Burnout Isn’t About Resilience - It’s About Design

Burnout is often misunderstood.

It’s not a sign of individual weakness, nor is it something a mindfulness app can fix. In reality, burnout is a systemic warning signal—a red flag waving over broken organisational structures, outdated leadership models, and a culture of overwork.

For Australian businesses, the costs are staggering. Burnout contributes to $39 billion in lost productivity each year, according to the State of Workplace Burnout report. New psychosocial risk legislation makes addressing it not just good ethics but the law.

As work evolves in the face of societal disruption, economic pressure, and declining trust in institutions, leaders must confront a confronting truth: The design of work itself is the problem.

Burnout isn’t caused by struggling individuals. It’s caused by struggling organisation and systems.

Leaders can’t coach their teams out of burnout. They must design their way out of it - by looking hard at how work is structured, how process and technology are used, and how their organisation supports (or drains) its people. But how?

Before that, lets conduct a quick thought experiment:

It’s 9pm on one of the days that you spend in the office. You arrived at 8.00 and are just leaving. It’s been a long day; your evening has been ruined because you stayed at work to get something finished. You missed the chance to spend some time with the kids and you’ve asked your partner to cover you on cooking dinner and helping with homework – again.

As the Uber draws up to take you home, you reflect about how much you’re not enjoying work, given the impact it’s having on you.

What’s happened over the last 13 hours to create this reflection?

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What’s Really Driving Burnout?

Burnout isn’t about people working too many hours (although that’s part of it). It’s about people working in systems that don’t support them.

Common drivers of burnout include:

• Unclear roles, competing priorities
• Overloaded teams due to poor planning and ineffective systems
• Tech and processes that slow people down instead of speeding them up and produce low quality outcomes that require loads of rework
• Reward systems that celebrate overwork and presenteeism
• Leaders who push for more without removing barriers, considering what to stop doing and/or making appropriate investments to make things better

Sound familiar?

Burnout is what happens when people feel like no matter how hard they work, it’s never enough - and nothing changes. It’s the consequence of chronic mismatch between expectations and enablement.

If you’re seeing signs of burnout in your team, it’s a red flag that the organisational design and the design of the work itself needs attention.

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What do we mean when we talk about Organisational and work design?

In essence we are talking about the operating model of the organisation. How processes, people and technology work together (or don’t) to create the outcomes the organisation needs them to.

None of those elements is dominant, they all inter-relate and all have an impact on each other and on the collective whole. In that respect the operating model is a complex system. Like all complex systems, if you want to create change you will be more effective if you address change at multiple ‘points’ in the system.

So back to burnout.

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Where to look and what to do?

Step 1: Look at How Work Is Designed

The first place to start is your structure.

• Are your team members clear on their roles and responsibilities?
• Is the scope of their work achievable - or have they become catch-alls for every new initiative/ idea/ project?
• Are your high performers being “rewarded” with more work – without consideration of what’s taken off their plate or extra support?

Good organisational design creates clarity and flow. It removes ambiguity and ensures people are spending their energy on what matters - not navigating bottlenecks or guessing what success looks like.

In many businesses, design hasn’t kept pace with growth. New projects are layered on top of old ones. People end up juggling too much, with little time to step back, reflect, or recover.

The fix? Be deliberate.

• Redesign roles where needed.
• Define what not to do.
• Make trade-offs visible and intentional.

As a leader, you need to protect your team’s focus and maximise their effort on the things that have the greatest impact on the outcomes you need to create.

Step 2: Audit Your Processes - Are They Helping or Hurting?

Process is where good intentions often fall apart.

• How many meetings could have been an email?
• How many forms, approvals, or manual steps slow your team down every week?
• Are your key workflows built for performance today – not for compliance, control or on outdated assumptions and platforms.

The truth is: processes can either maximise people’s time or waste it.

If your team is burning out, ask them what gets in their way. You’ll often hear:

• “We spend more time reporting on work than doing it.”
• “We don’t know who owns what.”
• “We’re stuck waiting on decisions.”
• “The systems don’t give us what we need”
• “I don’t think anyone ever reads the report anyway”

Process should enable clarity, speed, and ownership - not bureaucracy.

