DOMPETRUS.com

Why the wellness industry has been fixing the wrong thing for twenty years

She is twenty-five. She has been in the job nine months. She is, by every metric her manager looks at, doing fine.

It is Sunday evening. She is on the couch with her laptop balanced on a cushion, refreshing Slack, because some message went out late on Friday and she still isn’t sure whether she was meant to action it or just notice it. She has read the thread four times. She rewrites a reply. Deletes it. Rewrites it. Closes the lid. Opens it again.

She is not lazy. She is not weak. She is not lacking resilience.

She is doing the invisible job nobody hired her for: trying to figure out what good even looks like in a workplace where nobody has bothered to tell her.

Multiply her by a few million and you have what we are euphemistically calling a burnout epidemic.

And this is not abstract

Massey Business School’s Professor Jarrod Haar has been running the wellbeing@work survey since 2020, sampling more than a thousand representative New Zealand employees every four months. The series is the most rigorous longitudinal picture we have of how this country’s workforce is actually holding up.

Pre-COVID, the baseline sat at around 8% of the workforce in the high burnout risk category. By April 2024, that figure had hit 57%.

One in two Kiwi workers at risk of clinical-level burnout. The highest score ever recorded in the dataset.

The rate has since come down to around 26%. Treat that as good news at your peril. It is still more than three times the pre-pandemic baseline; parallel research from Telus Health in mid-2025 found 63% of New Zealand workers reporting they feel somewhat or extremely burnt out.

The cross-cut that should worry every board sits in Haar’s 2024 data. Hybrid workers, (the group an entire industry now calls the future of work) were burning out at 72.4%, more than double full-time office workers and nearly five times full-time remote workers. The arrangement we engineered specifically to give people balance turned out to be the arrangement burning them fastest.

That is not a workforce in need of a meditation app.

That is a country whose operating model is on fire.

The story we keep telling is wrong

For two decades, the conversation about burnout has been a kind of polite fiction.

The fiction goes like this. Burnout is a personal condition. It happens when an individual fails to manage their workload, their boundaries, or their mindset. The remedy, accordingly, is also personal. More yoga. More journaling. More resilience training. A meditation app subscription paid for by the company. A wellness webinar at 4pm on a Thursday that nobody has time to attend.

It is a beautifully convenient fiction, because it locates the problem entirely inside the employee — and therefore entirely outside the organisation. Burnout, in this telling, is something they have. Not something we designed.

The fiction has held up so well partly because everyone with power benefits from it. If burnout is personal, no operating model needs to change. No team structure needs to be revisited. No executive incentive needs to be rewritten. The CFO can keep approving the EAP renewal and nobody has to ask the harder question.

The harder question is this. Why are so many capable, committed, talented people exhausted in the first place?

The answer, when you actually look at the research, is unflattering. Burnout is not a person problem. It is a design problem. And it has four distinct blueprints, depending on where the person sits.

Blueprint one: the early-career fog

This is the woman on the couch.

At the start of a career, burnout almost never looks like overwork. It looks like disorientation. The unspoken rules. The decoding of tone. The constant low-grade terror of either asking too many questions or asking too few. The energy spent figuring out who actually decides things in a hybrid workplace where the old apprenticeship-by-osmosis is dead and nothing has replaced it.

Research is brutally clear on this: a lack of control and unclear expectations predict burnout more reliably than the raw number of hours worked. Yet most onboarding still hands a junior employee a laptop and a vague invitation to “reach out if you have questions” — as though reaching out were free.

It isn’t free. Every question costs social capital the employee does not yet have. So they guess. Then they overdeliver, just in case. Then they do it again. Then they break.

What this person needs is not a resilience workshop. It is three clear priorities, an explicit map of who decides what, and a manager who has been told in writing that “I don’t know yet” is an acceptable answer.

Blueprint two: the manager in the vice

Climb one rung and the shape of the burnout changes completely.

Mid-career managers are not disoriented. They know exactly what is happening. That is the problem. They are absorbing pressure from above and trying to shield the team below from the worst of it, with neither the authority to change the inputs nor the support to absorb the output.

The technical name for this is responsibility without authority. The colloquial name is Sunday-night nausea.

