Burnout is a mismatch between the work environment and your people's needs and expectations. It's an organisational issue, not a sign of individual weakness. Workshops, webinars, and ongoing support to educate you on the causes of burnout, how the structure of your business drives burnout, and give individuals the tools to support them when they are under stress. Delivered on-site across New Zealand or online.
The business case
Why wellness programmes don't work
Most wellbeing programmes start with the individual: teach people to manage their own stress better, and hope it holds. Research by psychologist Christina Maslach and her collaborator Michael Leiter takes a different starting point. Their Areas of Worklife model identifies six specific conditions in a job that drive burnout regardless of how resilient a person is. An effective approach looks at those drivers, not just the individual who is burning out.
Work expands to fill every available hour, with the next project starting before the last one is finished. Sometimes it isn't about volume alone, teams are asked to deliver without the resources or headcount to do it sustainably.
Your most capable people are trusted with real responsibility, but the decisions that shape their work keep getting made above them. Sometimes it looks like close oversight or micromanagement. Either way, the people doing the work aren't controlling how it gets done.
It isn't always about salary. It's whether people feel what they actually do is noticed and recognised by anyone above or around them.
Feeling isolated at work isn't unusual, and it often hides behind a culture of professionalism. In some teams it's worse, people are excluded or undermined by cliques. Either way, the result is people feeling alone and unsupported, even in a full office.
Some people get the credit, the flexibility, or the benefit of the doubt that others don't. People notice, even when nobody says anything about it.
Does how work actually gets done align with what the organisation says it stands for? Staff regularly asked to act against their own sense of what's right pay a cost for it, whatever their job title.
Individual training genuinely helps. But it works within a ceiling set by these six conditions, not instead of them. A resilient person in a badly structured job still burns out. The programme is built to address both: the conditions your organisation controls, and the physiological tools your people can use while those conditions are being addressed.
What your business gains
These are the outcomes a programme should be judged on at the business level, not just individual anecdotes.
How that benefits your people
Every programme is designed around specific, observable outcomes, not vague wellbeing improvements. Here's what participants typically report.
Programme formats
From a workplace review, to workshops, to working with individuals, programmes are tailored to your organisation's context, size, and goals. These are starting points, not fixed packages. Workplace reviews are conducted on a case-by-case basis. Workshops typically start from NZD $1,500. Shorter sessions and ongoing programmes are scoped and quoted based on your team's size and needs, so get in touch and we'll work out what's right for you.
From 60 minutes to a full day. A workshop can be tailored to suit your needs, from teaching practical breathwork tools through to sessions that include breathing assessments and a walkthrough of the six workplace conditions, workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values, that drive burnout in the first place. Ideal for all-hands meetings, conferences, and team days.
From single sessions through to multi-session online programmes covering burnout, resilience, sleep, and stress management. Multi-session programmes are delivered across several weeks to allow for practice and integration between sessions.
A sustained engagement including monthly sessions, check-ins, and measurable progress tracking, for organisations with systemic burnout issues that are committed to genuine cultural change around wellbeing and performance. Periodic reassessment against the six areas of worklife helps track whether the underlying conditions are actually shifting, not just how people are coping with them.
Why Simon
I spent seventeen years in litigation. Law is a high-pressure, high-stakes environment where burnout is normalised, ignored, or simply not understood. I know exactly what it's like to be in the audience for a wellbeing talk and think: that's fine for other people, but not relevant to the pressure I'm under. Or worse, knowing I've tried what they are teaching and it doesn't work. In truth, I didn't understand the causes of burnout, so I was unable to properly understand and address what was going on. Most likely, I was in the wrong job.
I speak to professional audiences differently because I come from one. The content is grounded in science, the delivery is direct, and the tools are practical enough to survive contact with a real working week.
I work with law firms, corporate teams, medical and healthcare organisations, and any professional environment where sustained high performance is expected and burnout is a genuine risk.
