Thriving Sustainably Report: Navigating the complex landscape of workplace mental health

Thriving Sustainably: Navigating the complex landscape of workplace mental health

A Thrive at Work Survey Insights Report

At the heart of the Thrive at Work initiative lies a crucial element: gaining deep insights into the employee experience. One of our primary tools for achieving this understanding is the Thrive at Work Survey. This survey plays a pivotal role in unveiling how workers perceive their work and how work influences their mental health and overall wellbeing. Aligning with our comprehensive Thrive at Work Framework, the survey draws upon extensive evidence from various research domains, including public health, occupational health and safety, work design, positive psychology, and human resource management, accumulated over decades. Since its launch in 2020, we’ve gathered responses from 6813 workers across Australian organisations, spanning diverse industries such as Mining and Energy, Technology, Education and Training, Transportation, Public Administration, Healthcare, and Social Assistance. 

In this report – the first of a broader series of Thrive at Work Survey Insights reports – we discuss findings from the survey and provide a journey into the multifaceted nature of workplace mental health and outline the key strategies that organisations can undertake to best address different aspects of the mental health spectrum. Our data show that workers can experience aspects of thriving and burnout simultaneously, which means that organisations need to pay attention to how their workforce is faring in terms of mental ill-health and wellbeing. This also applies to the mental health supports and interventions that organisations provide. To unlock a motivated workforce that can sustain their performance without burning out, organisations need to provide supports that address the whole spectrum of mental health. This means creating an organisational environment that enables workers to recover from illness, to stay well, and to be the best they can be.

What does it mean to be engaged and energised compared to being engaged and exhausted?

Our data showed that 77% of workers surveyed reported high levels of thriving, however, not all these workers were thriving sustainably.  

Half of these thriving workers were ‘Engaged and Energised’, meaning they were thriving with little to no symptoms of burnout. These workers reported feeling confident, energetic, and motivated.  

Unfortunately, one-third of thriving workers were ‘Engaged and Exhausted’. For these workers, while they experienced high levels of motivation and fulfilment in their work, they were exhausted and grappling with burnout at the same time.  

Critically, these ‘Engaged but Exhausted’ workers were more than twice as likely to want to leave their current organisation in the next 12 months, compared to their ‘Engaged and Energised’ counterparts.  

If workers are thriving in their job, why are they considering quitting?

Compared to their energised counterparts,‘Engaged but Exhausted’ workers not only reported higher levels of time pressure and emotional demands, but also experienced less clarity and feedback to help them perform their tasks. Additionally, they perceived a less supportive working environment for managing potential mental health concerns.  

What this tells us is that ‘Engaged but Exhausted’ workers are doing more with less and feel that should their mental health take a turn for the worse, they have no choice but to soldier on. Conversely, ‘Engaged and Energised’ workers experience a balanced interplay of demands and resources in their work, which sustains their motivation and provides them with a sense of control over how they can manage their work if their mental health declines.