These are the people logging on at 9pm on a Wednesday, not because they are addicted to work, but because that is the only ninety-minute window in the day that hasn’t been colonised by a meeting they could not legitimately decline. Flexibility, in an organisation without guardrails, has a habit of curdling into permanent availability. The work doesn’t go away when the workday does. It leaks.

What this person needs is not a mindfulness app. It is fewer meetings, clearer decision rights, and someone with sufficient seniority publicly modelling that being offline after six is not insubordination.

Blueprint three: the executive carrying weight that is not theirs to carry

Now climb again, into the C-suite, and burnout mutates a third time. This is the version nobody talks about, because the people experiencing it cannot afford to be seen experiencing it.

At this altitude, burnout stops being about workload and starts being about moral load.

Decisions that affect livelihoods. Restructures. Layoffs. Strategic tradeoffs that move resources away from things the leader personally believes matter. Each of those is a small, repeated act of carrying consequences alone; and often being publicly asked to defend choices privately disagreed with.

The clinical literature has a name for the accumulated cost of this. It is moral injury. Originally studied by Jonathan Shay in combat veterans, the same pattern shows up reliably in executives subjected to long stretches of value conflict. Performance can hold up for an alarmingly long time. The integrity damage, less so.

What this person needs is not a peer-to-peer wellness platform. It is a confidential, properly facilitated space, inside or outside the business, where they can say the true thing out loud without it ending up in next quarter’s board pack.

Blueprint four: the founder who has merged with the mission

And then there is the version I see most painfully often in my own work: the founder, the executive director, the mission-driven leader for whom the organisation has quietly become a synonym for the self.

This person cannot rest, because rest feels like betrayal. Cannot delegate, because delegation feels like abandonment. Cannot step back, because stepping back is, in their internal logic, the moment the mission dies.

The research on founder burnout is consistent and miserable. Over-identification with the organisation is associated with emotional exhaustion, impaired decision-making, and a reduction in the very strategic clarity that made the leader effective in the first place. The thing they built starts eating the person who built it.

What this person needs is not another offsite. It is an organisation chart engineered so that the mission survives them being absent for a fortnight, and a board willing to challenge them rather than worship them.

The same root in every blueprint

Four wildly different presentations. One root cause in every case.

Not workload. Design.

Unclear priorities. Misaligned incentives. Decision rights that no one will commit to paper. Cultures that quietly reward visible overextension as a stand-in for actual commitment. The slow, expensive normalisation of availability as performance.

You cannot resilience-train your way out of any of that. You cannot meditation-app your way out of any of that. You can absolutely redesign your way out of it, but redesign requires someone with power to admit that the existing design was the problem in the first place; which is exactly the admission most organisations are structurally incapable of making.

Dom Petrus, CEO & co-founder of teambleu.com, has been arguing this point to anyone who will sit still long enough.

Every burnout statistic I see is reported as a wellness problem. It isn’t. It’s an architecture problem dressed up as a wellness problem so that the architects don’t have to take responsibility for it. We built teambleu specifically to make this visible — to show leaders, in real numbers, where their operating design is quietly burning their people. Once you can see it, you have to lead it. That’s the bit nobody can outsource.

Five questions to ask before approving the next wellness budget

Before the next wellbeing initiative gets signed off, run your organisation through this list. Honestly.

What in our operating rhythm is consuming far more energy than it returns?

Which decision keeps getting delayed, and who actually has the authority to make it?

Where, in our culture, has being available quietly become a substitute for being effective?

What are we still doing out of habit that no one would invent today if we were starting from scratch?

And the question the wellness industry exists to help us never ask: what would we have to stop, remove, or redesign to give our people genuine relief?

If you don’t like the answers, the response is not to demand more endurance from the people who answered them.

The response is to redesign the work.

That is not someone else’s job. It is not HR’s job. It is not the EAP provider’s job. It is yours, and it always was.

The wellness industry has been selling you bandages for twenty years.

You don’t have a bleeding problem. You have a blueprint problem.

Go fix the blueprint.

---

Sources: This piece draws on Harvard Business Review reporting on burnout across organisational roles by Daisy Auger-Dominguez (author of Burnt Out to Lit Up), Jonathan Shay’s foundational research on moral injury, the ongoing wellbeing@work burnout research led by Professor Jarrod Haar at Massey Business School (peak rate from April 2024 wave reported by Massey here), and the Telus Health Mental Health Index (NZ, June 2025 quarter).