The modern workplace has become a bizarre theatre of performance porn, where humans are reduced to KPIs and souls are measured in quarterly targets.
We've somehow decided that squeezing every last drop of output is more important than creating spaces where humans actually want to show up. Psychological safety? Belonging? Nah. Let’s just keep flogging the productivity horse and act surprised when it collapses.
This obsessive focus on performance over psychological safety and belonging isn't just damaging our wellbeing, it's actively sabotaging the very outcomes we're desperately chasing. The research is clear: when people feel safe, seen, and like they bloody matter, performance naturally follows. Yet we continue to chase the tail of productivity while ignoring the body it's attached to.
If you've ever sat at your desk with your brain fogged up like a busted windscreen, staring at emails like they're written in ancient Sumerian, congratulations. You're not broken. You're burnt out. And you're not alone. Burnout has become the background noise of modern life. It's in the sighs between meetings, the thousand-yard stares on public transport, the "just one more episode" spiral at 2am. But here's the kicker: burnout isn't just about work anymore. It's existential, emotional, cultural. A low-grade, chronic soul-exhaustion from trying to be a functional human in a system that was never designed for actual humans.
The World Health Organisation didn't officially recognise workplace burnout as an occupational phenomenon until 2019, which is a bit like finally acknowledging that water is wet. By then, we'd already built entire economies on the premise that humans are basically meat robots who can be optimised, measured, and squeezed for maximum output. The cost? An estimated $39 billion annually in workplace mental ill-health in Australia. This jaw-dropping number includes lost productivity, absenteeism, and presenteeism (that’s showing up but being so fried you might as well be a decorative pot plant). That's not including the immeasurable cost of crushed spirits, broken relationships, and the general misery of treating people like spreadsheet entries.
What's particularly maddening is how we've turned burnout into another individual failing to overcome. "You need better resilience," they say. "Try this meditation app." "Have you considered yoga?" Fuck that, frankly. As Dr. Christina Maslach's research demonstrates burnout is primarily an organisational problem, not a personal failing. When we obsess over productivity metrics and ignore the basic human stuff: belonging, connection, meaning — we’re not managing work, we’re building workplaces that extract rather than nourish. Until we stop treating people like cogs in some corporate meat-grinder and start building work cultures where safety, trust and dignity actually matter, we’ll keep burning people out and wondering why engagement scores are in the toilet.
Here's where it gets interesting from a brain science perspective. When people feel psychologically unsafe, when they're constantly worried about making mistakes, being judged, or having their contributions dismissed, their brains literally hijack their ability to perform. The amygdala, our ancient alarm system, screams "Get the fuck out of there" and hijacks cognitive resources that should be used for complex thinking and creativity. It's like trying to write poetry while someone's chasing you with a chainsaw. Technically possible, but not conducive to your best work.
The cruel irony is that in our obsession with performance metrics, we're creating the exact conditions that make high performance impossible. When your nervous system is constantly in fight-or-flight mode, you can't access the prefrontal cortex; the part of your brain responsible for executive function, creative problem-solving, and all the things that matter at work. You end up with entire organisations full of people whose brains are essentially running on survival mode.
Steve Magness, who spent years studying what makes athletes tick, points out something bloody brilliant: athletes perform better at home than when they're away. This isn't just about sleeping in your own bed or avoiding airline food (though both are valid concerns). It's about belonging. When we feel like we belong, our nervous systems calm down and we can actually perform. The same principle applies to every area of life. If you feel like a stranger in your own workplace, your body is in fight-or-flight mode, not performance mode.
The research is staggeringly clear on this. And yet, in all our corporate “wisdom,” we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the path to high performance is through psychological danger. Sometimes it’s overt: people being watched, measured, micromanaged like they’ve already stuffed something up. Trying to grow performance in that kind of culture is like trying to grow roses by yanking them out of the soil every five minutes to check if the roots are working. Spoiler: they’re not. Because you’re suffocating them. Other times, psychological danger is passively constructed: just flat-out neglecting the work of building trust, belonging, connection, and real accountability. That’s when you expect the roses to grow in dry, toxic, unwatered soil.
Either way, the result’s the same: performance through paranoia or emotional neglect. And let’s call it what it is: complete bullshit.
Fuck, if you can’t buy into belonging and connection for the sake of it, then here’s the data. When people feel they belong, job performance increases by 56%, turnover risk drops by 50%, and sick days decrease by 75%. The mechanism is simple: belonging reduces cortisol (the stress hormone that makes you feel like everything's falling apart) and increases oxytocin (the bonding hormone that makes collaboration possible).
There’s more: teams with higher psychological safety are more likely to report errors, which prevents bigger problems from festering. In our performance-obsessed culture, we've created environments where admitting mistakes is career suicide, so problems metastasise until they explode spectacularly. Meanwhile, psychologically safe teams are busy catching and fixing issues before they become disasters, or practising accountability when they need to. This cultivates safe-to-fail environments where actual innovation and breakthrough performance flourish.
