When workforce wellbeing becomes another task for exhausted employees

By By Mafalda Carvalho, author, founder and leadership and workforce practitioner.

Workplace wellbeing has matured. It has moved into boardroom conversations about workforce health, performance and psychosocial risk. Yet one old habit remains surprisingly persistent: when people are exhausted, organisations still too often give the exhausted person another task.

Download the wellbeing app. Attend the resilience session. Learn to meditate. Speak to your manager. Use the benefits portal. Set better boundaries. Each of these can help. None of them can compensate for work that is badly designed.

That distinction matters because wellbeing becomes fragile when the employee carries responsibility for managing risks the organisation itself is creating.

When support becomes extra work

A wellbeing offer can be generous on paper and inaccessible in practice. A person who is already overloaded may not have the time, privacy or psychological safety to use it. Someone working under unclear priorities may be told to protect their boundaries while being rewarded for constant availability. A manager may be asked to spot burnout while carrying an unmanageable team and targets of their own.

The question is not whether individual support should exist. It should. The question is whether support is being used instead of examining workload, role clarity, autonomy, staffing, management behaviour and the way change is introduced.

Psychosocial risk belongs in the design of work

The International Labour Organization’s 2026 work on psychosocial risk is useful here because it places the issue where it belongs: in how jobs are designed, organised and managed. Workload, role clarity, autonomy, working time, supervision, fairness and participation all shape health and performance.

WHO guidance makes a similar point. Organisational interventions sit alongside manager training and individual support. In other words, the answer to workplace mental health is not simply to help people cope better with harmful conditions; it is also to reduce avoidable harm in the conditions themselves.

In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive estimated that 964,000 workers were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost. These are not numbers that can be solved by better signposting alone.

Managers matter, but they cannot carry the whole system

Middle managers are often the human face of workplace wellbeing. They notice changes in behaviour, hear the first disclosure and make day-to-day decisions about priorities. Good manager capability matters enormously.

But there is a risk in turning the manager into the organisation’s emotional shock absorber. A manager cannot sustainably create psychological safety if senior decisions repeatedly overload the team. They cannot protect boundaries if incentives reward overwork. They cannot fix poor role design by becoming endlessly compassionate.

The organisation has to make wellbeing possible.

A better test for wellbeing strategy

Instead of asking only how many people used an intervention, leaders can ask five harder questions. What is making work unnecessarily difficult? Where are demands consistently higher than available time or resources? Do people have enough control and clarity to do good work? Can they raise overload before it becomes absence or exit? When a wellbeing signal appears, does anything change in the way work is organised?

These questions shift wellbeing from a collection of benefits to an operating discipline. They also produce more useful conversations with providers, because external support can then complement a healthier system rather than mask a broken one.

Wellbeing should reduce friction, not add to it

The most credible wellbeing strategies do not make employees prove that they are resilient enough for the workplace. They make it easier for people to do sustainable, high-quality work.

That may mean redesigning workload, removing low-value meetings, improving role clarity, training managers, reviewing staffing, creating safer routes to speak up, making benefits easier to access or changing how success is measured. Often it is a combination.

Individual responsibility still matters. People benefit from boundaries, self-awareness, support and healthy routines. But wellbeing becomes unfair when the employee is given responsibility without corresponding organisational action.

If an exhausted employee has to become project manager of their own survival, the wellbeing strategy has missed the point.

Consider a hypothetical team whose wellbeing survey repeatedly mentions interrupted work and late requests. An app might help an individual relax, but it cannot decide which requests matter. The manager and team could instead agree one channel for urgent work, define what urgent means and protect a short period for concentration. They could then review whether interruptions fell and whether important requests were still handled. This is an example of a change to test, not a claim of proven results. It connects listening to a visible decision about work, while retaining access to individual support.

A review should also ask who benefits and who remains excluded. Shift workers, carers and employees with different communication needs may experience the same offer differently. Participation counts can conceal those differences.

Reviewing access is therefore essential.

Sources and context

• International Labour Organization (2026), The psychosocial working environment: Global developments and pathways for action.

• World Health Organization, Guidelines on mental health at work and supporting workplace mental-health resources.

• Health and Safety Executive (2025), Health and safety at work: Summary statistics for Great Britain 2025.

• Primary source links: https://www.ilo.org/publications/psychosocial-working-environment-global-developments-and-pathways-action ; https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240053052 ; https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/assets/docs/hssh2425.pdf

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Well Crowd. This content is for information and discussion purposes only and should not be taken as medical, health, or professional advice.