IDLab seminar: linking workplace practices and burnout indicators in employee reviews
On December 19, 2025, within the framework of a regular scientific seminar at the International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy, research fellow Sophia Paklina presented a paper titled "Workplace Practices and Burnout Signals in Employee Reviews". The study, conducted jointly with Peter Parshakov, Alexey Smirnov and Elena Shakina, is focused on analyzing the relationship between corporate benefits and management practices and the risk of employee burnout. It is carried out as part of Russian Science Foundation project No. 25-18-01037 "Professional Burnout Syndrome: Identification Using Artificial Intelligence Methods and Economic Impact Assessment".
The empirical basis of the work was provided by data from the Dream Job platform, which serves as the Russian counterpart to Glassdoor. More than 1.4 million employee reviews collected over the period from 2018 to 2025 were included in the analysis. The authors focused on the "Cons" section, assuming that emotional signs of burnout are most evident there.
To quantitatively assess burnout levels, the RuBERT model, originally designed for text sentiment analysis, was further trained. Training involved combining real user comments about burnout with synthetic texts generated using large language models.
Key findings can be summarized as follows. Most corporate benefits — such as training programs, company events, and basic workplace amenities — are associated with reduced probability of burnout. However, medical insurance does not demonstrate consistent protective effects. The impact of these benefits varies across different groups of employees: early-career professionals benefit more from development-oriented practices, experienced workers value comfort and stability, while formalized training programs may actually increase the risk of burnout among managers.
The authors emphasize that their research remains under refinement and requires additional validation of the model. Nevertheless, even at this stage, the results suggest that public employee feedback could serve as a valuable tool for studying burnout and developing more targeted human resource solutions.