Amy Edmondson's research shows that psychologically safe teams are more likely to engage in learning behaviours and to be rated as high-performing by their leaders. It makes perfect sense, really. If you’re constantly bracing for judgment or punishment every time you screw up, you’re not gonna take intelligent risks. You’re not gonna speak uncomfortable truths. You’re not gonna try the weird idea that might just work. You’re gonna play it safe, colour inside the lines, and crank out the kind of vanilla, risk-free output that kills creativity, purpose and innovation.
Donald Campbell identified this phenomenon decades ago with what's now known as Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor". In plain English: when you make metrics matter more than the work itself, people will game the system, and the work will suffer. Our take? The same thing happens with workplace culture. When you make metrics matter more than the culture itself, people will suffer.
Nowadays, the real work (the relationship-building, the struggle for belonging and connection) happens in the shadows, unmeasured and undervalued. When organisations fail to make space for the practice of being human at work and beyond (catching up with colleagues, being vulnerable, walking over to wish Joe a happy birthday instead of forwarding the manager’s email), people simply don’t have time to build the kind of culture that actually makes them want to show up to work.
Here's where things get interesting, and frankly, hopeful. Some organisations have figured out that if you give a damn about people's wellbeing (hooray!) and psychological safety, performance follows naturally. Honestly, it's not rocket science, but it does require letting go of the illusion that humans are machines that can be optimised through better management techniques and emotional neglect.
Google's Project Aristotle studied hundreds of teams to identify what makes them effective. The answer wasn't individual talent, team composition, or management structure. It was psychological safety. Teams with high psychological safety showed:
- Fewer errors (because people report problems instead of hiding them),
- More innovation (because people aren't afraid to try new approaches), and;
- Better learning outcomes (because mistakes become learning opportunities rather than career-limiting events).
- These are the real results that come from treating people like humans who need safety to perform at their best.
The companies that are truly transforming their cultures understand that this requires a fundamental shift in leadership philosophy. Instead of controllers and optimisers focused on extracting maximum output, effective leaders become enablers and developers of human potential. They become the guide, not the hero. They create conditions where people can thrive rather than just survive, where psychological safety allows for the vulnerability and risk-taking that drives innovation.
Human-centred cultures create sustainable competitive advantages. When you truly listen to what people have to say, give them meaningful work, and support them to get there, you create psychologically safe environments where performance naturally follows. Healthy work cultures don't need complex performance management because people are intrinsically motivated to do good work when they feel valued, connected, and safe.
Eastern philosophies have understood these principles for millennia, and Western performance science is finally catching up. The Taoist concept of "wu wei" (effortless action) suggests that peak performance comes from alignment with natural flow rather than forced effort. Buddhist teachings on non-attachment show that fixation on outcomes creates suffering and interferes with clear thinking and skillful action. Modern neuroscience confirms these ancient insights: when we're less attached to specific outcomes, we can access the creative and intuitive capabilities that are blocked by performance anxiety.
This doesn't mean becoming passive or lowering standards. It means understanding that sustainable high performance comes from creating the right conditions and trusting the process rather than trying to control outcomes through sheer force of will and management pressure. It's the difference between trying to make a river flow faster by pushing the water and removing obstacles so it can flow naturally.
Let’s say it one more time, shall we? Our obsession with performance metrics is not just failing to deliver better results, it's actively sabotaging the human conditions that make work possible. We've built workplaces that trigger fight-or-flight responses, undermine psychological safety, and treat humans like inefficient machines that need better optimisation. The cost isn't just measured in burnout rates and healthcare spending; it's measured in disconnected cultures, miserable employees, and missed opportunities to create something bigger through collaboration and purpose.
The path forward is a fundamental shift toward creating psychologically safe environments where people can access their full capabilities. The revolution starts with a simple recognition: people aren't problems to be solved or resources to be optimised. They're fascinating, messy, capable beings who do their best work when they feel safe, valued, and connected to something meaningful. Everything else is just tactics.
The real strategy is culture.
Healthy performance flows from healthy culture, not the other way around. And great organisations get this. They don’t just talk about culture; they invest in it, practise it, and lead it from the inside out. That’s where Habitus comes in.
We help teams build cultures where people don’t just survive, they thrive. Not through glossy values posters or one-off engagement surveys, but through the stuff that actually shapes culture: the words we use, the stories we tell, the rituals we practise, and how we relate to one another.
And we help leaders shift from performing leadership to practising it. Our Facilitation Training for Human-Centred Leaders is for those bold enough to lead with courage, vulnerability, and emotional intelligence. Chances are, we’re running one of them soon, check here or sign up for our newsletter to get notified on future offerings.
So if you’re ready to lead the kind of culture where psychological safety isn’t a tagline but a lived experience, where people can show up as their messy, brilliant selves, and feel like they bloody belong,
let’s do it.
This 2-minute culture check offers a safe way to surface the conversations your people might be holding back — and what to do about it.
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