Questions about your organisation
What is the difference between a wellbeing programme and what you offer?
Most wellbeing programmes, mindfulness training, yoga, meditation, mental health awareness sessions, are aimed entirely at the individual. They teach someone to cope better with pressure. What they don't do is ask why the pressure exists in the first place. That's not a small distinction: a programme that only builds coping skills quietly places responsibility for burnout on the person experiencing it, not on the workload, decision-making structures, or culture that produced it. This one starts somewhere different, naming the actual conditions, workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values, that are driving the problem. Alongside that, it also gives your people physiological tools, using the Oxygen Advantage method, that measurably improve how their nervous system handles pressure while those conditions are being addressed.
Can this be delivered online or does it need to be in person?
Both. Most organisations run an initial in-person workshop to establish the programme across the team, then use online sessions for follow-up, webinars, and ongoing support. It works equally well for a single-site team, a distributed team, or a hybrid mix, so it can fit your existing structure rather than requiring you to change how your business operates to accommodate it.
Is this suitable for organisations where burnout has already taken hold, or only as prevention?
Both. Prevention is the most cost-effective time to intervene. For organisations where burnout is already present, the immediate priority is stabilising the people affected, while identifying which of the six workplace conditions most need to change so the team members can sustain recovery. Prevention work then shifts attention to those underlying conditions to build resilience.
What does a typical corporate workshop look like?
Workshops are tailored to your needs. Ideally, a workshop runs for at least half a day and covers two aspects. First, defining burnout, discussing the workplace conditions present in your organisation that drive burnout, and assessing whether people are at risk. The second half is practical: participants learn and practise two or three techniques they can use immediately to help reduce individual stress and build resilience. Workshops can be extended to a full day. Shorter workshops focusing on one aspect of burnout are also available.
How is burnout affecting New Zealand workplaces?
Burnout in New Zealand professional environments is most prevalent in high-demand, high-accountability roles including law, medicine, finance, and senior leadership, usually where workload and control are most out of balance. New Zealand organisations face the additional factor of small team sizes, where one person's burnout has a disproportionate impact on performance and culture. The physiological mechanism of people under constant stress is the same regardless of industry: sustained negative nervous system activation, driven by chronic stress and inadequate recovery. This can lead to exhaustion, cognitive impairment, and emotional depletion that define burnout.
Does this address the causes of burnout, or just how people cope with it?
Both are worth being clear about. To reduce instances of burnout will most likely require organisational change. This is not for the faint-hearted and requires buy-in from every level of your organisation. One of the primary reasons people leave a role is because of a poor relationship with a direct manager. If managers aren't on board with culture change, it won't stick. The physiological tools I can teach to help your people be resilient are only effective if they are embedded in a strong business structure. There will always be people who aren't the right fit for your business, but if burnout is a problem for your organisation, then that is the structure, not the people. It's important for producing meaningful change that you're working from an accurate picture of the problem, not a wellness perk bolted on top of it.
Questions about what to expect
How quickly do participants notice a difference?
Many participants notice something in the first session: a reduction in acute tension, a clearer head, a slower heart rate. These are immediate parasympathetic responses to slow nasal breathing. Structural change, where stress recovery genuinely improves and sleep quality shifts, typically takes two to four weeks of consistent daily practice. Programmes are designed around this timeline, with follow-up sessions spaced to reinforce the change after the initial workshop.
What's actually involved for someone attending a session?
An in-person session typically includes an individual breathing assessment and more hands-on feedback, which is especially useful the first time someone learns the techniques. From there, participants practise short daily techniques between sessions, and online follow-ups build on that foundation without needing the same one-on-one adjustment.
If your team is under sustained pressure and standard wellbeing support hasn't moved the dial, get in touch. Unlike most programmes, this one starts by naming the workplace conditions actually driving the problem, and gives your people physiological tools to recover while those conditions are addressed. I can help you decide what format will work for your people and your business.