The ongoing polycrisis isn’t just another storm  to weather; it’s the new operating environment. And the coping mechanisms most organisations are running were never designed for it.

The polycrisis – the convergence of economic instability, geopolitical uncertainty, AI disruption and deepening global anxiety – doesn’t arrive in sequence. It arrives all at once, and compounds. 

When I look at organisations scrambling to cope, I keep returning to Professor Christina Maslach’s challenge to the old saying “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”. 

Maslach, who has conducted foundational research on burnout, turns the question around. She argues that leaders should be asking, “why does the kitchen need to be this hot?” The question isn’t how to toughen people up for the heat. It’s whether the kitchen can be redesigned.

That reframe is an important shift that HR practitioners are best placed to drive. With good intent, organisations often default to an individually focused mode: supporting people to return to a baseline after a difficult period. 

The problem here is twofold: it places the burden of recovery squarely on the individual, and it assumes a tidy beginning, middle and end to the difficulty – and that’s no longer our reality.

Rethinking the work, not the worker

The response needs to be organisational, not individual. That’s why HR practitioners need to push the conversation beyond traditional wellbeing programs and back towards work design. 

The relationship between poorly managed demands and burnout has been one of the most consistent findings in occupational psychology for some time. 

Sharon Parker’s landmark 2014 review in the Annual Review of Psychology found that organisations were adding complexity, cognitive demands and emotional labour to roles without redesigning the underlying job architecture to support people carrying that load. 

A systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology (Rothe et al, 2020) found the same pattern with technology: change consistently outpaces adaptation, leaving workers to absorb the cognitive and emotional costs without additional resources, training or role clarity. 

What’s changed is the pace at which demands are now being added, and the near-complete absence of reciprocal investment resources to help absorb them.

A polycrisis takes recovery time out of the equation, resulting in what is known as allostatic overload – when the nervous system is constantly activated. The cumulative cost keeps building and showing up in cognition, judgement, mood and even immune function. 

AI compounds this. It can work forever, at speed, without rest. The natural pauses we once had – to think, talk and process – are gone, without any reconfiguration of how we work.

“A polycrisis takes recovery time out of the equation, resulting in what is known as allostatic overload – when the nervous system is constantly activated.”

The operating reality

The pressure shows up most concretely in how organisations are managing the transition to AI-augmented work. 

The intention to be proactive often means they dive in without rethinking underlying workflows or educating teams. I keep hearing: “Here’s the tool, go figure out how to use it.” Meanwhile, people are expected to deliver regular work faster while learning something new and innovating.

Managers, most of whom are already overstretched, are being asked to coach teams through AI adoption while managing engagement and wellbeing. The result is a retention crisis, manager burnout and a loss of trust. 

You can’t tell people this technology is good for them while they’re watching organisations cut roles because of it. That contradiction destroys trust. 

What’s insidious is how interconnected it all becomes – workload, manager burnout, trust breakdown roll into each other and, because they’re so entangled, they demand a systems response.

Designing the response

The response must start with simplicity. When cognitive bandwidth is depleted, additional processes or ambiguous expectations become a heavier load on a system already struggling. 

What’s needed are fewer initiatives, sustained longer; fewer meetings, but better ones. In a high-cognitive-load environment, clarity is a wellbeing strategy and productivity strategy.

The interventions that work tend to be structural and normalised: protected time between meetings, consistently modelled expectations around after-hours communication, leave that is genuinely taken, and regular low-pressure touchpoints where people can surface early signs of overload.

Reducing ambient uncertainty matters too. Clear, honest communication about what is and isn’t changing signals safety to an overloaded nervous system. So does a sense of control – and it doesn’t require wholesale flexibility. 

Genuine input into how a project is sequenced, or latitude to manage a schedule around a deadline, can be enough.

An underrated gamechanger

I want to end on something that doesn’t come up enough: hope. Without it, organisations drift into cynicism – and cynicism is dangerous in a polycrisis. But hope only becomes powerful when people can see how progress will happen.

HR’s role is to counterbalance the conversation at the leadership table: to keep asking if we’re adding to people without ever removing anything. Our job is to make sure the people part – the biggest driver of the finances – gets the same level of rigour and intention.

The complexity of the polycrisis is not entirely of our making, but how we respond is. I believe organisations have the instincts and expertise to reset: to move from episodic intervention to sustained load management; from reactive support to structural stability; and from labelling distress to understanding its origins and formulating a more informed response.

That’s what designing calm looks like. It’s not quiet or passive. It’s one of the most active and consequential choices an organisation can make. 

🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit

• Read: Dr Chan’s article on ‘Why we need to stop calling everything burnout’
• Podcast: Sandra Parker on redesigning work for the age of AI (Let’s Take This Offline).
• Learning: AHRI’s ‘Contemporary Workforce Redesign course’

A longer version of this article first appeared in the July, August, September edition of The HR Agenda, AHRI’s member-exclusive magazine. Become a member today to receive your copy each quarter, plus a range of other valuable member benefits.

Dr John Chan MAHRI is an industrial/organisational psychologist, the Managing Director of Infinite Potential and recipient of the 2025 AHRI Scholarship, which is supporting his work in mitigating loneliness in the workplace. 

This article was peer-reviewed by Dr Michelle Phipps FCPHR, AHRI Board member and Chair of AHRI’s DEI Advisory Panel.