Burnout is rising again in Australia. Why can it be so hard to spot?

Burnout is rising again in Australian workplaces, writes Dr Natalie Cummins.

New research from ELMO’s Employee Sentiment Index shows the proportion of Australian employees reporting burnout has risen from 39 per cent to 44 per cent in six months. Presenteeism is also up, with 41 per cent reporting they have gone to work while unwell.

Other recent Australian evidence points to significant workplace pressure. Safe Work Australia’s 2026 Australian Worker Exposure Survey found that 37.3 per cent of workers experience tight deadlines or work pressure often or all the time. Earlier this year, Suicide Prevention Australia found 61 per cent of workers cited heavy workload and burnout among their top three contributors to workplace distress.

In a recent HR Leader podcast, editor Jerome Doraisamy explored “increasingly unsustainable workforce burnout” with Karl Treacher, including the relationship between productivity, presenteeism, workplace culture, and AI. It raises an interesting question: What if some employees experiencing burnout are also the people who appear to be performing well?

Interviews with Australian psychologists and workplace wellbeing practitioners suggest burnout doesn’t always begin with someone who can no longer perform.

Sometimes, high-performing employees keep going until they burn out.

Why burnout can be hard to spot

Australian psychologist Caron Marks says burnout among high-performing professionals can initially be “masked by incredible competence”.

She notes that they continue meeting deadlines. They keep delivering. They push through chronic fatigue, sometimes relying on adrenaline to maintain their performance.

And rather than immediately doing less, some do more.

As tasks become harder to complete, they may work longer hours or become reluctant to delegate, partly because they don’t want others to see that they are struggling.

Underneath that performance, things can begin to change. Marks sees declining creativity and problem solving, slower processing, indecisiveness and second-guessing. Irritability and impatience can emerge. Even someone’s usual sense of humour can disappear.

Australian Burnout to Brilliant author and psychologist Dr Marny Lishman sees a related problem. Some people who are seriously burnt out are still working. Their “battery” may be extremely low, but they continue “going through the motions”.

For leaders, admitting they are struggling can be particularly difficult. Lishman says some “put a lid on” how they are feeling and can “suffer in silence” for longer.

The warning signs may come earlier. Burnout is not always a collapse. Lishman says there are often smaller signals first, such as becoming more irritable or snappy.

“Your body and your mind are whispering things to you all the time,” she says, “but often we’re too busy to notice”.

Simone Hamilton, a behavioural change specialist, similarly describes burnout as more like a “slow leak” than a sudden crisis.

Mental fog, exhaustion despite sleep, irritability and reduced emotional bandwidth can emerge gradually. Someone who once completed a task quickly may begin taking longer, but compensates by staying later. Someone struggling to concentrate may repeatedly check their work. From the outside, they may still appear to be performing.

If employers wait for absenteeism, missed deadlines, or an obvious fall in productivity, burnout may already be well established.

Workplace culture can reinforce the problem

Jania Nouri, a social worker working in health and wellbeing, points to the role workplace culture plays in determining what gets normalised, rewarded and tolerated.

Consider the employee who always says yes. They answer emails after hours. They work through lunch. They rarely take leave. They remain available when everyone else has logged off.

None of these behaviours alone indicates burnout.

But in some workplaces, rather than prompting concern, they attract praise. The employee becomes known as reliable, committed, and capable of taking on more.

It raises an uncomfortable question for HR: could organisations sometimes be rewarding behaviours that make burnout harder to see?

The pressure behind the performance

More than one-third of workers experience tight deadlines or work pressure often or all the time, according to Safe Work Australia’s latest national survey. In financial and insurance services, the figure reaches 47.2 per cent, while in professional, scientific and technical services it is 46.3 per cent.

Hamilton points to a contradiction that can arise inside organisations: employees can be told not to work excessive hours while simultaneously being given workloads that cannot realistically be completed within those hours. Encouraging people to take breaks, disconnect and establish boundaries can achieve little if the way work is structured makes those behaviours difficult.

Technology may be adding another dimension. ELMO’s latest research found 72 per cent of Australian employees agree that if AI helps them work faster, more is expected of them.

That doesn’t mean AI directly causes burnout. But if technology saves an employee an hour and that hour is immediately filled with additional work, increased efficiency has not necessarily created greater capacity. It may simply have raised expectations.

Look beyond performance

None of this means managers should attempt to diagnose burnout by watching individual employees. But organisations can pay attention to changes.

Marks suggests looking beyond whether someone is still delivering. Is a normally decisive employee suddenly second-guessing decisions? Is someone working substantially longer to achieve the same result? Have creativity, humour, or willingness to delegate changed?

Those signs should prompt a second question: are workplace conditions adding to the pressure?

Employers need to examine whether workloads are realistic, whether deadlines are achievable, whether people can genuinely disconnect and whether employees feel safe saying when capacity has been reached.

As Dr Marny Lishman stresses, the key is recognising the smaller warning signs before someone hits the wall. And as Marks argues, addressing burnout means changing the conditions contributing to it – not simply asking employees to cope better.

Australia’s latest figures suggest burnout is moving in the wrong direction.

But burnout doesn’t always look like someone who has stopped performing.

Sometimes, they’re still showing up, still delivering – and still burning out.

Dr Natalie Cummins is a leadership expert and academic at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia, whose work focuses on organisational culture, leadership decision making and the human challenges facing HR in periods of rapid change.

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