Your workplace is an ecosystem, not a machine

I am writing a book on regenerative management for Gereso, and to introduce it I have to start with the idea underneath it: the ecology of work. In one sentence, regenerative management is my answer to the interconnected crises pressing on staff, managers and leaders inside their ecology of work. That phrase, the ecology of work, is the lens this whole article is built on, so it is worth slowing down on.

The idea is simple to state and hard to act on. Your workplace is not a set of isolated problems to be fixed one at a time. It is a living ecosystem, where physical, social, cultural, economic and political forces all interact to shape how people feel and perform. Treat it as an ecosystem, and most of what passes for wellbeing at work starts to look like patching one leak while the water table rises.

The old lens	The full picture	The response
The ecology of workThe ecology of work treats the workplace as a living ecosystem, where physical, social, cultural, economic and political layers interact to shape how people feel and perform.	Wellbeing is systemicEngagement, health and safety rise or fall with the whole system, so a perk in one layer cannot offset strain in another. The layers are interdependent, and a fix that ignores that fails.	Regenerative managementThe response is to regenerate the ecosystem rather than patch its symptoms, creating positive value for staff, managers, the business and the world around them.

What the ecology of work means

The ecology of work is a way of seeing the workplace as a living ecosystem rather than a machine with faulty parts. It holds that the experience of work is shaped by many interacting layers at once, from the desk and the roster to the economy and the climate. Change one layer and you move the others, which is why single-point fixes so often disappoint.

This lens sits behind everything I do, and it reframes what leaders are actually managing.

The work environment as an ecosystem

An ecosystem is a web of parts that depend on each other, and the workplace behaves the same way. The ecology of work spans the physical environment of tools and spaces, the social environment of colleagues and managers, the cultural environment of values and norms, and the wider economic and institutional environment of markets, laws and the climate. None of these sits in isolation.

Seen this way, a person’s day at work is the product of all these layers pressing at once. A well-designed office cannot rescue a toxic culture, and a generous salary cannot offset a manager who erodes people’s confidence. The layers combine, and the weakest one tends to set the ceiling.

It is worth naming the layers plainly, because most organisations manage only two or three of them and forget the rest. The physical layer is the tangible environment of ergonomics, light, noise and air. The social layer is the web of relationships, collaboration and belonging. The cultural layer is the set of values and unwritten rules that decide what really gets rewarded.

Two more layers sit further out and get ignored most often. The sectoral layer is the network of suppliers, customers and partners the organisation lives inside. The economic and institutional layer is everything from inflation and the law to demography, technology and the climate. A leader who manages the first three and pretends the last two do not exist will keep being surprised.

Beyond wellbeing perks: a systemic view

Most workplace wellbeing effort targets a single visible layer: a fruit bowl, a meditation app, a step challenge. The ecology of work asks a harder question about whether the system itself is healthy, across physical, social, psychological, cultural and organisational aspects. A benefit bolted onto a sick system rarely holds.

This is where the older language of quality of working life falls short. It tends to describe conditions inside the office walls, while the forces shaping how people feel now spill well beyond them. A systemic view keeps the whole ecosystem in frame, including the parts a manager does not directly control.

There is a test I use to tell the two apart. Ask whether an initiative changes how the work itself is designed, resourced and led, or whether it sits alongside the work as an extra. Fruit, apps and celebration days sit alongside, and they are pleasant, and they move nothing structural. The ecology of work is interested in the design of the work, which is the layer that actually determines health and engagement.

Why economics and politics belong in the picture

How people feel at work is tied to conditions far outside the building. A tight or loose job market, the cost of living, job security and the climate all press on the same person who shows up to your Monday meeting. Leaving these out of the picture is what makes so much wellbeing work feel hollow.

The data backs this up. Gallup finds that global employee engagement sat at just 20 per cent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy around 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity. Engagement moves with the health of the wider economy and job market, which is exactly what an ecological view would predict. People read their whole environment, then decide how much of themselves to bring to work.

This is where a purely internal view of wellbeing runs out of road. An organisation can run the best onboarding and the warmest team rituals in its industry, and still watch engagement sag because interest rates, insecurity or the news cycle are pressing on people from outside. Ignoring those forces does not make them stop acting on your team.

The practical lesson is humility about what a manager controls, paired with honesty about what they do. You cannot fix the economy, and you can be straight with people about it, protect them from the shocks you are able to absorb, and avoid pretending a perk answers a structural worry. That honesty is itself part of a healthy ecology of work.

The pressures reshaping the ecology of work

The ecology of work is under strain from several crises at once, which is why old management habits are failing in new ways. Economic pressure, declining health, falling engagement, climate anxiety and a loss of trust all land on the same person at the same time. In my book I set these out as seven distinct crises, and here they form the backdrop the rest of this article works against.

The important move is to stop treating these as background noise outside the manager’s remit. They walk in the door with every person, every morning, and they shape how much of themselves anyone can give.

The economic squeeze

Money stress is a workplace issue whether or not a manager wants it to be. When the cost of living outruns pay, and job security feels thin, people carry a low background anxiety into every task, and their tolerance for a bad day at work drops sharply. The economic layer of the ecosystem is squeezing the social and psychological ones.

This is the crisis that makes perks feel like an insult. You cannot offset a real-terms pay cut with a wellbeing app, and attempting it tells people you have misread their situation. Naming the squeeze honestly, and doing what is within your control about it, earns more trust than any benefit.

