The messy reality of workplace stress costing Australian IT businesses

Imagine you run a small MSP. What’s the first thing you do when someone in your team says they’re struggling with stress?

Perhaps you send them on holiday, split their work among the rest of the team and call a contractor to help for a few weeks.

Your team starts treating overtime as the norm. They get frustrated because it seems like the goalposts keep shifting. The employee you sent on holidays returns, but soon they’re exhausted again, and some staff are lining up to leave. Your customers start complaining about poor service quality.

What if the underlying problem is not just people? There might also be poor communication, broken processes, toxic culture, or unrealistic workloads, for instance.

These problems are hurting businesses financially.

Mental ill-health is estimated to cost Australian businesses billions of dollars each year, according to various estimates.

They also create legal risk. If you run a business you are legally required to provide a safe workplace that doesn’t risk your employees’ health, including their psychological health.

Australia’s IT industry didn’t rate a mention in a 2026 webinar hosted by Safe Work Australia and mental health not-for-profit SuperFriend about rates of workplace mental health harm, compared with healthcare and social assistance, for example.

But of course IT firms aren't immune from these problems.

The solution isn’t always as straightforward as re-jigging your service desk roster, though.

"There's a lot more aggressiveness in our world..."

One of the pressures MSPs are increasingly facing is customer aggression, according to Luke Fong, CEO of Victorian MSP Lateral Plains.

“We're a service industry, right?” he said. “And part of the problem is …there's a lot more aggressiveness in our world than what there was”. Customers seemed to increasingly expect things faster and “on a dime”, in his experience.

He also saw a disconnect in the industry between older and younger people.

“I think there's a generational shift in the way that we approach things. We're all process driven, whereas [a customer might say] ‘Oh no, we've always done it this way’.

The way he explained it, he needed to get these two groups on the same page. “We're trying to change the way that our customers think, but also trying to give our staff the ability to understand them.”

He was feeling the pressure. “Business owners and employers themselves are seeing such different demands on their people, even all the way up to the top.”

IT engineers “struggling”

IT engineers are among those working long hours.

Danny Wells runs Sydney meetup group The Route Table for network & infrastructure engineers. He sees widespread concern about burnout among IT engineers.

“From the conversations that I've had over the past few years, it’s a topic that has been quite prevalent, and also not just in Australia.” The general sentiment is “I’m struggling… I've just got to disappear for a couple of weeks. I've just got to take a holiday.’”

A big contributor to this stress, from Wells’s point of view, is fear of becoming irrelevant or missing out on career opportunities, especially amid advances in AI.

“The people that I am talking to, they say they fear all of these redundancies that are in the news. They fear that their jobs are at risk because they can't get a grasp on the technology.”

People are feeling imposter syndrome, he said.

This is fuelling excessive working hours. “It’s probably one of the biggest reasons that we push to do certifications at the weekends and so many extra hours.”

“There's not enough time in the week to even spend on half of this stuff. How can I learn this? What does that mean for my career, my livelihood?”

It doesn’t help that extreme working hours seem to be regarded as “just how things are in this industry,” he said. “Everything's very busy, and everything's always important, and you've got to keep the lights on, and you've got to work overtime, and you've just got to get the job done because it's the right thing to do.”

More ways for IT engineers to talk with each other about this are needed, in Wells’s view.

“The feedback that I've been getting from people that have been coming to the meetups is the fact that there is nothing for engineers to connect with their peers and help them realise that they're not as behind as they think they are.”

He also sees a need for more work to put graduates into IT jobs, to help ease pressure on senior technicians.

“Australia has a skills shortage. We've got a bunch of people in universities, but yet they can't seem to get a job,” he said.

“That's something that I've been thinking about quite a lot recently. How do I help those early career people get into the industry? I'm seeing bits of it, but it’s one thing that I do think needs to happen more in this industry.”

Misunderstood “superpowers”

Lucas Meadowcroft, co-founder, CEO and head of innovation and engagement at business automation consultancy CROFTI, told us he has ADHD and is neurodivergent, which he described as a “superpower”.

