Manager or employee: who is responsible for combatting burnout?

Mark Topley helps dental practice owners and managers identify who is responsible for burnout and its consequences to build calm, high-performing teams.

Most practices have a wellbeing initiative of some kind.

A wellbeing lead, a mental health first aider, a fruit bowl in the staff room nobody quite trusts.

And most owners have a frustration running alongside it, usually about a younger team member who’s off the odd Monday, increasingly with the explanation that they need to protect their mental health.

The two feel unrelated, but they’re the same problem – nobody’s quite sure who’s responsible for a team’s energy.

Wellbeing isn’t a programme you bolt on. It’s a by-product of two things, how a place is led, and how the people in it look after themselves, and it has two owners. 

The conditions are the leader’s job. The choices are the individual’s. 

Almost all the confusion comes from collapsing it to one, either the leader who tries to fix everyone single-handed and burns out doing it, or the cynic who calls it all personal and none of their business.

Both are wrong, in opposite directions.

This isn’t a soft issue

A 2025 Dental Protection survey of more than 1,600 UK dental professionals found 63% frequently burnt out and exhausted.

Most of the cost isn’t dramatic, it’s the slow grind of a tired team doing slightly worse work, and research links poorer staff wellbeing to worse patient safety.

Your team’s energy and your patients’ experience are the same conversation.

Let’s take the leader’s half first, because it’s the bigger lever.

It comes down to four conditions you actually control.

Clarity

People burn enormous energy guessing what good looks like and whose job a thing is. Clear expectations don’t constrain a team, they relax it. Clarity is kindness.

Capacity

An honest look at the diary, rather than a permanent state of slightly too much. You can’t recover from a week that was never survivable.

Safety

Whether someone can say ‘this isn’t working’ without it becoming a thing. Psychological safety is the early-warning system, the way problems surface while they’re still small.

Recovery

Whether rest is modelled from the top or punished. If you’re answering emails at 11 at night, you’ve set the standard, whatever the wellbeing poster says.

All four are structural, not reactive. A wellbeing day is a nice gesture aimed at a problem the structure created across the other 51 weeks.

The real work is building conditions that don’t drain people in the first place.

Then there’s the other owner, and the Monday frustration is the clearest example of the half that isn’t yours to fix.

It’s real, and it’s still their responsibility. Real first, because that’s the bit the eye-rollers get wrong – anxiety and depression in working-age adults has risen sharply since the 90s, and now peaks in the mid-20s rather than the late 40s.

When a 24-year-old says they’re struggling, the odds they actually are have gone up.

But younger workers take fewer total sick days than older ones, so this was never about volume, and much of what shows up as Monday fatigue isn’t a condition at all.

It’s social jetlag, the body-clock whiplash from late nights and lie-ins all weekend, then a Monday start.

Real and measured, but largely self-made, driven by weekend bedtimes and late screens, both within a person’s control.

Health is health. A body clock you wreck every weekend isn’t a problem your practice created, and saying so isn’t unkind, it’s honest.

A smaller group are truly unwell and need proper support, but that isn’t most of what shows up on a Monday morning.

How does it work?

You don’t police people’s weekends, and you don’t absorb the gaps in silence. 

You’re clear that reliability matters and the team carries the cost when someone’s repeatedly missing, you make it safe to tell you when something real is going on, and you treat the recurring Monday as a conversation, not a crime.

The person who’s truly unwell will be relieved you noticed, while the person who needs to sort their sleep out gets the message without you being heavy about it.

The trap is asking ‘is it the practice’s fault or theirs?’ because the honest answer is usually some of each.

What’s mine to fix is the conditions. What’s theirs to own is their health and the choices that protect or wreck it.

Sort your half first, because it’s the bigger one, and it earns you the right to ask about theirs.

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