Workplace burnout: stop making it the employee’s problem

Workplace burnout won’t be solved by yoga and resilience training. Employers need to fix the conditions exhausting their people.

Australian employers have become remarkably good at talking about employee wellbeing. We've introduced mental health days, wellbeing programmes, resilience workshops, mindfulness apps, employee assistance programmes and enough workplace wellness initiatives to keep an entire industry employed.

Yet burnout remains stubbornly high.

Perhaps it's time we stopped asking employees how they can become more resilient and started asking employers why their organisations are so bloody difficult to work in?

The problem isn't always that employees cannot cope with their jobs. It's that organisations have designed jobs, systems and management practices that make coping unnecessarily difficult.

And no amount of team building retreats is going to fix a fundamentally dysfunctional workplace.

Key Takeaways

• Workplace burnout demands that employers fix the conditions exhausting their people, rather than keep asking employees to become more resilient.
• When employees need workarounds to get their jobs done, management needs to scrutinise the systems getting in their way.
• Clear roles, realistic workloads and accountable managers give employees a fair chance to perform without burning out.
• Another AI tool, wellbeing app or office attendance mandate cannot compensate for poorly designed work and ineffective leadership.
• Listen to employees, remove unnecessary work and measure whether conditions improve, because webinar attendance tells you nothing about whether burnout is falling.

The numbers should concern every employer

Dr John Chan's State of the Workplace 2026 research presents some findings that should be attracting considerably more attention in executive meetings.

According to the research:

• 36% of Australian employees are experiencing burnout.
• 54% struggle to keep up with the work expected of them.
• 71% report using workarounds to navigate poorly designed internal processes.
• 48% report feeling lonely or excluded at least some of the time.
• And workplace interruptions and task switching were associated with 53% higher odds of burnout.

Separate research, Australia's Economic Case for Mentally Healthy and Safe Workplaces, projects that workplace-driven mental ill-health could cost the Australian economy $27 billion annually by 2041.

These are findings from different studies, with different measures and timeframes, but collectively they point towards something employers should find difficult to ignore.

We have a substantial workplace design and organisational effectiveness problem, and we're spending an extraordinary amount of time discussing how employees should manage its consequences.

We have confused being busy with being productive

I've spent more than 30 years working in HR, recruitment and organisational management, and one of the most consistent frustrations I've encountered is the extraordinary amount of effort employees expend simply trying to get their jobs done.

An employee needs an approval, but nobody is quite sure who has the authority to give it. A manager requests information that already exists in another system. Three departments maintain different versions of the same spreadsheet. A straightforward decision requires another meeting, another report and another executive sign-off.

Eventually, somebody creates a workaround because following the official process takes twice as long.

Management then discovers the workaround, declares it a compliance problem and introduces another procedure to prevent it happening again.

Congratulations. We've managed to make the original problem even worse.

Chan's finding that 71% of respondents use workarounds should be a serious warning to employers. It suggests that employees are routinely compensating for processes that don't support the work they're supposed to perform.

When employees need to invent ways around your systems to do their jobs properly, perhaps the systems deserve more scrutiny than the employees.

The solution isn't another survey asking whether people feel stressed. It's to examine the actual work, identify unnecessary approvals, eliminate duplication, clarify decision-making authority and remove processes that contribute little beyond keeping somebody occupied.

And importantly, involve the people doing the work in redesigning it. They genuinely know exactly where the problems are.

Role clarity is not an administrative exercise

Another issue that deserves far greater attention is the relationship between role clarity, organisational capability and psychosocial risk.

I continue to encounter organisations where Position Descriptions are outdated, accountabilities overlap, reporting relationships are confusing and employees have little understanding of how their performance will actually be assessed.

Managers are then expected to manage performance, identify capability gaps, allocate work fairly and develop employees against responsibilities that nobody has properly defined.

How exactly is that supposed to work?

