Issue 005: The price of looking fine

Sixty-two percent of C-suite leaders report burnout right now, and seven in ten have seriously considered walking away from the job, not because the work stopped mattering to them, but because it never stopped, full stop. The people carrying the tightest to-do lists in your organisation are usually the last ones anyone checks on, because they're still hitting their numbers. That's exactly the problem this issue is about.

This week is the gap between performing well and being well, and why the two have almost nothing to do with each other once someone crosses a certain line. Real companies trying to close that gap, what the data says about the wellbeing perks that poll well and change nothing, and what to actually notice in your highest performers before burnout becomes the story you're telling instead of the one you caught early.

Jeya Sivans is this week's Leader Spotlight. She spent 15 years across corporate and consulting, including roles at the Financial Times and LexisNexis, before her own health forced a stop she hadn't planned for. She joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday to talk about what she calls unseen burnout, and what she built after she stopped.

Welcome to Issue 005 of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

In June 2021, Bumble's CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd closed the company's offices worldwide and gave roughly 700 staff, plus employees at sister app Badoo, a fully paid week off. Nobody had to ask for it. Bumble's head of editorial content at the time, Clare O'Connor, wrote that Wolfe Herd had "correctly intuited our collective burnout," a year and a half into a stretch where video calls had replaced every informal signal a manager used to pick up in a hallway. Bumble's president, Tariq Shaukat, put it plainly: teams were flagging Zoom fatigue and real burnout, and the company acted before a single formal complaint was filed.

What made this land, and what a lot of copycat "wellness weeks" since have missed, is the timing. Wolfe Herd didn't wait for an engagement survey to confirm what she could already see. She read the signal, in output slipping, in the tone of Slack messages, in how many cameras stayed off in meetings, and moved before it turned into a resignation problem. A wellness week announced after your best people start leaving is a retention tactic. A wellness week announced before anyone says a word out loud is something closer to actual care, and employees can tell the difference.

Exos, the performance coaching company that trains professional athletes and runs corporate wellness programmes for major employers, started piloting a 4-day workweek for its own staff in May 2023. Over the following year, employee turnover at Exos fell from 47% in 2022 to 29% in 2023, alongside reported gains in productivity, retention, and team morale.

The detail worth sitting with is the irony. A company whose entire business is telling other organisations how to build human performance had to run the experiment on itself, because its own people were burning out running the very programmes meant to prevent that in clients. You can sell a performance philosophy to a client for years and still not be living it internally, until the turnover numbers force the question. Exos didn't get credit for having the right ideas. It got results for actually testing them on its own people first.

In 2024, KPMG began rolling out "energy check-ins" across tens of thousands of its employees and partners in the UK. The system flags people who sit in the top 25% for hours worked or time spent on calls, and the bottom 25% for PTO taken relative to their peers. Three flags trigger a prompt for their manager to check in, ask about workload, and actively encourage time off.

On paper, this is more proactive than almost anything else in this issue, a company using its own workload data to catch the exact high performers everyone else here is worried about missing. But it sits one policy change away from a different use entirely. The dataset that flags someone for a supportive conversation is the same dataset that could just as easily end up in a performance review if nobody draws a hard line around it. The difference between care and surveillance isn't the data itself. It's who sees it, what happens after a flag, and whether an employee ever finds out they were flagged at all.

Peppy, a UK digital health platform now used by more than 250 employers, matches staff going through menopause, fertility treatment, or early parenthood with an actual specialist practitioner, rather than a generic app or a hotline. A published evaluation tracking 11,870 users found a 58% reduction in severe menopause symptoms within 180 days of using the service, with the improvement tracking directly against how engaged each user was. Separately, 70% of users report feeling more positive about their employer simply for offering it.

The distinction here matters. Most companies before Peppy weren't offering nothing, they usually already had an EAP or a general wellness app sitting in the benefits pack, unused. What Peppy proved wasn't that wellbeing support is valuable in the abstract, everyone already believed that. It proved that matching someone to a practitioner who understands their specific life stage and biology produces a measurable clinical result, not just a satisfaction score on an engagement survey. Generic wellbeing perks poll well and change little. Specific, matched support changes outcomes people can actually feel, and still measure 180 days later.

In April 2007, Arianna Huffington collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaustion at her desk, two years into building the Huffington Post. She broke her cheekbone on the way down and woke up in a pool of blood. The eventual diagnosis, after doctor visits, an MRI, an echocardiogram, was burnout, a word she's said wasn't even in common use for what had actually happened to her. Nine years later, in 2016, she founded Thrive Global, built around the idea that wellbeing and performance aren't competing priorities, they're the same problem viewed from two different rooms.

