they’re performing for someone else.

Connection with teammates carries more weight than it gets credit for. A two-minute conversation before a shift that has nothing to do with work. A manager who asks how someone is doing and actually waits for the answer. The sense that the people around you have your back when things get hard.

What Your Team Won’t Ask For (But Needs)

And honestly? Acknowledgment that the sacrifice is real fills the tank in a way nothing else does. An ice cream sundae buffet in the break room is a nice gesture, and so are the water bottles with motivational quotes. But what people actually need is simpler than that.

A leader who says “I know a lot of you are making real sacrifices to be here this summer, and I want you to know I see that.” That sentence, delivered with genuine honesty and backed by action, does more than most wellness programs..

Setting the Tone Before It Gets Loud

If you’re heading into your busy season, the next few weeks will set the tone for how your team experiences the months ahead. The drains are coming. They’re built into the nature of the work. The question is whether your environment is also providing enough fills to keep people resourced, present, and engaged rather than just getting by.

Recent research found that employees who feel their organization supports their mental health are twice as likely to report no burnout or depression. That support doesn’t have to be a formal program. It starts with awareness: knowing what drains your team, paying attention to the signs that someone’s capacity is shrinking, and being willing to adjust before you lose them.

A Book for Exactly This Moment

Our upcoming book, Worth at Work: An Inside-Out Approach to Confident Teams and Exceptional Service, releases June 30 and goes deeper into the fills-and-drains framework with practical tools for identifying what’s depleting your team and building systems that replenish rather than just extract. If this article raised questions about how your team is heading into the season, the book is where those questions get answered. Learn more here.

And if this newsletter has been useful to you, we’d love your help spreading the word. Share it with a colleague, forward it to a fellow leader, or tag someone in hospitality who needs to see this. The more people in this conversation, the better the industry gets for everyone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Randy Haveson, MA, is the founder of WORTH@WORK, a bestselling author, and TEDx presenter with over 30 years of experience helping organizations build genuine self-empowerment and sustainable transformation. With a Master’s in Counseling and frontline hospitality experience (including Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort), he’s built award-winning mental health and wellness programs at universities nationwide. His upcoming book, Worth at Work: An Inside-Out Approach to Confident Teams and Exceptional Service (co-authored with Kat Nisson, MLIS, CPCC), releases June 30, 2026 through Press 49. For more, visit worthatwork.com or schedule a discovery call.