'Burnover' emerges as critical HR risk in not‑for‑profit sector

New data from the 2025 Pro Bono Australia Salary Survey shows that 29% of people who left not‑for‑profit (NFP) roles in the past year did so primarily because of burnout, up from 21% the year before.

That steep rise has prompted burnout recovery specialist and former Victorian Government executive Nick Orchard to introduce a new term for what happens when exhaustion tips into attrition: burnover – the point at which burnout converts into turnover.

Orchard argued that burnover is less about individual resilience and more about how work is designed and led. Once staff start leaving, he says, the issue shifts from being a personal health concern to a core organisational risk that touches budgets, culture and frontline impact.

For NFPs already grappling with tight funding and surging community demand, the financial impact of repeated burnover can be severe. Research from the Australian HR Institute suggests that replacing an experienced team member can cost between 30% and 200% of their annual salary once recruitment, induction and lost productivity are factored in. That cost multiplies quickly when departures cluster in critical roles.

Signs of that strain are already evident. Nationally, almost half of CEOs and senior leaders report that staff turnover is too high, according to the Australian Council of Social Service. In the housing and homelessness sector, ACOSS data shows that more than seven in ten organisations are seeing rising staff stress and burnout, and nearly half say workforce pressure is now threatening service delivery and continuity.

Orchard noted that when exhausted employees walk out the door, they rarely just take a job description with them. They also take deep institutional knowledge, specialised skills and long‑standing community relationships. Even a highly capable replacement will need time to understand the nuances of the role, which often leads to remaining team members absorbing additional work and morale dipping further. This, he says, is how burnover becomes a self‑reinforcing cycle.

Middle leaders in the burnover “firing line”

While the entire workforce is affected, Orchard warns that middle leaders are often at the centre of the burnover cycle. International evidence indicates that a large majority of nonprofit middle managers receive no formal leadership training, despite reporting high levels of burnout.

In practice, many of these leaders are promoted for their technical expertise, then left to navigate competing demands from the executive level above and frontline teams below. Without clear systems, role clarity and decision‑making support, they can become default problem‑solvers and bottlenecks, carrying a disproportionate share of the work and emotional load.

Over time, that pressure makes them more likely to exit, often taking team stability and institutional memory with them. Orchard described this as a paradox at the heart of burnover: it rarely happens because people do not care, but rather because they care intensely, for too long, in environments that are not structurally set up to sustain that level of commitment.

From yoga days to system redesign

For HR teams, traditional wellbeing initiatives alone will not fix burnover. Orchard argued that the real leverage sits in organisational design and leadership practice, not in performative wellness activities.

He points to four areas where HR and executives can act:

• Clarify priorities and decision rights: When everything is treated as urgent and it is unclear who makes which decisions, stress and confusion escalate, calendars overflow and work becomes reactive. Orchard advocates shared prioritisation conversations that make trade‑offs explicit and define decision‑making boundaries. This can substantially reduce cognitive load and eliminate unnecessary check‑ins and meetings.
• Redesign workflow, not just workloads: Burnover is often driven less by pure volume of tasks and more by competing deadlines, constant interruptions and unresolved bottlenecks. Regularly mapping how work actually flows through teams can reveal hidden pressure points and unhelpful norms that can then be addressed collectively.
• Strengthen the middle‑leadership layer: Orchard said many middle managers try to operate as fixers and doers rather than strategists and coaches, often because they lack a clear leadership system and delegation framework. Providing them with defined role scope, support to distribute work appropriately and practical leadership tools can dramatically reduce burnover risk for both managers and their teams.
• Treat turnover risk as an operational metric: Indicators such as sustained overtime, unplanned leave, extended vacancies and spikes in internal transfer requests can act as early warning signs long before formal resignations appear. Tracking these systematically can give HR leaders a chance to intervene before workloads become unsustainable.

Leadership as a protective factor

Orchard emphasised that leadership quality – especially at the middle‑manager level – is one of the strongest protective factors against burnover. Effective leaders translate strategy into achievable work through small, trackable sprints, protecting focus and energy by stripping out non‑essential meetings and tasks. They distribute responsibility and authority clearly, favouring coaching and strategic oversight rather than personally fixing every issue.

Just as critically, they foster psychological safety around conversations about capacity and risk. When staff feel safe to talk about pressure points and suggest improvements, organisations can address issues before they spiral into resignations. Leaders who model sustainable work patterns themselves – rather than boundaryless availability and constant overwork – also send strong signals about what is truly expected.

The cost of inaction – and the upside of change

If burnover is left unaddressed, Orchard warned, organisations face a cascading set of workforce, operational, cultural and strategic impacts. Voluntary turnover rises, institutional knowledge erodes, recruitment costs blow out and remaining staff shoulder more work, fuelling further burnout. Service quality and project delivery suffer, risk increases and leadership attention is dragged from long‑term strategy into relentless firefighting.

Over time, this can become normalised as just the way things are, making it harder to attract high‑quality candidates and perpetuating a cycle of overload and exit. The financial toll can run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year – resources that should be directed to community impact rather than constant replacement, Orchard claimed.

However, he stressed that when organisations proactively design against burnover, the benefits go far beyond simply avoiding harm. HR leaders who tackle these structural issues report gains in performance, culture, engagement and funding competitiveness, putting their organisations in a stronger position to grow and deliver on their missions sustainably.