If you do not invest in your people’s mental health capability now, you risk losing them later

Welcome to another edition of data you need to know, diving into what the data is telling us in one of Australia’s biggest annual workplace mental health surveys: Superfriend’s 2026 Indicators of a Thriving Workplace.

It is a big survey of 12,000+ people, comparing different industries on psychosocial hazards and indicators of mental health challenges (burnout and psychological distress), as well as SuperFriend’s own composite measure of a thriving workplace.

The report aims to give a nationally representative picture of workplace mental health across Australian industries, and to do a bit of cheeky lead-gen for SuperFriend while they are at it. Let’s look at some of the headline results, as well as some of the more nuanced signals we picked up on.

1. Workplace thriving isn’t moving over time

The 2025 results are comparable to the 2024 results, and when comparing them to SuperFriend’s Decade in Data review, which they published two years ago, they show remarkably little change over time.

68.4 out of 100 and the dial isn’t moving.

If you look at what organisations are doing most well in, its connectedness and safety, whereas improvement is needed in leadership support and work design. The worst performing for Australian organisations? Providing their staff with skills and resources to manage mental health.

2. The awareness paradox: workers are struggling despite increased efforts to help them

A big standout is that the report points to a clear paradox. What do I mean by that? Well, there has been a decade of effort that has genuinely improved the awareness and stigma picture. So, that’s good news, right?

The problem is, we aren’t seeing meaningful movement on follow-up outcomes. For example, burnout and distress has only improved marginally and are still affecting the majority of the workforce.

A staggering 53.9% of the Australian workforce is in moderate to severe distress. This is not promising news. Something isn’t working.

At the same time, SafeWork Australia data shows that claims have more than doubled (up 161%) with roughly 1 in 8 serious workers’ comp claims now being for a mental health condition. This comes at 3x the cost of other workers’ comp claims. And when it comes to time off, a serious mental health claim results in 4x more time away than other claims… that’s a median of 30.7 weeks lost per serious mental health claim.

3. We aren’t recognising our staff, and it’s the easiest psychosocial hazard to fix

Workload, Change Management, and Recognition have been the bottom three psychosocial hazards for multiple consecutive years. For 2025: Relationships and Fairness, Physical Environment and Role Clarity top the list.

Recognition is the standout hazard in the dataset: only 57.3% of workers feel recognised for their achievements. Recognition has been in the bottom three hazards for multiple consecutive years. It’s also the hazard most amenable to low-cost, high-frequency intervention: a daily shoutout costs nothing, working on your leaders’ people skills is pretty cheap, and even overhauling the way you conduct performance reviews is cheap compared to EAP programs.

4. Young people struggle most, but it isn’t because of their work

Gen Z workers have the worst mental health outcomes in the dataset: 1 in 4 Gen Z in severe distress, and 55.6% of Gen Z are either burned out or at risk of it. It’s not encouraging data, but it does line up with virtually every other report out there on youth mental health.

What this report does add, though, is that only 29.3% of young people attribute their problems to work, compared to 45.5% nationally. This cuts against the prevailing narrative that young workers are very sensitive to workplace conditions.

5. Invest in leadership or watch your people walk

This is a stat leaders really need to take into consideration. It was clear that workers who have a higher intention to stay with their organisation score high on leadership support, compared to those intending to leave: 19% is a massive difference between the two groups. The takeaway here: leadership support is very important.

6. Flexible work protects against one pathway to harm while creating another

Remote workers score 71.2/100 on Work Design, the highest of any working arrangement in the report. This dimension measures things like autonomy, workload control, and flexibility, so it makes sense that remote workers come out on top.

But good job design doesn’t tell the whole story. Despite those favourable conditions, 1 in 4 remote workers report psychological distress – nearly double the 14.2% national rate – and 62% are either burned out or at risk of it.

The insight here is that flexible work protects against one pathway to harm while quietly opening another. Remote workers gain control over how they work, but often lose the things that buffer against distress: social connection, a sense of belonging, and easy access to support when they’re struggling.

7. Financially distressed workers

More than 1 in 3 Australian workers (35.1% of respondents) are currently experiencing financial stress. This isn’t a fringe issue; it’s a majority-adjacent reality of the modern workforce.

And the data shows it’s taking a real toll. Financially stressed workers report significantly higher rates of severe psychological distress (25.2%) and burnout (36.5%) than the national average. A reminder that financial pressure doesn’t stay at home when someone clocks on. It follows people into their work, affects their concentration and their capacity to cope with everyday demands.

8. The case of small organisation

Small organisations (2–19 workers) present an interesting paradox. They score above average on Leadership (70.5 out of 100) and Connectedness, meaning people feel well-managed and genuinely close to their colleagues. That tracks intuitively: when a team is small, relationships are real, managers know their people by name, and there’s a natural proximity that creates accountability.

But small organisations score below average on Capability (56.4): the dimension that captures whether an organisation actually has the systems, resources, and structured support in place to manage mental health effectively.

The implication is that human factors can compensate up to a point. A good manager and a tight-knit team go a long way. But without the infrastructure: formal mental health policies, access to EAP, training, or dedicated budget, that goodwill has a ceiling. Smaller businesses often simply don’t have the resources to build what larger organisations take for granted.

And a final observation directed at SuperFriend: what we would do to make your report measure ‘thriving’ workplaces

The report is called Indicators of a Thriving Workplace, but it paradoxically mainly measures the absence of harm and this my (super)friend, is not the same thing as Thriving.

A range of typically accepted workplace wellbeing indicators, like job satisfaction or related concepts like meaning or engagement, aren’t captured. Similarly, it captures distress and resilience, but doesn’t capture general mental wellbeing, which heavily influences job satisfaction.

This to us, feels like an opportunity to move a report that focuses on “are workers less at risk?” to one that looks at whether “workers are thriving in a meaningful sense?”

Compliance and risk management really should be seen as a floor, not the ceiling – at least not when it comes to truly thriving workplaces.

The main takeaways

You can find a PDF that gives you the headline stats and our outtakes here – handy if you want to share the findings with your team or leadership.

As always, we encourage you to sit with what you’ve just read. Here are two (and a half) questions to reflect on:

1. Which of these insights is the most relevant to your own workplace right now? And what would it look like to act on it?
2. Which insights surprised you the most, and why?

P.s. If you haven’t checked out our previous edition of data you need to know, this one is a great follow-up to the article we wrote on Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 last month.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.

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