How do you prevent burnout on a collection or call centre floor?

The short answer

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. In our experience, on a collection floor the stress is built into the job: call after call of refusals, angry or upset consumers, and a manner collectors are expected to keep up whatever they feel. Research points to six areas that drive it: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.

In our view a manager can change several of those this week: who gets the hardest calls, breaks after difficult ones, targets people can reach, the processes that waste collectors’ time, and how much say they have in their own work.

What burnout is

In 2019 the WHO included burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition. It defines burnout by three things: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism about it; and reduced professional efficacy. It refers only to work.

That third part matters on a collection floor. A burnt-out collector doesn’t only feel tired; they can feel less effective at the job, and in our experience that can show in their results and their calls.

Why collection work wears people down

Robert Sutton studied a bill-collection organisation for a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly (1991). He found collectors were selected, socialised and rewarded for conveying urgency on their calls, and for adjusting the emotions they showed to each consumer’s manner. Those expected emotions sometimes clashed with what collectors actually felt, and collectors coped by becoming emotionally detached from the people they called and by letting off unpleasant feelings without showing them to the consumer.

That study is from 1991. In our experience the strain hasn’t gone away: collectors hear "no" far more often than "yes", many conversations are with people under real financial pressure, and some calls are hostile. How to handle angry or overwhelmed consumers.

The six areas

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, reviewing decades of burnout research (World Psychiatry, 2016), describe six areas where a mismatch between a person and their job drives burnout. On a collection floor, in our view, they look like this:

Maslach and Leiter link unfairness to cynicism, anger and hostility.

Monitoring or involvement

Filipa Castanheira and María José Chambel studied 811 employees in 11 call centres (Human Resource Management, 2010). They compared two kinds of HR practice. Control systems, which include performance monitoring, were associated with more emotional dissonance and less autonomy, and so with more burnout. Involvement systems, which include training, participation and performance-related pay, reduced burnout by easing emotional dissonance and quantitative demands, the sheer amount of work.

In our view that is the trade-off on most floors: monitoring is necessary in collections, but a floor run mainly on monitoring wears people out faster than one that also trains them and gives them a say.

What a manager can change this week

1. Spread the hardest calls. Call Centre Helper’s guide to preventing burnout (2025) advises against assigning excessive calls or complex cases to the same agents, and suggests rotating people between different kinds of work.
2. Allow a short break after a really difficult call. In our view a few minutes off the phones after an abusive call costs less than the calls that follow it going badly.
3. Check targets against the accounts. In our view a target a collector can’t reach on the accounts they were given is a burnout target. What a fair collector scorecard measures.
4. Fix one process that wastes collectors’ time. In our experience re-keying the same details, slow systems and unclear rules add to the load on a collector’s day.
5. Give collectors some say. Over the order of their work, shift swaps, or how a process changes.
6. Train for the hardest conversations. Hardship, anger and grief, so collectors have something to use beyond detachment.
7. Watch for the early signs and talk to the person, not just the numbers.

Where agent matching fits

Agent matching does not prevent burnout. It changes which collector works each account, not the calls themselves, the pay or the manager. BestPair sends each account to the eligible collector who has done best with accounts like it, from the floor’s own call and payment history, inside the rules and workload limits the agency sets, and measures the result against a control group. Those workload limits are the agency’s to set, and in our view they should be set with burnout in mind, so the hardest accounts don’t pile up on the same few collectors. We haven’t measured any effect on burnout.

Sources

• Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases: World Health Organization, 28 May 2019.
• Maintaining Norms about Expressed Emotions: The Case of Bill Collectors: Robert I. Sutton, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1991; a qualitative study of a bill-collection organisation.
• Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry: Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, World Psychiatry, 2016.
• Reducing burnout in call centers through HR practices: Filipa Castanheira and María José Chambel, Human Resource Management, 2010.
• How to Prevent and Overcome Call Centre Burnout: Call Centre Helper, 18 April 2025.