You don’t need to go agile or invest in automation and other tech tools to make a difference. Often, a simple reset on decision-making, reporting, and prioritisation can create a huge positive impact - for the cost of a little bit of thinking and some sensible conversation.

Step 3: Rethink the Role of Technology

Ironically, one of the biggest contributors to burnout is the very thing meant to help: technology.

Since the advent of widespread computer technologies in the 70’s and 80’s – we’ve had the promise that all that processing power would enable increased leisure time and less work. It’s fair to say those outcomes appear a little oversold.

Why?

Because we’ve added tool after tool - without streamlining how they’re used. We assume automation saves time, when it often just shifts tasks or creates new ones. We measure everything, but act on little.

Your team might be toggling between five platforms, managing ten Slack channels, responding to emails at midnight, and getting pinged about three dashboards - while still trying to “focus.”

To paraphrase Bill Gates. When an efficient process is automated, it multiples the efficiency. When an inefficient one is automated, the inefficiency is similarly multiplied. I’d then argue that calling out the increased inefficiency is made all the harder off the back of the financial investment in the new tech.

Here’s what to do:

• Simplify the tech stack. Audit what adds value and what adds noise.
• Design for flow, not surveillance. Use tools to support deep work, not constant availability.
• Invest in proper process design: LEAN and 6 Sigma methodologies are proven and easily accessible
• Don’t fall for the hype. Every AI or analytics tool must serve a clear purpose.

The promise of technology should be this: less admin, more impact. If that’s not happening, the tech isn’t working for you.

Step 4: Redefine What Success Looks Like

People burn out when expectations are high, but the rewards don’t match - or when only one kind of success is recognised.

Ask yourself:

• Do we celebrate output - or input?
• Are promotions and recognition tied only to title and tenure - or to impact, learning, and contribution?
• Are we rewarding busyness, or meaningful progress?

If your team feels they have to work late, do masses of work from a standard report to get it ready for some form of report or presentation or take on more just to be seen - they’ll eventually burn out.

Fixing this starts with rewarding the right things:

• Working smarter not harder
• Supporting others to work at a sustainable pace
• Flagging and making recommendations to fix ineffective systems
• Calling out low value activities
• Saying no to things that don’t really contribute to the greater good

You don’t need to lower the bar - you need to change what the bar is measuring.

Step 5: Reconnect as a Team

Burnout doesn’t just come from too much work - it comes from feeling alone in the work.

In high-performing teams, people feel supported, trusted, and part of something bigger than themselves. When that’s missing, even small setbacks feel overwhelming.

Post pandemic there’s been a lot of discussion on hybrid and remote working and the various implications. The reality is – in most teams – in person connection matters for learning, discussion, process improvement and efficiency. The impact varies by role but there’s probably a connection between increased remote working and increased burnout.

As a leader:

• Create space for honest conversations - not just task updates.
• Build rituals that reinforce connection
• Find the right balance to bring people together whilst enabling them to work apart
• Acknowledge the emotional toll of change. You don’t need to solve everything - but people need to feel heard.
• Invest. The days of team building events are correctly in our rear view mirrors, but smaller interventions that create considered and impactful connection and conversation will always add value (even if you can’t directly measure it).

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to stop the grind and ask: “How are we really doing?”

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Before I close, let’s review that thought experiment:

It’s 9pm on one of the days that you spend in the office. You arrived at 8.00 and are just leaving. It’s been a long day; your evening has been ruined because you stayed at work to get something finished. You missed the chance to spend some time with the kids and you’ve asked your partner to cover you on cooking dinner and helping with homework – again.

As the Uber draws up to take you home, you reflect on how much you’re enjoying work, despite the impact on your other responsibilities.

What’s happened over the last 13 hours to create this impact?

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In Closing: Leading for Sustainable Performance

Great leaders don’t just drive performance - they design for it:

• They protect people’s time and focus.
• They create clarity through structure and process.
• They use technology to reduce work, not increase noise.
• They model sustainable behaviours themselves.

And they understand that burnout is a system failure, not a people failure.

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