Workplace burnout? Blame the board

This article was written by Isy Oderberg

If staff at your organisation are experiencing burnout, don’t blame their inability to set boundaries. Don’t blame high workloads. Don’t blame competition. Place the blame firmly where it sits: the board or c-suite.

The first time I heard the quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, attributed to management consultant Peter Drucker, was when I completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Company Directors Course.

It was during the module about company culture, where the presenter prosecuted Drucker’s contention that you can have the best strategy in the universe, but if your organisation can’t execute it because it’s being let down by second-rate workplace culture, success is going to be difficult to achieve on any metric.

BeyondBlue defines “burnout” as "being emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted", and we hear a lot about this issue in Australia. The mental health charity commissioned a community poll that showed one in two Australian adults had experienced burnout, with numbers skewed towards younger workers. This rate puts us well above our comparable global peers.

In fact, in an OECD burnout ranking of 41 countries, Australia was near the bottom of the barrel in 32^nd place.

There are many theories as to why this is the case, including our tighter lockdown laws during the pandemic driving the uptake of hybrid work models that make identifying the work/home boundaries more challenging, massive cost of living issues creating job security and an ingrained national culture of competition and performance reward.

Given these factors, Pro Bono Australia’s Salary Survey Report 2025 understandably asked respondents about burnout, gleaning new sector knowledge about its importance for job hunters.

In a revelation that floored me, survey respondents ranked "high workload and burnout" as second only to remuneration. Many managers might contend that burnout is the responsibility of the individual employee. We’re all adults after all, right? Well… wrong.

Workplaces understand the cost of employees getting the flu over winter; it’s for this reason that many choose to provide a free flu injection, understanding that the cost of mitigation is much cheaper than the cost of the consequence or risk.

Burnout or workplace stress might seem to some like a “fluffy” issue, but let’s get real: burnout and stress-related absenteeism cost the Australian economy an estimated $14 billion per year, according to research commissioned by Medibank Private.

If employees are experiencing burnout, it’s because they’re operating under the belief management expects them to meet unrealistic expectations, at the expense of their health. 

Whether or not this is an actual or perceived expectation is irrelevant. Because if management is aware that this belief exists – and make no mistake, if they're not aware, they should be – then staff should be explicitly told they should always be prioritising their health and the health of their fellow staff. 

Trickle-down economics has been thoroughly debunked as political claptrap, but the traction of and commitment to trickle-down culture has gained momentum. At both Ernst and Young (2024) and Nine (2024), boards were forced to apologise for massive failures in organisational culture. As the Turkish saying goes, “The fish rots from the head”.

It’s very easy to talk the talk, but too often this talk isn’t translated into a walk that’s walked by the most visible and senior members of an organisation. It might be a manager’s rolled eyes, when someone raises an issue with an unrealistic workload. Or an annoyed huff when a staff-member takes a sick day.

You can’t inoculate someone against burnout, though there are solid ways to address this in your organisation before it becomes a problem, and in its section on psychological safety the Survey gives concrete examples of how to do so.