How to support managers’ wellbeing and happiness at work

Managers spend much of their working lives supporting other people. They handle conflict, answer difficult questions, monitor performance, communicate change, and respond when employees are struggling.

It’s easy for their own wellbeing to become secondary.

If you employ or lead managers, it’s worth remembering that responsibility doesn’t protect people from stress, exhaustion, frustration, or disengagement. In some cases, greater responsibility can expose managers to additional pressure, especially when expectations keep growing without enough time, authority, or support to meet them.

That matters for the whole organisation. Managers shape much of the day-to-day employee experience, from how feedback is delivered to how workloads, conflict, and change are handled. If you want stronger employee wellbeing, better job satisfaction, and lower turnover, supporting managers should be part of the conversation.

Why managers’ wellbeing matters

Managers often sit between two sets of expectations. They need to deliver business results while also supporting the people responsible for those results.

One employee may be struggling with burnout. Another may be unhappy about workload. Someone else may need flexibility because of difficulties at home. At the same time, the manager may be dealing with vacancies, performance targets, customer pressure, budgets, and requests from senior leaders. That combination can become difficult to sustain if the role isn’t designed well.

Australian research supports this. A study of 305 managers across private, public, and third-sector organisations in Western Australia found that role overload, role conflict, and role ambiguity were associated with lower job-related wellbeing and job satisfaction, which in turn affected managers’ contextual performance.

For employers, the finding is significant because it shifts attention towards the conditions surrounding the role. If a manager is struggling under unmanageable demands, another resilience workshop may have limited value unless the workload, reporting structure, or conflicting priorities are addressed too.

Safe Work Australia’s provisional 2023-24 data recorded 17,600 serious workers’ compensation claims for mental health conditions, representing 12% of all serious claims. The median time lost for mental health condition claims was 35.7 weeks, compared with 7.4 weeks across serious claims overall.

Gallup’s 2026 workplace report, based on information collected throughout 2025, found that 50% of Australian employees reported experiencing stress “a lot” during the previous day, while 21% were engaged at work.

These figures cover the wider workforce rather than managers specifically, but they show why psychological health needs to be treated as part of how work is designed and led.

The pressures managers often carry

There’s no single reason managers become stressed or dissatisfied at work. Some feel buried under administration. Others have manageable workloads but little authority to solve the problems they’re expected to own.

Three pressures appear repeatedly in research on managerial stress: excessive workload, unclear responsibilities, and competing demands.

1. Too much work, with too little time to lead

Role overload develops when the amount or complexity of work exceeds what someone can reasonably manage.

A manager may be responsible for recruitment, performance reviews, budgets, customer concerns, compliance, reporting, employee development, and day-to-day problem solving. In many workplaces, that person is also expected to maintain a substantial individual workload. When that happens, people management can get pushed to the edges of the day.

That matters because good management takes time. Difficult conversations shouldn’t be rushed. Employees need thoughtful feedback. New staff need guidance. Workplace conflicts often need careful handling before they escalate.

If your managers spend most of their time moving from one urgent task to the next, they’ll have less capacity for the thoughtful leadership you expect from them.

Safe Work Australia recognises high job demands as a psychosocial hazard when those demands are severe, frequent, or prolonged. Its guidance encourages employers to look closely at staffing levels, workload, scheduling, resources, and the broader systems surrounding the work.

2. Unclear responsibilities and competing expectations

Managers also struggle when success is poorly defined.

You may ask a manager to improve productivity while reducing overtime, protect employee wellbeing while meeting a difficult deadline, or take ownership of an issue without giving them enough authority to resolve it. Any one of those tensions can be manageable. When they become constant, they can wear people down.

Safe Work Australia identifies lack of role clarity as a psychosocial hazard. Risks may arise when responsibilities are unclear, expectations keep changing, or people receive conflicting messages about what should take priority.

If you manage early-career or newly promoted leaders, this deserves particular attention. Clear decision rights, realistic priorities, and accessible escalation pathways can reduce a great deal of unnecessary strain.

3. The emotional labour of managing people

There’s also a less visible side of management.

Managers are often among the first people to hear when an employee is grieving, experiencing relationship problems, struggling financially, dealing with poor mental health, or having difficulties with a colleague. But responding with care can be emotionally demanding, especially when the manager is dealing with pressures of their own.

It helps to give managers clear boundaries around their role. A supportive manager isn’t expected to act as a counsellor, psychologist, or crisis service. Without that clarity, some managers can feel responsible for solving personal problems that sit well outside their expertise.

A survey of 572 Australian managers found that social support was more readily available through relationships outside work, with non-work relationships also providing forms of support such as care, acceptance, and consolation that were less characteristic of workplace relationships. That means managers need people and services they can turn to as well.

Start with the manager’s actual workload

If you want to improve manager wellbeing, one of the most useful questions you can ask is whether the role can reasonably be performed with the time and resources available.

Wellbeing initiatives can be useful, but they won’t compensate for a role that has become structurally unmanageable.

Review the number of direct reports each manager has, the administrative burden attached to the role, staffing gaps, recurring after-hours work, meeting load, and responsibilities that have accumulated over time. It may also be worth asking which tasks genuinely need to sit with managers and which could be simplified, automated, delegated, or removed.

