Habits, relationships and structures are important for building resiliency expert finds
In high-stakes roles, burnout rarely strikes without warning.
A lot of the time, professionals in these roles—with tight deadlines, high workloads and high-stakes decisions—will see the signs and completely disregard them.
In a survey conducted by Robert Half of 1,500 professionals across Canada, 47 percent reported feeling burnt out. Thirty-one percent said they were more burnt out now than last year. Respondents cited factors such as heavy workload, poor communication with managerial support, and lack of tools and resources needed for workers to perform tasks properly as contributing burnout.
“Before we get here to being exhausted, we will be overextended, and before we get cynical, we will feel less engaged,” says Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, an award-winning workplace mental health expert and psychologist.
She refers to the World Health Organization’s official definition of burnout, which is characterized in three ways: exhaustion, feelings of negativity and cynicism about one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.
The very attributes Pelletier finds often push individuals into high-stakes roles—resourcefulness, ambition, resilience—can be the same forces that blind them to their own decline. Often, individuals in these roles experience the signs: feeling exhausted, less engaged with work, and instead of addressing the symptoms, they push through the demands.
According to Queen’s University Faculty of Education, warning signs of burnout can include lack of enjoyment, low energy, physical aches and feeling irritable, among other things.
In Pelletier’s view, building a resiliency system is one important way to help with burnout. People often think of resilience as something rare—a personal superpower, but Pelletier sees it differently.
“Fundamentally, our resilience will fluctuate throughout our lives,” she explains. “It means it will be influenced by outside factors, but it also means we can influence it.”
Thinking of it as an isolated trait is not only reductive but also dangerous. Even when external circumstances are difficult, we still have the agency to make choices that support our well-being—and, similarly, supportive environments can help when we're struggling internally.
So how do we build resilience in real life? There are four areas that research shows are most important: exercise, nutrition, sleep and relationships, says Pelletier, author of The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Work Performance and Mental Health.
It’s less about discovering something new and more about committing to what we already know helps—like moving our bodies, eating well, getting enough rest and spending time with people who recharge us.
“The main challenge is not in knowing what supports resilience, it’s in implementing,” she says. “If we pair this psychological knowledge with what we do in business—strategic planning—then we have a chance.”
That’s the foundation of what she calls a “strategic resilience plan,” which frames building these habits into daily routines.
However, dealing with burnout isn't just an individual problem; organizations need to take responsibility as well.
She highlights the Mental Health Commission’s 13 factors for addressing mental health in the workplace as a good place to start.
Developed in collaboration with Ottawa Public Health and the Mindful Employer, this initiative includes an animated video series that outlines each of the 13 factors. The goal of the videos was to spark meaningful conversations around mental health and provide practical guidance for creating psychologically safe workplaces.
Some of these factors include psychological demands, growth and development, and recognition, among others.
For Pelletier, there are three key areas that organizations should focus on to make the most impact in decreasing burnout: managing workload, supporting employee growth and fostering a healthy workplace culture.
Workload, in particular, is often ignored.
“I think there is this impression that to make a difference, you need to make an 80% change. But often, a smaller change can bring fairly significant relief,” she says.
In one recent example, she describes a professional services firm where leadership had historically focused only on number-based key performance indicators. That’s how the company was built and focused on their success.
But that changed after the firm started recognizing people as their most important assets.
“They’ve decided to apply the [resilience framework] and bring people-based key performance indicators into their mix,” she said.
That meant holding leaders accountable not just for deliverables, but also for their efforts in promoting psychological safety and resilience.
“It was not an easy shift at all,” she explains. “It required a lot of conversations and also supporting those leaders.”
The company didn’t just hand leaders this new task and expect them to figure it out.
“They structured things to provide support to leaders,” she says. “Lots of information, a lot of internal individual support and external individual support so they could find their own way.”
It’s a powerful example, Pelletier says, of what it looks like when an organization walks the talk.
“Resilience isn’t just personal—it’s relational, and it’s contextual,” she says. “It would be a huge mistake to think of it as only an individual responsibility. We’re part of a system, and both individuals and organizations have the power to influence it.”