Meadowcroft also co-founded the startup SustainWork, which provides workplace psychosocial hazard compliance reporting.

“Once you figure out people's superpowers”, he said, “they just go all in and they just absolutely love it… We'll go smash out [a task] 10 times faster and better than anyone else.”

But in the past, being on underperforming teams had been triggering for him.

“You get annoyed, agitated, pissed off, really, really easily and really quickly… if you do have this superpower and you're on a really underperforming team, you won't last. You won't want to be there."

He added that his way of dealing with ADHD is now “completely different.”

“We want to just be given a task, be given the outcome of that task, and just leave us the hell alone and we'll go do it.”

In his view, employers who don’t play to the strengths of neurodivergent people are in for “a world of hurt”. “Mental health is huge, right? If you don't help these people help themselves, they can go off the rails really, really quickly,” he said.

His message to managers? “Spend time with these individuals and listen to what they love doing.”

Of course, this is one person’s view and doesn’t describe all neurodivergent people. “This is just my personal life, my personal journey,” Meadowcroft said.

Lack of understanding and accommodations for neurodivergence leads to lower productivity, higher rates of burnout, poorer mental health and psychological distress, according to a SuperFriend paper based on a 2024 survey of Australian workers.

An anonymous contributor with OCD saw a lack of managerial effort to accommodate neurodivergent traits, or to understand how disorders like OCD can present overlapping challenges with routine and focus at work.

“Managers don’t often commit to saying ‘I don’t get it and that’s fine’. Instead, they seem to think: ‘Why don’t you fit in the same mould we want everyone to fit?’”

The legal risk for businesses

If you run a business, you’re expected to manage psychological, or “psychosocial”, hazards.

It’s covered by occupational health and safety legislation in every state and territory, James True, head of employment and safety at commercial law firm LegalVision, told us earlier this year.

These hazards include high and low job demands, low job control, low clarity about a role, poor support and poor organisational change management.

They can be the result of work design, systems of work, the management or carrying out of work, and personal or work-related interactions, for example, says WorkSafe Victoria.

In Victoria, for instance, employers must eliminate the risks from these hazards if possible, or minimise them if elimination isn't reasonably practical.

Employers can’t always rely just on giving staff information or training to address these risks, according to the rules in Victoria.

“What they're saying is it is not enough to just share information and training on psychosocial hazards – which is kind of a way that historically, a lot of businesses would have dealt with these hazards.”

“The way you have to do that is actually by making changes or altering the management of work, or your plant, or your systems of work, the design of your work, or your workplace environment,” he told techpartner.news in early 2026.

“For example, if you’ve got a rostering or workflow management system that doesn’t have any kind of human input, and no-one's ever had a look at it, then it’s possible that system is just overloading one person with work and one person’s doing nothing.”

“That structure in your business has created a risk to health and safety, and so you've got to go and interrogate the actual structure there and see whether something about the design of our work created a risk. And if there is, we need to alter that.”

Waiting until someone’s health suffers isn’t a good idea.

“The really important thing for people to understand is it's positive duty, which means you haven't broken the law because there was an incident – you've broken the law because you didn't take reasonable steps to prevent an incident occurring.”

LegalVision’s tips for Victorian businesses include “conducting regular risk assessments for psychosocial hazards”, “performing ongoing consultation with your workers”, regularly reviewing workloads and “appropriately delegating work”, ensuring employees understand workplace complaint and grievance processes, and providing ongoing psychosocial training to managers.

Businesses are not expected to eliminate every risk

“The strict term is ‘reasonably practicable’,” True said.

According to him, “a very, very small business will not necessarily have to go as far as a large corporate on these things, because the law understands what's reasonable for one business may not be reasonable for another.”

“You don't need to eliminate every single risk to health and safety of your business. The law is sensible in that respect.”

Don’t assume you won’t get in trouble, True said. “It's one of those things where, historically, you might have said whilst there's an obligation there, the risk of being prosecuted for is low. That's not the case anymore.”

Two leaders’ approaches

When we asked Kylli Kidman, general manager of Queensland IT business Cymax, about her approach to managing workplace harm, she talked about management behaviours and policies.

