We talk a lot about mental health in the workplace. And while these conversations are important, they often focus on the individual: how someone could build their resilience, manage their stress, or ask for accommodation.
The problem with this approach is that it implies the problem is you.
What people report experiencing at work — the disconnection, the exhaustion, the going-through-the-motions feeling — is at least partially a cultural and systemic problem. Something that lives between people and in the conditions of work itself.
The numbers bear this out. According to talent solutions firm Robert Half, in 2025 nearly half of Canadian workers — 47% — report feeling burned out, a figure that has risen steadily from 33% in 2023. In Canada, 500,000 workers miss work every week for mental health reasons, costing the economy $51 billion annually (Manage2Retain). As one leading HR voice recently put it, burnout is not just an individual problem. It is an organizational and economic one (People Talk).
Given this, it’s worth organizations taking a hard look at how their workplace culture may be contributing to these numbers — and how it might instead provide better conditions for people to do and be well at work.
What is Culture, Including Workplace Culture?
Broadly, culture is the patterns, actions, habits, ways of communicating that are underpinned by shared values, beliefs, and assumptions within a group (Bhattacharya).
Outside of work, there are cultural groups or environments everywhere in your life. For example, your gym has a culture, your children’s school council has a culture, your religious congregation has a culture, your group of university friends has a culture.
Anywhere people meet together and share something in common, you can see those patterns in action by what people do together – how people interact, what objects they interact with, who makes decisions, etc. The things they do are shaped by values.
We see this at work too.
For example, if there is no shared common space at your workplace and people are not able to congregate when they eat, they’re not able to interact socially.
As another example, if people are working in-office together, but they only ever take their meetings through an on-line platform on their computer – this says something about the workplace culture and underlying values. But without resorting to forcing people to book a room to meet in person, it may be worth considering why this takes place, to get at the reason why people don’t seem to want to meet face-to-face while they are in the same physical location.
Workplace Culture Isn’t Just a Vibe
Of course, workplace culture isn’t just a vibe. Strong workplace culture, where people want to be and where they can do their best work, also doesn’t happen by chance. Workplace culture can be organized to support both productivity and human interaction.
Developing Two Sides of Workplace Culture
There are two interrelated sides to any workplace culture:
→ The structural side: how work is organized, where people meet, how decisions get made
→ The human side: how people connect, relate, and do the work within those structures
In purposefully building a workplace where people can do strong work and where they want to be involves paying attention to both the structural and human sides.
To learn more about how building a strong workplace culture can support people to work together well, see this blog post.
To learn more about how focusing on wellbeing can help create conditions for people to do and be well at work, see this blog post.
