Search Results for: employee experience

November 29, 2013

The meaningful aspects of what we do give us the greatest rewards

Charles Handy recently explained to attendees at Worktech 13 London why money is not the main motivating factor for employees; while at the same event, Claudia Hamm-Barstow of Jones Lang LaSalle added that the dream workplace is “a place where the company adds value to the employee experience, people feel valued and welcomed, the organisation feels meaningful, the work is rewarding and importantly there are no stupid rules”. According to The Human Givens Institute neither of these statements should be at all surprising. But The Human Givens theory adds that we also need to be respected, to feel in control, to have self-esteem, privacy and community. And, most crucially of all, we need to have purpose and meaning in our lives. (more…)

November 21, 2013

Quality of the place and the pace of work is more important than money

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Events, Flexible working, Workplace design

O+A designed Aol’s new West Coast HQ

In a remarkable session on the future of work at Worktech 13 London this week – Charles Handy declared that organisations need passion, people and profit, in that order. Money isn’t the main motivating factor for individuals either, which is why Handy’s thoughts on the emergence of the portfolio worker should inspire anyone who dreams of quitting their corporate job to do something more interesting instead. Those who don’t have that option would have been cheered to hear the prevailing message at Worktech was that employers are waking up to the fact that the quality of the place and the pace of work (i.e. flexible working) is of equal importance to remuneration in attracting and retaining staff. (more…)

February 2, 2026

New white paper offers actions for managing trauma in the workplace

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

A new white paper offering practical guidance for employers on how to recognise, understand and respond to trauma in the workplace has been published by Nottingham Business School (NBS), part of Nottingham Trent University. Recent national figures show that more than 8.5 million adults in England and Wales are survivors of childhood abuse, underlining the scale of trauma?related experiences within the UK workforce. Managing Trauma in the Workplace: Strategies for Wellbeing and Organisational Resilience brings together research, survivor perspectives, and evidence?based recommendations to help HR professionals and managers create psychologically safe working environments. (more…)

January 28, 2026

Intentional AI adoption is a leadership challenge, not just a technology problem

by Molly Lebowitz • AI, Comment

A lot of conversations about AI jump straight to the end state. Leaders envision a future where the human workforce is focused on higher-order thinking and augmented with agentic capabilities across the enterprise, and where operational costs are much lower. While visionary thinking is not negative, we’re discovering that the transition from today’s version of the organization to a more automated state will require a massive transformation to achieve. Effective, sticky change requires active work and leadership to truly pivot processes, integrate technology, cultivate new skillsets, establish the cultural foundations, reformat the organizational structure, and ramp to new ways of working. Machines can’t steer that kind of change; humans still have to. (more…)

January 27, 2026

Artificial intelligence appears to cut more jobs than it creates

by Neil Franklin • AI, News

Artificial intelligence appears to be contributing to a net loss of jobs, according to a new analysis of how organisations are adopting the technology across their operations. Research by Morgan Stanley, based on responses from nearly 1,000 companies that have been using AI for at least a year, suggests that British firms have shed more roles than they have created as a direct result of AI deployment. The study indicates a net reduction of around 8 percent of roles in the UK over the past twelve months, a higher figure than reported in comparable surveys of companies in the United States, Germany, Japan and Australia. (more…)

January 14, 2026

The coming year will see a recalibration of the workplace, report suggests

by Neil Franklin • News, Workplace

WORKTECH Academy has published a new trends report setting out what it describes as the key forces reshaping work, workplace and workforce strategy in 2026. The report, The World of Work in 2026, claims to identify twenty trends grouped into four “megatrends”: Human Performance Reset, Workplaces Without Walls, Sustainable Growth and Back to Basics. Together, they suggest organisations are moving away from short-term fixes and “spectacle”, and towards building long-term resilience through adaptability and human capability. (more…)

January 9, 2026

Hobbies have the power to improve creativity and personal lives

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

Hobbies could do more than improve your personal life, they could make you more creative and better at work, according to new research published today. The study by researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Erasmus University Rotterdam explored how ‘leisure crafting’ – intentionally shaping your free time through goal setting, learning and connection – does not just boost well-being outside the office but can spill over into creativity, engagement, and meaning at work, especially for older employees. Published in the journal Human Relations, the findings show that giving people simple, doable advice about how to grow through their hobbies can make a real difference in their daily lives. (more…)

January 5, 2026

Addressing the problem of burnout in high stress industries

by Mark Eltringham • Company news, Wellbeing

What would happen if a bridge constantly supports a stream of traffic over time? No matter how robust or well-built it is, there will come a time when the materials begin to strain, revealing cracks and deeper structural issues. Now, high stress industries tend to operate in a similar manner. Employees, acting as the bridge, may crumble under the continual weight of increasing workloads. Inevitably, burnout awaits at the end of the rope, something which serves as a warning of an overextended system.

