By The standard corporate response to burnout is a new program, more time-off policies, a meditation app, a wellness stipend. Nicholas Mukhtar thinks most of that misses the point, or at least arrives in the wrong order.
He does not dismiss wellness tools outright. His argument is that the organizations recovering from burnout are the ones willing to strip out complexity before layering anything new on top. Simplification, in his telling, is the prerequisite for everything else a company might try.
The logic follows from what he watches inside client companies. The executive who is burning out is often the same executive who allowed complexity, in workflow, in team structure, in expectation-setting, to accumulate unchecked for years. Adding a wellness benefit on top of a tangled operating model treats the fatigue while leaving its source untouched. “You just need to simplify things and have a conversation about why this isn’t working,” Mukhtar said. “What are the things that are bothering you and how do we make it better?”
Research has started to point in the same direction. Deloitte’s 2025 Workforce Intelligence Report found that mental fatigue and cognitive strain have surpassed workload volume as the leading indicators of burnout for the first time. The problem is less about how many hours people work and more about how much friction they wade through in those hours, unclear responsibilities, fragmented systems, decisions that stall waiting on an absent approver.
Mukhtar reached a similar diagnosis by observation rather than survey, and his prescription is consistent across every client who walks in with a people problem. Before adding a solution, remove what is making the work harder than it needs to be. A calendar full of redundant meetings, an approval chain nobody can explain, a reporting structure that duplicates effort, these drain leaders in ways no perk can offset.
He extends the point to the environment leaders operate in. “People just get pulled in so many different directions,” he said, “and a lot of it is you just need to simplify things.” The volume of digital noise erodes the capacity for focused, human conversation at every level, and no wellness program restores attention that a cluttered system keeps fragmenting.
The practical takeaway is a sequence, not a slogan. Audit the complexity first. Cut the meetings, clarify the decision rights, and name the friction out loud in a direct conversation. Then, if a wellness program still makes sense, add it to a system that is no longer working against the people inside it. Simplify first. Support second.
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