You cannot reasonably assess whether somebody possesses the capability to perform a role unless you've established what that role requires. You cannot conduct a meaningful performance appraisal without agreed expectations, and you cannot develop an effective training plan without understanding the difference between current and required capability.

Poor role clarity also creates uncertainty, conflicting demands and unnecessary workplace tension. Under Queensland's psychosocial risk framework, unclear roles and poorly managed organisational change are recognised workplace hazards that employers need to address.

A contemporary Position Description should establish why the role exists, what it is accountable for, the authority it carries, the capability required and what successful performance looks like.

This isn't about producing prettier HR documents. It's about giving managers and employees a reliable foundation for performance, development, accountability and fair treatment.

If we want better workplace cultures, we need to stop expecting culture to compensate for poor organisational design.

Technology isn't automatically the answer either

We've now reached the point where almost every organisational problem apparently requires an AI solution.

Too much administration? Introduce AI. Too many emails? Introduce AI. Poor communication? Set up an AI agent. Managers struggling with workload? Install a smart dashboard showing them how much work they haven't completed.

Technology can unquestionably improve productivity, and I'm a strong supporter of using it intelligently. But introducing new technology into an inefficient process doesn't automatically create an efficient process.

Sometimes it simply allows an organisation to perform unnecessary work more quickly.

Before introducing another system, employers should ask what work can be eliminated, what information is genuinely necessary, which approvals add value and whether existing systems can be simplified.

The objective should be to reduce work that adds no value, not automate it and congratulate ourselves on digital transformation.

Loneliness isn't necessarily a work-from-home problem

Another interesting finding from Chan's research is that 48% of respondents experienced loneliness or exclusion at least some of the time.

That should concern employers because workplace connection is not simply about having colleagues sitting nearby.

You can have an office full of people and still have employees who feel isolated, unsupported and disconnected from the organisation.

Importantly, the research did not identify a relationship between hybrid or remote working arrangements and increased loneliness. That challenges the increasingly convenient argument that bringing everybody back into the office will somehow resolve workplace connection and culture problems.

It won't necessarily.

The answer lies in how managers lead, communicate, involve people in decisions, support development and create meaningful working relationships.

An employee who works remotely but receives effective leadership, regular feedback and genuine support may feel considerably more connected than somebody sitting in an office where nobody listens to them.

Physical attendance is not a substitute for competent management.

So what should employers actually do?

This is where I think much of the wellbeing conversation needs to change.

We have spent years identifying the symptoms. We now need to demonstrate that we're prepared to address the causes.

I would start with six practical actions.

None of these actions are particularly revolutionary. They require competent management, organisational discipline, consultation and a willingness to challenge practices that have become accepted simply because they've existed for years.

And yes, they require investment. But so do turnover, recruitment, absenteeism, lost productivity, employee relations disputes and the consequences of unmanaged psychosocial risks.

We need to stop treating burnout as an employee deficiency

I am not suggesting that employee assistance programmes, mental health support, flexible working or wellbeing initiatives have no value. They absolutely do, and employees experiencing difficulties should receive appropriate support.

But there is a significant difference between supporting somebody who is struggling and correcting the workplace conditions that contributed to the problem.

Both matter.

An EAP can help an employee deal with stress. It cannot clarify conflicting management instructions, remove unnecessary bureaucracy, correct unreasonable workloads or make an ineffective manager competent.

Those are organisational responsibilities.

And while individuals have responsibilities for their own health and wellbeing, employers cannot reasonably expect personal resilience to compensate indefinitely for poorly designed work.

My concern is that we've become far more comfortable funding programmes that help employees tolerate workplace problems than making the management decisions necessary to resolve them.

The research is giving us a fairly clear indication of where we should be looking. The next question is whether employers, executives and HR professionals have the appetite to do something meaningful about it.

Because if 71% of employees are working around your systems, perhaps your next wellbeing initiative shouldn't be another mindfulness session.

FAQ