If you do not invest in your people’s mental health capability now, you risk losing them later
The insights from SuperFriend’s latest "Indicators of a Thriving Workplace" report every wellbeing professional needs to know.
Welcome to another edition of data you need to know, diving into what the data is telling us in one of Australia’s biggest annual workplace mental health surveys: Superfriend’s 2026 Indicators of a Thriving Workplace.
It is a big survey of 12,000+ people, comparing different industries on psychosocial hazards and indicators of mental health challenges (burnout and psychological distress), as well as SuperFriend’s own composite measure of a thriving workplace.
The report aims to give a nationally representative picture of workplace mental health across Australian industries, and to do a bit of cheeky lead-gen for SuperFriend while they are at it. Let’s look at some of the headline results, as well as some of the more nuanced signals we picked up on.
1. Workplace thriving isn’t moving over time
The 2025 results are comparable to the 2024 results, and when comparing them to SuperFriend’s Decade in Data review, which they published two years ago, they show remarkably little change over time.
68.4 out of 100 and the dial isn’t moving.
If you look at what organisations are doing most well in, its connectedness and safety, whereas improvement is needed in leadership support and work design. The worst performing for Australian organisations? Providing their staff with skills and resources to manage mental health.
2. The awareness paradox: workers are struggling despite increased efforts to help them
A big standout is that the report points to a clear paradox. What do I mean by that? Well, there has been a decade of effort that has genuinely improved the awareness and stigma picture. So, that’s good news, right?
The problem is, we aren’t seeing meaningful movement on follow-up outcomes. For example, burnout and distress has only improved marginally and are still affecting the majority of the workforce.
A staggering 53.9% of the Australian workforce is in moderate to severe distress. This is not promising news. Something isn’t working.
At the same time, SafeWork Australia data shows that claims have more than doubled (up 161%) with roughly 1 in 8 serious workers' comp claims now being for a mental health condition. This comes at 3x the cost of other workers' comp claims. And when it comes to time off, a serious mental health claim results in 4x more time away than other claims… that's a median of 30.7 weeks lost per serious mental health claim.
