Employers must be more involved in addressing the burnout crisis

A lack of understanding and involvement in employee workloads and wellness has been identified as a major contributor to a contemporary organisational disruptor.

In a recent episode of The HR Leader Podcast, Karl Treacher, chief executive of The Culture Institute of Australia, explored how burnout characterises modern employment and identified the practical changes organisations can make.

Treacher explained that many leaders have retained qualities of the past and are less equipped to handle challenges stemming from contemporary issues such as cultural health, AI, the cost of living, stress, personal life load, and changing workplace demographics.

Not only are these impactors all hitting at once, but “we don’t have governance and executive leadership in a position to be able to field that either from a time perspective or interest”.

Reflecting on the implications for organisations, Treacher explained that the impact first shows up as increased rates of absenteeism and presenteeism – the latter of which is not always measured or considered, but is equally increasing due to a fear of resigning despite unsustainable environments.

Treacher explained that business leaders remain deficient in their understanding of and involvement with employee burnout.

“When we talk about culture or any board or executive team talks about culture, it’s been forced on them at this point because of the increased regulations. They’re still not interested … that puts HR in a really uncomfortable and unnatural position where they’re seen to be responsible, accountable for shaping culture when really it’s a board and executive duty,” he said.

Treacher also noted that education remains poor among executive leaders, adding that “if you look at any of the education avenues that we have around HR in particular, or leadership, shaping team culture and bolstering cultural health to a sustainable level is not a core subject”.

Further, the sentiment around burnout that it has a low impact on organisations as a whole compared to high-level workforce strategy compounds the issue, as does its seemingly subjective manifestation.

Treacher said: “The definition has been so murky forever, it’s not given the time and effort and space and breathing room that it really requires.”

In this way, Treacher urged organisations to stop talking about culture the same way that practical, strategic decisions are made.

“There [are] expectations that, we’re going to focus on AI and the next shiny thing and we want you to work … that’s going to be the expectations modelled by the leaders. But if it’s actually, we’re wanting performance, we know that, just like an athlete, you’ve got to hit the stimulus and then you need to recover. And that’s not something that’s in the business vernacular,” he said.

Without this shift, Treacher warned that employees facing increasing workloads – especially as AI and workforce reductions dramatically change the nature of existing roles – will display worsened performance and increased rates of burnout and absenteeism.

However, Treacher remained hopeful that this correlation would become apparent in reporting cycles, ideally with corrections applied.

In this way, employers are urged to measure and identify the state of an organisation’s cultural health – and be involved in its application.

He said: “This idea that engagement surveys are going to give us an understanding of cultural health is a complete fallacy. There’s no truth to that. You can have highly engaged individuals in a burnout culture, or culture full of misconduct … the first thing is, are you measuring it effectively?”

“The second thing that most organisations forget is that leaders are 70 per cent of the variance in team and organisation culture. So if your leaders haven’t been trained in culture and then incentivised to do so and kept accountable, it’s no way that the culture will change.”

“It is a repetitive amplification that’s going to make a difference.”

Treacher reinforced that HR mustn’t be cautious of “running interference” when directives from above seem impractical or potentially harmful, and that it is their role to maintain the human component “of what is quite often a commercial and corporate machine”.

“You’re looking after people, and that’s important … but even to get the outcomes that the board and the executive are looking for, you need to factor in their wellness,” he said.

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