This included consulting staff – for example, when the company changed its PSA software. “There was a lot of pre-planning, a lot of talking to the team, getting a couple of people to be champions, so that they would be able to help the rest of the team as we moved across,” Kidman said.

Cymax also has “lots of boundaries” in place, including a policy designed to ensure people don’t work when sick.

The business also provided professional development beyond IT training. When we spoke with Kidman earlier this year, the team had just finished a communication workshop.

“We certainly try and make sure that we're not just developing the IT, but people working together as well.”

“I just always try and create a place where people can tell me something … Sometimes I feel a bit like a mother hen, but I think I'd much rather that, and my team go home happy and feel that they are looked after, than [them feeling] put upon all the time.”

At least seven of Cymax’s 11 engineers had been with the business for more than eight years, she said.

Lines of communication

Meanwhile, at Queensland software development and advisory business SixPivot, if a team member has a mental health or wellbeing concern, they can confide in their assigned buddy. The buddy is expected to ask the person confiding in them if they mind if the matter is also escalated.

The business’s founder and director, Faith Rees – who has a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science, Psychology – said she would rather know about staff’s problems than be in the dark.

“You can work with that, rather than [thinking] they're just a bad employee or they're taking off for sick leave,” she told us earlier this year.

If a team member isn’t comfortable with that, they can speak with one of the professionals the company works with.

Those professionals include an organisational psychologist, a mental-conditioning coach, and a clinical psychologist. Staff members also have anonymous access to an EAP.

“People say to me all the time, ‘I don't know how you can afford these things’,” Rees said. “They're not expensive. The EAP is, I don't know, a couple of thousand dollars a year to cover 40 employees. So, at minimum, there is no reason why even a small business can't do that.”

“And from the employer perspective, you're not dealing with the issues - a professional is; they’re making recommendations. It gives your staff somewhere to go.”

“There's lots of different things that can be put in place so that the employer doesn't have to take it all on themselves,” Rees said.

But she also saw risks for employers.

“If you know someone has a condition you do then need to look at things like are they under too much pressure in the engagement that they're working on, [or whether] they need special working conditions.”

“Some employers don't want to go into that and understand the conditions, frankly, because then there's a whole lot of liability in terms of how you manage that person.”

“So it's a fine balance, but from my perspective, I’d rather know what's going on for you than lose a good employee because something could have been managed in a different way.”

She added that this support was provided with the expectation that staff are accountable.

“The big thing we do tell people, if I use ADHD as an example, and I may get criticised for this, it's not an excuse to not do your job.”

“But giving someone the awareness and the skills to be able to manage their condition, I think, is really powerful.”

Boundaries

Many people don’t ask for help. A June 2025 community poll of 1,000 people for Beyond Blue found nearly one in two people who experienced burnout did not seek professional support. About one in three didn’t feel they could talk to their manager about feeling burnt out.

“A lot of people, when they tell people about these things, start to get treated differently. I understand why a lot of people don’t talk about it,” the person with OCD told us.

“Even if you recognise some of these traits in someone, how you address it is a really difficult area.”

The elephant in the room

One person in the IT channel, who asked not to be named, warned about the risk of bullying and cultures of fear and the harm they can cause to employees' health.

They also questioned the point of organisational values if leaders don't hold themselves to the same standards expected of their teams.

Their advice? “In hindsight, it'd be for leaders that if the culture's not right – as a leader, as a staff member – it's very rarely going to change.”

“That culture is often led by the top … and the person with that mantle doesn't often change.”

“And if they're not living and breathing the culture or values themselves, at all times, then go into [the job] knowing that it won't change and get out earlier.”

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Support services

At the time of publication, Beyond Blue offered free 24/7 phone and online support on 1300 22 4636 and at beyondblue.org.au/getsupport. Lifeline provided 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14 and online chat and text support.

Further information

Disclaimer This article is general information only and not professional or legal advice. Seek professional and/or legal advice if these issues are relevant to you or your workplace.

Images: Stock photographs in this article are illustrative. People pictured are not the individuals quoted in this article.