Search Results for: management

January 15, 2026

Major surge in people working past retirement age … matched by rise in age discrimination claims

New research by specialist employment law firm Littler, based on 2024-25 data from HM Revenue & Customs, suggests there has been a 12 percent rise in the number of people working past retirement age over the past five years up from 1.39 million in the year to March 31 2020-21 to 1.56 million in the year to March 31 2024-25. The firm claims that, with the number of older people in the workplace growing, employers need to be more proactive to avoid age discrimination and prevent conflicts from developing between workers of very different generations. Although these conflicts are often seen as just workplace ‘banter’ they can cross the line to the point an employee feels they have been unlawfully discriminated against. For instance, where workplace ‘jokes’ have a repeated ageist element or stereotypes about young or old people stray into being seen as unlawful harassment. (more…)

January 6, 2026

Embedding AI into daily tasks can heighten stress and confuse people about their role

by Neil Franklin • AI, News

While artificial intelligence is taking on work across the economy, it may also create new demands on the human workforce that employers must stay ahead of and respond to. Researchers from Microsoft and Imperial College London highlight in the Society of Occupational Medicine’s (SOM) journal Occupational Medicine that AI tools will bring a multitude of benefits to the workplace. The technology is likely to make accessing workplace health support much easier for employees and managers, for example by automating and simplifying booking processes and appointments. (more…)

January 5, 2026

How business leaders can support disabled people in the workplace

by Freddie Steele • Company news

Disabilities are more common than we may realize, affecting the everyday lives of real people in heartbreaking ways. The CDC observes that over 28 percent of people in the US suffer from one or more physical disabilities. These could be related to cognition or mobility, vision, or hearing. Sometimes, a tragic accident may leave you in this condition. Or a genetic disorder, such as Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis, may flare up. Whatever the cause, the result is generally the same. Prolonged physical and mental stress that complicates your personal and professional life in the workplace. (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.

December 31, 2025

Half of firms are still sending unwanted office furniture to landfill

by Neil Franklin • Environment, Furniture, News, Workplace design

Half of UK organisations are still sending unwanted office furniture to landfill despite widespread (and apparently misplaced) confidence in their sustainability credentials, according to a new report from Business Moves Group. The findings highlight a significant gap between intent and practice in the way companies manage furniture during office moves, refurbishments and wider workplace change The white paper, Furniture futures: sustainable strategies for better workplaces [registration], is based on a survey of 250 facilities and office management professionals across the UK. (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

Life at the coalface: How the agile workplace first appeared in the mid 20th Century

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The idea of diffusion of innovation has become so embedded in our culture, and most recently so associated with the adoption of new technology, that we might assume it happens in predictable ways. The steps between innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards seem intuitive and certain even when their peaks might be unsure. And yet history teaches us that sometimes new ideas can take years or even decades to take hold, even when they are potentially world-changing and relevant for the era in which they were formulated. (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.

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December 11, 2025

JLL sets out the five key corporate real estate trends for next year

by Neil Franklin • News, Property

A new analysis from JLL claims to highlight how global occupiers are rethinking corporate real estate as a strategic tool for talent, culture and performance rather than treating it purely as a cost. The report identifies five priorities expected to influence workplace strategy in the year ahead, reflecting continued pressure on portfolios alongside rising expectations for employee experience and sustainability. JLL says organisations are increasingly shifting to more flexible “elastic portfolios” as they look to balance cost control with growth. Office utilisation remains well below target levels, prompting a move away from long, fixed leases in favour of portfolios that can expand or contract according to market conditions, workforce needs or new business opportunities. The firm argues that portfolio management is now closer to a continuous process than a periodic exercise.

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December 11, 2025

Student AI use doubles while confidence amongst university educators slips

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

New research suggests a widening gap between how UK university students and academic staff view the growing influence of artificial intelligence in higher education. The annual Coursera study reports a sharp rise in student use and approval of AI tools, contrasted with declining confidence among educators. The findings indicate that students now use AI for almost half of their study activities, up from a quarter last year. They also report strong benefits: four in five say their grades have improved since adopting the technology, and most believe it is enhancing the overall quality of higher education. Confidence has risen markedly since 2024, with 85 percent now saying the technology has a positive impact, compared with 67 percent a year ago. (more…)

December 10, 2025

Solar power plants: from panels to the grid

by Neil Franklin • Company news

More and more people are turning to solar energy as a reliable and sustainable electricity source. Solar power technology is improving, and equipment costs are decreasing every year. This allows more countries and companies to transition to green sources. DTEK Group is the largest private investor in the country’s energy sector, with investments of over €12 billion since 2005 and 55,000 employees. The company harnesses wind, sun, and thermal resources to generate electricity. Thanks to its hard work and innovation, DTEK Group is helping the Ukraine renewable energy scene grow and move towards cleaner, greener power. (more…)

December 10, 2025

Five strategies to enhance HR efficiency in modern workplaces

by Jesse Yancey • News, Workplace

HR departments are supposed to be the backbone of modern workplaces, but many are struggling to keep up. You’ve probably seen it firsthand: talented HR teams getting bogged down in administrative tasks when they should be driving real organizational change. The problem isn’t lack of effort. It’s that most HR departments are still operating like it’s 2010. Today’s business world moves fast, and your HR processes need to match that pace. (more…)