By Aleksandar Plavsic
Attending the CIPD Festival of Work 2026 in London was a useful reminder that workplace wellbeing is no longer a peripheral HR topic. It is increasingly part of how organizations think about performance, leadership, retention, employee experience and risk. What stood out to me was not a single new trend, but the consistency of the conversation: many organizations are still trying to understand how to support people without reducing wellbeing to individual resilience or one-off initiatives.
From the perspective of organizational psychology, that distinction matters. Burnout, stress and emotional exhaustion are experienced by individuals, but they are rarely created by individuals alone. They sit inside systems: workload, role clarity, leadership behaviour, communication norms, flexibility, recognition, psychological safety and the degree to which people feel able to recover. The most mature conversations at the festival were those that treated wellbeing as an organizational capability rather than a personal weakness to be managed privately.
Burnout remains a dominant workplace challenge
Burnout was present across many of the discussions I attended. What was especially relevant was the way burnout was framed: not only as exhaustion, but as a signal that the relationship between demands, resources and recovery has become unsustainable. For HR and People teams, this creates a difficult challenge. They are expected to respond to burnout compassionately, but also strategically. That means looking beyond awareness campaigns and asking more precise questions: Where is pressure accumulating? Which roles are carrying invisible emotional load? Are managers equipped to notice early signs? Are employees able to recover, or only expected to cope?
Good burnout prevention requires more than encouraging people to take breaks. It requires conversations about workload, availability, psychological safety, decision pressure, team culture and leadership habits. This is where organizational psychology can be useful: it helps translate individual distress into workplace patterns that can be understood, discussed and improved.
The wellbeing of HR professionals needs more attention
One theme I found particularly important was the pressure carried by HR professionals themselves. HR is often positioned as the function that supports everyone else, but the people doing that work can become exposed to repeated emotional labour, conflict, ambiguity and responsibility without adequate support. They may be involved in redundancies, employee relations, complaints, wellbeing concerns, manager escalations and organizational change, often while needing to remain calm, professional and available.
This creates a risk that HR becomes the container for organizational pressure. In complex professional environmentsplaces, HR professionals are asked to be strategic business partners, culture carriers, compliance advisors, emotional buffers and wellbeing advocates at the same time. That combination can be meaningful, but it can also be draining. For me, this reinforces the need for more focused support for HR teams: not only training them to support employees, but also helping them recognize their own stress patterns, boundaries, compassion fatigue and recovery needs.
HR and Occupational Health collaboration is becoming essential
A session on stronger collaboration between HR and Occupational Health captured another important direction for workplace wellbeing. Many organizations still treat wellbeing, sickness absence, performance, workplace adjustment and mental health as separate categories. In practice, they are connected. When HR and Occupational Health collaborate well, organizations can respond earlier, more consistently and with better understanding of both the human and organizational dimensions of work.
This collaboration is especially important in international and distributed environments, where managers may not see early signs of strain, cultural norms around stress may differ, and employees may be navigating pressure across time zones, languages and local expectations. A more integrated approach allows organizations to move from reactive support to a more preventative model: identifying patterns, supporting managers, clarifying referral pathways and designing work in ways that reduce avoidable harm.
Flexibility, performance and wellbeing are still being negotiated
Another recurring tension was the relationship between flexibility, performance and employee wellbeing. Flexible work is no longer a simple benefit; it is part of how people structure attention, recovery, care responsibilities, collaboration and identity. At the same time, organizations are trying to maintain standards, connection and accountability. The challenge is not to choose between flexibility and performance, but to create clearer agreements about how work happens.
That includes conversations about availability, response times, meeting culture, deep work, manager expectations and the psychological impact of constant digital connection. In distributed teams, these issues become even more visible. Without deliberate norms, flexibility can quietly become permanent availability. Sustainable performance depends on clarity, not just autonomy.
Workplace wellbeing is an organizational issue
The strongest message I took from the festival is that workplace wellbeing is increasingly being understood as an organizational issue. Individual support matters, but it cannot compensate for unhealthy systems. A person can learn emotional regulation, communication skills and recovery practices, yet still burn out if the environment continually rewards overextension and ignores structural pressure.
For organizations, this means wellbeing needs to be connected to leadership development, manager capability, employee experience, organizational design and culture. It also means HR and People teams need language that is both psychologically accurate and commercially credible. Wellbeing cannot be reduced to perks, nor can it be communicated only through clinical language. It has to sit between human experience and organizational reality.
What this means for my work
The festival reinforced the direction of my own work: psychology-informed support for complex professional environments, with a particular focus on burnout prevention, workplace pressure, leadership wellbeing and international work cultures. The most useful wellbeing work is not generic. It is specific enough to speak to the realities of HR, leadership, remote collaboration, multicultural teams and the emotional complexity of modern organizations.
For me, the question is not simply how to help people feel better at work. It is how to help organizations create conditions where people can think clearly, communicate honestly, recover properly and perform without disconnecting from their wellbeing. That requires better conversations about stress, leadership, psychological safety and sustainable performance. It also requires support for the people who are usually expected to support everyone else.