This article will explore the root cause of burnout, which often goes unnoticed and unaddressed. You will gain insights into what the early signs look like and how a sustainable workplace design can help reduce unnecessary strain on employees.

Burnout As a Signal of Systemic Imbalance

For the longest time, burnout has been viewed as an individual failure to cope. However, the fact that this condition is so persistent across industrial sectors reveals something far more structural.

Personal resilience, or lack thereof, becomes secondary when exhaustion and disengagement are reported across roles and sectors. By this stage, burnout has turned into a system-level signal that organizational demands have drifted out of alignment with human capacity.

A 2025 report showed that 72 percent of employees reported moderate to high levels of work-related stress. This marked the highest figure recorded in the past six years. Another independent research conducted the same year discovered that 66 percent of employees were experiencing some form of burnout.

The truth is that certain industries are known to be high-stress, including education, healthcare, emergency services, finance, and technology. When burnout is reported across these, it’s a sure sign that the operating models are relying on endurance rather than sustainability.

Since time pressure and emotional labor are treated as inherent to such sectors and the roles therein, burnout goes largely unaddressed. Common indicators of systemic imbalance include:

Workloads remain high despite changing demand cycles.
Recovery time is treated as optional.
Professionals are given high responsibilities with limited control or discretion.
Crisis conditions become normalized, masking long-term risk.
Moral and emotional strain occur, especially where workers cannot meet professional standards consistently.

Interestingly, burnout first appears among the most capable employees, those most invested in the outcomes. This should ring alarm bells, but sadly, many continue to see it as an individual issue. It’s time to understand that burnout is an early warning that the system itself is operating beyond sustainable limits.

How Workforce Shortages Intensify Burnout Cycles

It’s important to note that high-stress industries also suffer from workforce shortages alongside burnout. This means the two are not separate challenges. When staffing levels are inadequate, the result is sustained pressure on remaining employees, no matter the market demand.

Staffing gaps go beyond redistributing work. They reshape job conditions in such a way that burnout only gets worse. The scale of this problem is most evident in the healthcare sector. As per a 2025 report, 72 percent of hiring professionals reported ongoing staffing shortages in their facilities.

What’s more is that such conditions are expected to continue in the near future. When more than two-thirds of managers cannot find enough qualified applicants to fill their vacancies, we can understand that the problem is real.

Under such circumstances, burnout tends to intensify through the following mechanisms:

Workloads don’t get reduced, just redistributed. The remaining staff have to work harder to complete the additional tasks generated due to high demand.
The work environment continues to stay fast-paced and high-stakes.
Experienced staff members spend more time covering direct services and less on mentoring or decompression.
Since shortages persist, the workforce doesn’t get replenished properly.
As the existing employees strain under pressure, that in itself fuels burnout and attrition rates.

Rethinking Talent Pipelines in High-Stress Sectors

If organizations operating across high-stress industries are somehow able to replenish and sustain their workforce, that should provide some relief from burnout. The problem is that traditional talent pipelines, particularly in sectors like healthcare, emergency services, and education, were built for linear careers and predictable demand.

Under prolonged pressure, these models struggle to respond quickly enough. As a result, existing staff members are left to absorb the ongoing gaps. Many organizations are now reconsidering how people enter demanding professions in the first place.

In other words, many have decided not to rely solely on early-career entrants. Mid-career transitions and return-to-practice routes are also becoming a part of broader workforce strategies. For instance, in healthcare, career changers with a university degree in other disciplines can also pick up nursing training.

Within this context, online second-degree accelerated BSN programs have emerged as one example of how talent pipelines are being restructured. These programs lead to a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, the standard qualification for registered nurses.

