Ask most people in professional services what makes a good consultant, and you’ll hear the same answers repeated back to you: a strong work ethic, an ability to thrive under pressure, commitment to clients, and attention to detail.

But let’s reframe the picture: what does this tell us about professional services culture? It tells us that people work hard, under great pressure, to avoid letting people down, and can’t afford to get things wrong.

Add to that the stressors that come with the culture of the job itself – competitive environments; chargeability targets; complex stakeholder demands; expectations of constant availability – and you have a perfect recipe for burnout.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a 2024 study found that the burnout rate for business and professional services was 22% higher than in some other industries.[1] Globally, Deloitte report 78% of executives as saying their workers have been affected by burnout or exhaustion.[2] The World Health Organisation estimates the cost of lost productivity from mental health conditions as $1trn a year.[3]

Resilience, then, isn’t a luxury: it’s a necessity.

Ticking the wellbeing box

Corporate investment in wellbeing initiatives is steadily increasing: indeed, the Global Wellness Institute estimates that the wellness economy has doubled since 2013, reaching a new peak of $6.8trn in 2025. Yet a recent survey found that the percentage of employees who strongly agreed that their firm cared about their wellbeing had plummeted from 49% in 2020 to 21% in 2024.[4]

Research from the University of Oxford suggests a subtle but important reason behind this apparent disconnect: wellbeing interventions tend to focus on the individual, not the culture.[5] When facing working practices that make burnout a near-inevitability, a half-day mindfulness seminar just can’t compete. So how can firms improve employee wellbeing in a meaningful way?

How to build a sustainable, high-performance culture

We know that high performance isn’t at odds with wellbeing: if the data show us anything, it’s that performance suffers when wellbeing does. Focus on high performance leads to burnout. Focus on resilience leads to high performance.

The first step, as our medical friends would have it, is to do no harm. There are certain parts of professional services culture that make stress inevitable, but that’s not to say that firms themselves should add to it. It’s crucial to identify elements of culture within firms that are unnecessarily increasing stress, and address them: be that impossible targets, lack of internal support structures, or that senior partner rumoured to be the real-life inspiration for Malcolm Tucker.

As to positive action to foster resilience, there are cultural changes that have been shown to significantly improve wellbeing:

• Normalising failure: senior partners who talk openly about setbacks as learning opportunities, rather than personal flaws, implicitly encourage that behaviour in others. Sharing stories about overcoming struggles helps to normalise the challenges, as well as providing practical insight into how to overcome them.
• Strong internal support networks: internal communities – whether that be mentorship programmes, neurodiversity networks, buddy systems or running clubs – are well known for increasing staff retention, but they have also been shown to have positive effects on individual wellbeing.
• Celebrating (wider) achievements: public recognition of achievements including persistence, innovation and positive coping strategies – rather than a focus simply on results – remind people that their work makes a difference.
• Continuous feedback: build a culture where conversations about wellbeing are the norm, not something that happens in a seminar hall once a year. Surveys, one-to-one check-ins, and water-cooler chats all provide the opportunity for feedback on how a firm’s resilience strategies are working. And of course, taking action on the feedback is vital.
• Protect rest: a system that prioritises wellbeing shouldn’t just be about working hours; the fetishisation of ‘commitment culture’ needs to end. Enabling true rest away from work is vital: there should be clear systems in place to make sure that those on leave are only contacted in a genuine emergency.  Deviation from such systems should be extremely unusual.

Ultimately, while a basket of fruit in the breakout room might sound like a good way to tick a wellbeing box, without first addressing a firm’s internal culture, employing short-term wellbeing measures are like trying to dry your face while you’re underwater. Prioritising meaningful wellbeing and resilience needs to start with cultural change. It needs to be a consistent practice; it needs to begin long before crisis point; and it needs to be encouraged, supported, and modelled by senior leadership. Only then should we start browsing the spa brochures.

Openside has a deep heritage and experience in professional services and consulting, supporting consulting excellence and advisory skills development across a range of industry sectors.

Footnote: One of Openside’s most impactful keynotes for a top-tier professional services firm, based on audience feedback, was on resilience and wellbeing. However, the executive committee of the firm were less impressed – they considered the messages ‘didn’t align with the firm’s way’ – the unwritten rule of their culture was that ‘work has no boundaries’ and they didn’t want that challenged.

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[1] https://www.webmdhealthservices.com/blog/workplace-mental-health-statistics-by-industry/

[2] https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/workplace-well-being-research-2024.html

[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-at-work

[4] https://www.gallup.com/394424/indicator-employee-well-being.aspx

[5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/irj.12418