Burnout is a huge workplace issue: the low engagement that comes with it costs every business affected a fortune. Worse yet, its effects on workers are deleterious to the point where it can literally lead to death.
Yet in my experience, most leaders consider “burnout” an HR line item to be managed by a wellness program. It’s hard to know how to jolt people out of this mindset, but if I were a CEO (and I am), I’d be very concerned about potential industrial manslaughter charges coming my way at worst, and shareholders rightfully wondering why I am failing to manage the main thing that’s materially impairing productivity at best.
Burnout is a workplace safety hazard—and needs to be governed as one.
The World Health Organization defines burnout as the result of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It’s a costly hazard that claims at least twice as many lives as workplace accidents. Long working hours alone led to an estimated 750,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016, more than twice the 360,000 people killed by workplace injuries, according to a report from WHO and the International Labour Organization. In the USA, workplace stressors are estimated to kill 120,000 people a year.
Outside of the devastating human impact, the toll burnout takes on commercial performance should be triggering emergency board meetings all over the world. At an estimated cost of US $5 million a year for a company of 1,000 employees, it would be reasonable to ask very direct questions of the executive about their plans to arrest the poorly designed workplace practices that lead to burnout.
Maybe the questions could start with who decided that it was okay to spend more than half of your working week in meetings or managing the almost 600 emails and more than 750 Teams messages knowledge workers field every week. Perhaps some questions about what the executive has done to deliberately design the working week toward outcomes—not admin.
Burnout and chronic workplace stress come from the health of a company’s culture, and culture is almost universally dismissed, neglected or delegated to HR: A function with no formal training in organizational culture, no resources to shape it, and by its very station, no authority over the leadership behavior that does.
So, when an organization is faced with a growing number of employees taking chronic work stress-related leave—in Australia, the median time off for a serious mental health claim is almost five times that of other serious workplace injuries—it looks for a button to press, inside a function it believes has the answer. But doesn’t.
HR has never had the answer and never will. The organizations that shape their culture with intention, and deliberately look at the accidental practices we’ve inherited from antique cultures, don’t start with HR. They look directly at:
- the board, which needs to be asking the right questions, in line with increasing regulation and on behalf of shareholders looking for optimal productivity
- the CEO, who is entirely accountable for the productivity and performance of the organization
- the leaders who shape culture through the expectations they set, the practices they perpetuate, the consequences they apply for culture drift, and the chronic workplace issues they walk past every single day
CEOs and organizations never set out to burn their people out. It’s more a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and neglect. Neglecting the implications of workplace practices, neglecting better ways of working that are confirmed by research rather than the assumptions of a post-industrial era, and neglecting to look through the human lens at a growing contributor to cardiovascular incidents and death by suicide.
Whether leaders look at burnout through a productivity lens or from a human suffering perspective, the situation is clear. Leaders are enabling the ongoing, systemic impairment of commercial performance at the cost of human lives…and feeling OK about it because they’ve passed a memo to HR to invest in a wellness program or resilience training.
Thankfully, regulators and standard setters understand the crisis better and have begun something of a reckoning. ISO 45003 became the first international standard for managing psychological health and safety at work in 2021, and the US Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being names protection from harm, psychological safety included, as its first essential.
Australia has moved from guidance to enforcement. Every Australian state and territory now requires employers to identify and manage psychosocial hazards in the same way as physical ones, and in December 2025, Australia’s Department of Defence became the first federal employer convicted for failing to manage psychosocial risk.
Burnout is, quite literally, an existential risk. It’s time organizations truly started acting like it.
If this article raises concerns for you or someone you know, support is available. In the USA, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on 988. In Australia, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
