CEO Voice: WA bosses take aim at workplaces making staff sick and mistaking exhaustion for high performance

Working people to exhaustion should not count as high performance, WA business leaders say, calling on employers to fix the workplaces making their staff sick. Workloads, management and the pressure on bosses themselves came under scrutiny at the latest CEO Voice boardroom lunch, hosted by The West Australian and the Australian Institute of Management WA. “We’ve got to stop asking people to be more resilient and sending them back to workplaces that make them sick,” Happiness Co founder and chief executive Julian Pace said. “It’s like modern workplace gaslighting.” “What do we say about wellbeing when no one’s watching? Like when no one’s around, what are we talking about when it comes to wellbeing?” he asked. Workplace psychologist Vanessa Vershaw questioned whether capable people were simply being asked to do too much. “What organisations, in my view, are demanding from people is more than they can do,” she said. “We actually have to change the definition of what high performance means and what we reward in organisations.” “We cannot reward exhaustion as a badge of honour or courage. “We have to allow people to recover so that they can come back for more, and we aren’t doing that right now.” PwC managing partner Justin Eve drew a gasp around the table with the cost of mental health claims. Safe Work Australia figures put median compensation for a serious mental health claim at $68,600 in 2023-24, more than four times the $16,100 for other serious claims. Median time off work was 34.8 working weeks, compared with seven weeks. The number of serious mental health claims rose 169 per cent over the decade to 2024-25, reaching 17,900 despite a small fall in the final year. Mr Eve said prevention was “an absolute business and strategic priority”, rather than “this thing for HR to deal with”. He argued employers needed to change how work was organised to prevent harm, rather than simply detect it. A good set of numbers did not settle the question of who should run a team. “We also promote people who are really good at what they do, but not always really good at who they are,” Mr Pace said, drawing spontaneous agreement across the table. Leaders were pressed on how they would persuade a board to act against a high-performing manager who was harming staff. Mills Oakley partner Rob Humphreys said telling staff to take a problem to their supervisor would not always cut it. Workers needed other ways to raise concerns, and employers had to act on what they heard. “You can have a whistleblower hotline that has 25 whistleblower complaints sitting there. If they’re not actioned, what’s the point,” he asked. Therapy Focus chief executive Curtis Reddell questioned how much employers could learn once someone was on their way out. If staff had not felt comfortable disclosing their concerns, “they wouldn’t feel comfortable answering the exit survey”, he said. The discussion also turned to the pressures on women at work, including those in the chief executive’s chair. Fremantle Chamber of Commerce chief executive Chrissie Maus said extra locks had been installed to protect her. “To protect me, we’ve had to put more locks and more safety around it,” she said. “I’d like us to really consider the well-being and safety of our female CEOs.” Her board and male colleagues had been “so instrumental” in looking out for her. PeopleKind Group chief executive Mark FitzPatrick raised sexual harassment as a concern for employers with predominantly female workforces such as his own. “We as men need to do better,” he said. “How do we have a safe environment for our people?” Mr FitzPatrick also challenged employers to rethink job design for neurodivergent staff, questioning why they stuck with the same approach to jobs when people had different needs. Mr Humphreys said employers needed to look beyond the wellbeing perks. “If you’re talking to the regulator about this, they don’t care about your fruit bowls or your yoga classes,” he said. “They care about your systems and the work you’ve done in your system.” That meant examining staffing, how work was organised and whether employees could raise concerns and get them addressed. Richmond WA chief executive Adrian Munro said some distressing encounters, however, came with the work. His staff cared for people experiencing severe mental illness and could encounter verbal abuse and self-harm. “We know with absolute certainty you are going to get sworn at,” he said. “We can’t change the workplace because this is who we’re caring for. “So we’re doing more work up front when people interview to say, ‘Okay, how would you respond? This is what you’re going to be exposed to.’” He said deeply empathetic people were often drawn to mental health work, but that sensitivity could also leave them struggling with its demands. He recalled an earlier job in intensive care, when he and his colleagues had worked on a patient who died. The ward head told them they could go to morning tea before returning to assess the next patient. “I look back at that and think that was not a great moment of care,” he said. “But that’s just the system.” Lifestyle medicine physician Jenny Brockis said “well-being is about care.” She had worked with managers trying to support their teams who could not get senior leaders to listen. “And I also see that they themselves are not being supported, and so they are frustrated. They’re the ones getting burnt out. They’re the ones developing anxiety as well,” Dr Brockis said. Lifeline WA chief executive Sarah Fordham was hearing the strain on crisis support calls. “People used to bring just one problem. Now there’s multiple layers,” she said. Financial strain, grief, loneliness and work pressures could follow people into the workplace, leaving managers to handle difficult conversations alongside their other responsibilities. “There’s nothing harder than being a middle manager. I reckon that’s the hardest job in the organisation,” Ms Fordham said. “So we need to empower them, train them, resource them with this conversation, so that they can do the best work they can do.” At Hicks Civil and Mining, chief executive Keryn Hicks described the strain on experienced supervisors struggling with examinations required under changing workplace safety arrangements. The business ran mock tests, brought in lecturers and sat with supervisors to help them prepare. “We have to go through it, but we’ll go through it together,” she said. In Ms Maus’ earlier career in radio and television, being around for the evening pizza run was a sign you were putting in the hours. Missing it could count against you. After successive years of growth at the chamber, she had taken a different proposition to her board. “And I said, for the first time, if we do the same as we did last year, fantastic,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine an earlier, younger version of myself telling that to the board.” UDIA WA chief executive and WA Association for Mental Health chair Tanya Steinbeck described almost losing her daughter to anorexia and her husband being diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She had taken six weeks off and disconnected from work, telling her team and members what was happening. Her openness prompted others to share their own difficulties. “I’m not in a position to be able to effectively lead you at the moment,” she recalled telling them. “I need to stop. So I did and the conversation has flowed since then.”

CEO Voice: WA bosses take aim at workplaces making staff sick and mistaking exhaustion for high performance

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