HR needs to look at how the workday is designed 'and whether it’s set up for intentional work or reactive work,' says expert
Canadian employers are reporting record levels of burnout – and HR could be missing the underlying problem that is quietly eroding performance, revenue and retention in knowledge‑based roles.
Rather than a pure mental health issue, much of what shows up as burnout is actually an “executive function problem” created by how modern work is structured, says Shari Black, founder of Black to Basics.
“Executive function is not just a clinical concept, it’s not a diagnosis reserved for people with ADHD,” she says. “It’s operational capacity. Every knowledge worker needs to be able to turn their intentions into results. When that breaks down, it looks like a people problem, but it isn’t. It’s a performance‑infrastructure problem, and there are solutions to that.”
A March 2025 Robert Half survey of 1,500 Canadian professionals found that 47 per cent of workers feel burned out, up from 33 per cent in 2023. Telus Health’s Mental Health Index also reports high levels of burnout and a direct hit to productivity.
“Executive function is our brain’s management system,” Black tells Canadian HR Reporter. “It’s what helps you, as an employee and as a knowledge worker, look at everything that’s on your plate, decide what matters the most, how you’re going to start it, what you’re going to do, how you’re going to follow through, and then how to stay on that when everything else is pulling your attention away.”
The demands of modern work – constant interruptions, back‑to‑back meetings, multiple digital channels and rising expectations – are overwhelming that “management system” for a growing share of professionals, says Black, an executive function consultant and ADHD and habit coach.
“I see increasingly with my clients across the board—accountants, lawyers, managers, engineers—people really struggling with their executive function,” she says. “They don’t necessarily recognize it; they’re not using that as the language. But it’s really a condition of the modern knowledge worker.”
From mental health issue to executive function problem
From an HR perspective, the consequences often show up as stress leave, disengagement or delayed projects. But Black argues that labelling it solely as burnout obscures what is really going wrong.
“We often look at it from an HR perspective like it’s a mental health issue, but I would argue strongly that it’s a business issue... rather than necessarily a mental health issue,” she says.
One of the clearest signals, she adds, is the “knowing-doing gap”: high performers who know exactly what needs to be done, have the skills to do it, but still are not progressing the work that matters most. On paper they look fine – calendars full, inboxes active, basic metrics met – yet the highest‑value work keeps slipping.
“Most of the people that I’m working with are just like: 'I’ve worked all day long, I’m absolutely busy, I’m completely overwhelmed, but I’m not getting to the important work. I’m constantly in reaction mode,'” she says. “So that’s a structural question, not a wellness question.”
Those employees rarely raise their hand early. Many assume the problem is their own motivation or discipline and respond by working longer hours and “trying harder”, which can deepen exhaustion and quietly erode confidence.
“The people most affected by this are really capable,” Black says. “They’re exhausting themselves just trying to ‘try harder,’ and then they eventually disengage or they leave. So organizations lose them, and then they assume maybe the person’s going off to a better offer, when often it wasn’t that.”
Rising burnout and low engagement are undermining productivity, even as many employees report generally good health and happiness at work, according to a previous global report from Sodexo.
Work design and HR’s missed levers
Black says HR’s first move should be to put a name to what they are seeing. Without a concept of executive function, managers and employees alike default to familiar categories such as stress, burnout or individual performance issues.
“If HR starts to build in the language of executive function—what it is, what it looks like, why it’s breaking down under certain conditions—then they can ask better questions about what those conditions are within the organization that are leading to executive function overwhelm,” she says.
Those conditions are often design choices:
- schedules filled with meetings
- no protected time for deep work
- constant digital interruptions
- an implicit expectation of instant responsiveness.
In knowledge‑based roles, that design can quietly push high‑value work to the margins of the day, she says.
“A lot of what depletes our executive function is environmental: it’s the constant interruptions; it’s not having deeply protected time for that deep-focus work that actually moves the strategic priorities forward.
“HR doesn’t need a new program for this; they need to look at how the workday is designed and whether it’s set up for intentional work or just reactive work,” she adds.
From people problem to performance infrastructure
Black urges HR to shift its core question from “What’s wrong with this person?” to “What does this person need to do their best work, and have we set up an environment for them that helps support that?” That reframing moves the focus from individual resilience to the systems that support or undermine it.
She also stresses that the work falling through the cracks is rarely peripheral. Strategic projects, client‑relationship building and innovation often require sustained, uninterrupted focus – precisely what current work patterns and tool stacks tend to erode.
“The work that isn’t getting done is almost always the work with the highest business value, the highest business impact,” she says. Helping employees recover the executive function capacity for that work, she adds, means “you’re recovering revenue, you’re recovering client retention, you’re recovering leadership capacity.”
Nearly half (46 per cent) of employees say their company does not prioritise burnout prevention or that they are unaware of any such programme, according to a previous report from Mental Health Research Canada (MHRC).