Sometimes the most supportive change is a smaller workload. Giving managers enough time to think, prepare, coach, and recover allows them to spend more energy on leadership rather than constant triage.

Give managers enough authority to do the job

Responsibility without authority is a common source of frustration. If you expect managers to own an outcome, they need a clear understanding of the decisions they can make, the issues that require approval, and the situations that should be escalated.

Safe Work Australia identifies low job control as a potential psychosocial hazard. Its guidance includes situations where supervisors lack enough authority to carry out their responsibilities effectively.

You can reduce this pressure by making reporting lines and decision rights clear. Senior leaders should also be prepared to resolve competing priorities when managers raise them, rather than leaving managers to satisfy several incompatible expectations at once.

Clarity helps people direct their effort towards the work that matters most.

Managers need support from their own leaders

A one-to-one conversation with a manager shouldn’t focus only on targets, deadlines, and team performance. It should also give them room to talk about how the role is going.

You can ask about workload, difficult team dynamics, staffing pressure, confidence, and areas where they need more support. The quality of that conversation matters, but so does what happens afterwards. If a manager repeatedly raises a structural problem and nothing changes, trust can erode quickly.

Managers may also hesitate to admit they’re struggling because leadership roles are often associated with composure and competence. You can reduce that pressure by making discussions about capacity and wellbeing a normal part of management supervision.

Prepare people for the human side of management

Strong technical performance doesn’t automatically prepare someone to manage people. A skilled accountant, engineer, clinician, salesperson, or educator may be promoted because of professional expertise. The new role may then require that person to manage conflict, respond to distress, give difficult feedback, supervise performance, and navigate sensitive conversations.

Those are skills people often need to learn.

If you’re developing managers, focus on practical capabilities they’re likely to use regularly, including communication, conflict resolution, performance conversations, boundaries, psychosocial hazards, and appropriate responses when an employee discloses a mental health concern.

Managers also need to know where their responsibility ends. Clear guidance on when to involve HR, escalate a concern, or refer someone to an EAP or other professional service can reduce the pressure to have every answer.

Recognition should include good people leadership

Organisations often say leadership matters, but managers may still be rewarded almost entirely for operational results, and that sends a mixed message.

If revenue, output, deadlines, and efficiency dominate every performance discussion, managers may conclude that coaching employees, preventing conflict, and supporting employee wellbeing are secondary tasks.

You can send a clearer signal by including the quality of people leadership in performance expectations. Employee development, communication, retention, workload management, and team feedback may all provide useful indicators alongside commercial or operational outcomes.

Recognition doesn’t have to be financial. Specific acknowledgement from senior leaders can reinforce that thoughtful, humane management is valued.

Protect time away from work

Managers often influence the behavioural norms of a team, but senior leaders influence managers in exactly the same way.

If managers routinely answer messages late at night, work through annual leave, or stay available every weekend, employees may assume the same behaviour is expected of them.

A policy encouraging staff to disconnect won’t carry much weight if managers continue to receive routine evening emails marked urgent or are contacted repeatedly while on leave.

You can help by setting reasonable expectations around after-hours communication, annual leave, and recovery time, then modelling those expectations at senior levels.

Managers also need to know that using those boundaries won’t be interpreted as a lack of commitment.

Listen to managers separately from the wider workforce

Whole-of-organisation engagement surveys can hide problems within management.

Managers may have concerns that differ from those of the wider workforce, particularly around authority, workload, senior leadership support, difficult employee matters, and expectations outside ordinary hours.

If your organisation is large enough, consider looking at manager wellbeing as a distinct group. Confidential pulse surveys, interviews, exit feedback, and facilitated discussions can help identify recurring issues.

The important part is responding to what you hear.

Repeatedly asking people about pressure without addressing the causes can create frustration. Where common themes emerge, identify what can be changed, who is responsible, and how progress will be reviewed.

Where an EAP fits

An Employee Assistance Program, or EAP, can give managers access to confidential professional support outside their reporting line.

That separation can be especially useful for a manager who feels uncomfortable discussing personal distress, workplace conflict, grief, family pressures, or mental health concerns with a senior leader. Some EAP services also provide manager assistance, which can help managers think through difficult workplace conversations or situations involving employee wellbeing.

EAP support is most useful when it sits alongside practical action at work. Counselling may help a manager process stress, strengthen boundaries, or work through a difficult situation. It won’t resolve chronic understaffing, unrealistic workloads, or unclear reporting structures.

If those conditions are contributing to distress, they need an organisational response.

Managers may also choose to speak with a GP, psychologist, or therapist independently, particularly when stress is affecting sleep, mood, relationships, or life outside work.

Final thoughts

Managers can only support their teams effectively when their own roles are sustainable. If you want better retention, stronger leadership, and healthier teams, it’s worth looking closely at the pressures managers carry, including workload, role clarity, decision-making authority, and access to support.

Practical changes often matter most. Clear priorities, manageable workloads, supportive senior leadership, and realistic boundaries can strengthen manager wellbeing and job satisfaction, while EAP services can provide confidential support when personal or workplace pressures become difficult to manage.

For managers dealing with ongoing stress, emotional exhaustion, or difficult workplace relationships, speaking with a therapist can offer useful professional support. Supporting managers well helps create a healthier foundation for the people they lead.