As Elmhurst University shares, students with a prior Bachelor’s in any other discipline will earn their basic nursing degree within 16 months. The online structure addresses burnout in ways that traditional programs may not, as follows:

Trainees can stay partially employed while they complete their coursework.
The workforce across crucial, high-stress sectors can be replenished faster.
Candidates across different regions and demographics can have access to learning.
Organizations are able to avoid cyclic depletion caused by pulling staff out for upskilling or retraining.

Such adaptations can reduce the duration and intensity of understaffing across high-stress sectors. However, pipeline flexibility alone cannot resolve burnout. Parallel improvements in workload design and staffing support are also needed. Otherwise, the system already operating beyond sustainable limits will keep feeding itself.

Moving From Wellbeing Rhetoric to Sustainable Work Design

Addressing burnout through well-being initiatives has become commonplace across high-stress industries. The world is all too familiar with wellness apps and stress management workshops. These interventions do provide short-term relief for individuals. However, they do little to tackle the root of the problem: systemic drivers such as chronic understaffing and excessive workloads.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, only 33 percent of employees worldwide said they were thriving. 58 percent were struggling to cope, and 40 percent even experienced significant stress “a lot of the previous day.” Such trends cut across sectors, showcasing that burnout and disengagement are not merely isolated personal challenges.

The need of the hour is sustainable work design that addresses how work is structured and paced. Key elements of this include the following:

Realistic workload distribution to ensure tasks are aligned with staffing levels and capacity
Predictable scheduling that reduces last-minute changes, which could erode recovery time
Built-in recovery periods to protect rest as a structural requirement
Clarity of roles to prevent overload that results from blurred responsibilities
Feedback loops that adjust workflows before the strain escalates

This type of design views burnout as a signal of system failure, rather than an individual employee’s weakness. High-stress industries cannot afford to consider this design as an optional enhancement.

The same is critical to stabilizing teams and protecting workforce capacity so as to mitigate long-term burnout. This is especially important as recent research has emphasized that organizations need to adapt workforce structure and skills to evolving demands.

With that being said, organizations also need to factor in anticipated future pressures, not just current workforce strain. This means the next frontier lies in intelligent workforce design. It would include predictive workload modeling and cross-training of teams for flexibility.

As digital tools and remote learning expand access, changes in workplace policy and culture can help prioritize sustainable work practices. This is crucial because the future of high-stress industries depends on proactive, structural solutions if burnout is to become a thing of the past.

January 2, 2026

Employers urged to expand flexible working ahead of 2027 legal changes

by Marvin Gort • Flexible working, News

Employers are being urged to widen access to flexible working during 2026, ahead of planned changes to employment law that will make flexibility the default unless it can be shown to be unreasonable. A new report from the Work Foundation at Lancaster University suggests that workers with long term health conditions and those in low paid roles are significantly less likely to have access to flexible working arrangements, despite evidence that such measures can support job retention and participation. (more…)

December 22, 2025

The role of local businesses in promoting mental health and wellbeing

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Wellbeing

Across the UK and over recent years, there has a change in how the general public views mental health and wellbeing. Once seen as an individual responsibility, mental health is now recognised as a shared, community wide issue. Our mental health is both our individual and collective responsibility and requires effort from family members, workplaces and organisations. For many, the workplace is where they spend most of their time. For others, local cafés, gyms, hairdressers, or local shops are their daily social spaces. These are the places that people connect, relax, and interact with other people. It’s in these spaces that local businesses have a unique power to influence how people think and feel as well as their mental health. (more…)

December 15, 2025

Global survey points to ongoing yearning for flexible work

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Employee engagement levels remained broadly stable in 2025, according to a new global report from workplace analytics firm WorkL, with flexible work continuing to show a strong association with how positively people experience their job. The Global Workplace Report 2025 is based on survey data from more than 500,000 employees across over 100 countries. It records an average global engagement score of 75 percent, suggesting little overall movement compared with recent years, despite ongoing economic and labour market pressures.

(more…)

December 15, 2025

Beyond compliance: how the EU Accessibility Act will redefine workplace inclusion

by Stephen Cluskey • Comment, Workplace

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into effect on 28 June 2025. Since that date, any new product or service entering the EU market must meet common accessibility requirements. It’s a significant step toward ensuring that Europe’s 87 million people living with disabilities can use everyday products and services fully and confidently and will have a profound effect on workplace inclusion. The Act is designed to support both individuals and businesses. Until now, accessibility laws have varied widely across member states, creating unnecessary complexity for organisations and uneven experiences for people with disabilities. (more…)