The uncomfortable detail worth sitting with is how long it took, and what it took, for the signal to register. Huffington was running one of the most visible media companies in the world and still didn't stop until her body physically forced the issue. Thrive's platform is now used by employees across more than 200 organisations in over 160 countries, and it exists specifically because its founder never got an earlier warning she could act on. Early pilots of its newer AI-driven tools report more than a 20% reduction in self-reported burnout indicators within three months, roughly the window Huffington herself didn't get in 2007.

Recent workforce research puts the average performance index across organisations at 31%, against an average resilience score of just 19%, a 12-point gap between what employees can deliver right now and what they can actually sustain. The same research found that employees with high performance scores but low resilience are five times more likely to be actively job searching than their high-resilience peers. Your dashboards are almost certainly tracking the first number. Very few are tracking the second.

That gap is exactly where your best people quietly decide to leave. Nobody manages out a high performer for looking tired, so the signal never reaches a formal process. It shows up instead as a resignation that "came out of nowhere," when it didn't, it came out of a dashboard nobody was reading for the right metric.

Pick your top output performers this quarter, not the average employee, and check the resilience gap specifically for them. The people carrying the most are the ones least likely to say so first.

Sixty-two percent of C-suite executives report burnout right now. The estimated cost of that disengagement runs to roughly $20,683 a year per leader, and seven in ten executives say they've seriously considered leaving their role specifically for their mental health. None of that shows up as a formal complaint, because there's rarely anyone whose job it is to check on the person at the top.

The reason senior burnout goes unflagged isn't that it's invisible, it's that the exact behaviours that would read as burnout in a junior employee, working late, never fully switching off, taking on more than their role requires, read as commitment and drive in a senior one. The signal is identical. The interpretation flips entirely based on seniority.

If your organisation has anything like the check-in system described earlier in this issue, extend it upward, not just downward. Your leadership team needs the same early-signal read your teams do. Nobody above them is doing it by default.

A large randomised trial out of the University of Illinois, published in JAMA, tracked employees through a standard workplace wellness programme for 18 months. Participants reported feeling better about their diet and exercise habits. They showed no measurable improvement on objective health markers: blood pressure, blood sugar, BMI, and no reduction in healthcare costs, despite an estimated $8 billion spent annually on workplace wellness programmes across the US.

The gap between those two findings is the entire point. Satisfaction surveys about wellness perks measure whether people liked being offered something. They don't measure whether anything actually changed for the person using it, which is a different question most organisations never separately ask.

The fix isn’t more perks. It’s fewer, more specific ones, matched to who’s actually using them, with an outcome checked at 90 and 180 days, not just a smile-sheet at sign-up.

Jeya Sivans built businesses across the UK and Canada, and spent 15 years across corporate and consulting, including roles at the Financial Times and LexisNexis, while advising organisations as a strategic consultant. In 2023, after years of operating at a relentless pace, she experienced burnout. What followed was a two-year sabbatical that changed how she views health, performance, and success entirely.

Earlier this year, she founded AskNama, a women's wellness consultancy built on one conviction: the problem was never that women lacked information. It was that almost every wellbeing solution on offer is designed to be generic, when a woman's biology, medical history, and life stage are deeply individual. AskNama now codifies 21 healing traditions across 9 cultures, from Ayurveda to Traditional Chinese Medicine to Nordic thermal practice, into protocols built around one person at a time.

Jeya joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday, her first appearance with us, to talk about what she calls unseen burnout: the structural exhaustion a weekend away, or even a sabbatical, can't touch. A note on what follows: these are drawn from the themes she's confirmed for Tuesday's conversation and her documented work, not a transcript, since the conversation itself hasn't happened yet as this issue goes out. Come back after Tuesday for her actual words.

Jeya's starting position for Tuesday is what she calls the cost of ambition: the hidden biological, emotional, and physiological price many high-achieving women unknowingly pay in pursuit of success. It's a trade-off no dashboard tracks, because none of the usual metrics were built to catch it.

Her argument reframes burnout itself as a late-stage signal rather than a starting point, the final visible sign of a cost that's been accumulating quietly for a long time before anyone, including the person carrying it, names it.

This is the turning point in her own story: 2023, a burnout that stopped her outright, and a two-year sabbatical that led directly to AskNama. Expect Tuesday's conversation to go into what that pause actually looked like, and why medicine alone didn't have an answer for her.

This is her core critique of most workplace wellbeing offerings: built to be generic, when biology, medical history, and life stage are anything but. It's the same gap this issue's Culture Plays keep circling from different angles, generic support polls well and changes little, specific support changes outcomes.

Her closing line for anyone AskNama works with doubles as the practical ask for people leaders watching Tuesday: notice the people who look like they're thriving, because appearing fine and actually being fine are rarely the same category, and asking the right question before someone reaches their own stopping point is the entire opportunity.

Thank you in advance, Jeya, we'll see you Tuesday!

Connect with Jeya on LinkedIn or find out more about her work at AskNama.

And that's a wrap for Issue 005. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

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