May is Mental Health Awareness Month. A good time to reflect on how work environments either support or sabotage employee well-being. Burnout is on the rise and employers’ role in addressing burnout has never been more important. If you’ve ever worked in a toxic culture, you know firsthand how it can chip away at your mental health.
As an employer or leader, you play a critical role in creating a workplace that protects people from burnout, not one that causes it. Below is an excerpt from one of the chapters in my book, Navigating a Toxic Workplace For Dummies, coming out on June 26, 2025, to help you better understand your responsibility in supporting mental wellness at work.
(Don’t forget to order your copy, and register for the virtual launch party!)
Employers’ Role in Addressing Burnout
There’s been a focus on mental health and well-being, employee burnout, and stress management for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought it to the forefront. Many employers offer Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), which are meant to help with a wide range of issues like substance abuse, financial and legal services, and caregiver support, and offer educational presentations on topics like stress management.
Good Perks Can’t Fix a Bad Culture
Many employers also offer subscriptions to meditation apps, free access to the gym in their office building, pizza lunches on Fridays, or half days at the end of a big project. Flexible work schedules and remote work are also offered as a way to ease tension between work and life, and assist employees in maintaining their mental health and well-being.
Though these are all great programs, they put the onus on the employee to manage their mental health while working in an environment that doesn’t support mental health. Employers who offer mental health benefits but don’t address the culture are in fact saying, “We don’t respect your mental health, as shown through the excessive workload, ignoring of your complaints about poor communication, and avoiding teaching managers to be great leaders. But here’s some stuff to help you manage the potential outcomes of the way we treat you.”
Address the Root Causes of Burnout
If the workplace is the root cause of poor mental health, then the employer must address those root causes in addition to offering resources.
One important way to do that is to train managers to be good leaders of the people they manage. Manager training programs and resulting behavior shifts should include:
- Developing and maintaining a team culture of psychological safety
- Cocreating expectations for behavior and performance with the team
- Holding the team accountable to group expectations through giving and receiving feedback
- Coaching team members engaging in hurtful or exclusive behaviors such as gossip, microaggressions, incivility, and bullying
- Proactively building a positive team culture
- Delegation and assisting team members in developing priorities, accomplishing goals and rewarding them when goals are achieved
- Innovative problem-solving
- Managing emotions and stepping in to solve conflict among team members
Hold Managers Accountable with Measurable Standards
Once this series of trainings occurs, then managers can be held accountable for effectively managing through measures on the performance management system, for example, such as a specific core competency around managing team burnout.
Core competencies are written as a set of observable behaviors. The idea is that a manager could observe someone engaged in those behaviors or not and therefore determine whether their employee is competent in that area or not.
For the competency “Effectively Manages Burnout,” a director could measure the managers who report to them with a list of behaviors such as:
- Communicates effectively about work product expectations and delivery timelines
- Encourages teamwork and collaboration
- Finds innovative solutions to address work overload
- Maintains a respectful work environment among the team
- Skilled at solving interpersonal problems such as miscommunication or conflict among the team
And then measure each of those observable behaviors on a matrix to ensure objectivity and consistency.
(Pre-order the book to get more ideas on creating and sustaining a thriving work environment. And then you can attend the virtual book launch party and get even more information!)
Renowned Culture Coach and Chairman Emeritus of WD-40 Company Garry Ridge will be joining us and we’ll be giving away copies of his best-selling book, “Any Dumb Ass Can Do It.” Trust me, you don’t want to miss this!
Ready to Lead the Change?
Mental health at work isn’t just about offering resources to people. It’s about removing the stressors that make those resources necessary in the first place.
Leaders must model respect, transparency, and empathy. The organization must back that up with policies, expectations, and accountability. And every individual must be empowered to contribute to a culture that supports mental health and psychological safety.