The human crisis of health and meaning

Alongside money sits a deeper crisis of health and meaning. Rates of psychological distress and burnout are high, disengagement is climbing, and more people are asking whether their work is worth the toll it takes. These are not separate problems, they feed each other, and they show up in the same claims and resignation data.

The search for meaning is easy to dismiss and expensive to ignore. People who cannot connect their daily work to anything they value will do it thinly, and no amount of monitoring closes that gap. Work that offers purpose, growth and respect is what refills the well the other crises drain. I set out the levels a manager can move in what a manager can actually fix about meaning at work.

The planetary and institutional strain

The outer layers of the ecosystem are straining too, and younger workers feel it most. Climate anxiety is now a real workplace factor, and being asked to work for an organisation seen as part of the problem weighs on people in ways a previous generation of managers never had to consider. Purpose and environmental credibility have become part of the deal. I set out what that asks of a manager in climate anxiety is now the manager’s job description.

Trust in institutions has thinned at the same time, which raises the bar for employers. People extend less automatic faith to those in charge and expect leaders to earn it through consistency between word and action. In that climate, an ecology of work that is visibly cared for becomes a genuine advantage. I follow that thinning through to what it asks of a manager in the trust crisis and the manager’s last reserve.

How the ecology of work shows up in health and engagement

When the ecology of work is out of balance, it shows up first in people’s health, their engagement and their willingness to stay. These are not soft indicators. In Australia they carry hard numbers and legal weight, and they are moving in the wrong direction.

The evidence below is Australian and current, and it points at the system rather than the individual.

The mental health load workplaces now carry

Work-related psychological harm has become one of the defining safety issues of the decade. Mental health conditions now make up around 9 per cent of serious workers’ compensation claims, a 36.9 per cent rise since 2017-18, and they cost far more than physical injuries, with median time off work more than four times longer. This is the ecosystem sending a bill.

What matters most is the cause. The leading drivers of these claims are bullying and harassment, work pressure and workplace violence, which are all products of leadership behaviour and work design rather than personal fragility. The problem lives in the system, so the fix has to as well.

I work through that system layer by layer in the psychological health decline a manager owns, which covers the hazards a manager can act on directly.

Zoom out and the cost is staggering. The Productivity Commission estimated that mental ill-health and suicide cost Australia up to 220 billion dollars a year, including lost productivity through absenteeism and presenteeism. A healthier ecology of work is not a nicety on those numbers. It is an economic argument.

The trend is what should worry leaders most. Psychological claims are the fastest-growing category of serious workplace injury in Australia over the past decade, and they run longer and cost more than physical ones at every stage. This is a structural shift in what work is doing to people, not a run of bad luck.

It also carries new legal weight. Australian work health and safety law now treats psychosocial hazards as risks an employer must actively manage, with the same duty of care that applies to physical ones. The exact obligations vary by state and territory, so this is a point that warrants a proper legal read for your own jurisdiction before you rely on it.

Engagement, motivation and the manager’s own health

Engagement is the emotional and professional investment people choose to make, and it is the clearest read on whether the ecosystem is working. Gallup’s data shows engaged teams outperform disengaged ones on productivity and profitability, so this is a performance metric wearing a wellbeing costume. When people withdraw, the business feels it before the survey does.

The part most programs miss is that managers are inside the ecosystem too. Gallup’s recent reports trace the current engagement slump largely to a fall in manager engagement, which then flows downhill to their teams. A manager who is struggling can drain a room without meaning to.

This is why I insist on the wellbeing of everyone, leaders included. You cannot ask people for an investment you are visibly unable to make yourself. The health of the ecology of work starts at the top of the reporting line, not at the bottom.

Managers have been squeezed from both sides, carrying rising expectations from above and shifting ones from below, often with less authority than the job seems to promise. A manager in that vice tends to tighten control, and the tightening shows up as reduced autonomy and trust for their team. The crisis at the manager layer becomes the team’s crisis within a quarter.

Any serious work on the ecology of work therefore has to resource the managers, not just audit them. That means realistic spans of control, genuine decision rights, and support for their own health, so they have something left to give. Skip that, and every downstream initiative is being built on exhausted ground.

Safety, flexibility and the shape of the day

The physical and structural layers still matter enormously. Psychological safety, the sense that people can speak up and take interpersonal risks without fear for their standing, is now understood as a precondition for both health and innovation. Where it is missing, problems stay hidden until they become expensive.

The term comes from Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, whose research found that the best teams reported more errors, not fewer, because they felt safe enough to admit them. That finding reframes a quiet team as a warning sign rather than a success. In an ecological view, silence usually means a layer has gone wrong somewhere upstream.

The shape of the working day has also changed for good. In August 2025, 36 per cent of employed Australians usually worked from home, rising to around six in ten among managers and professionals. Flexibility is now part of the ecosystem, and pretending otherwise costs organisations the people who have other options.

Australian law now reaches into that same layer. I look at what one year of the right to disconnect actually revealed, and at the practices worth updating while the law gives you the excuse, in the right to disconnect.

Why wellbeing programs keep missing

Most wellbeing programs fail for the same reason: they treat a symptom in one layer while the strain sits in another. A meditation app does nothing for someone anxious about a restructure, and a resilience workshop cannot fix a workload that is genuinely too big. The programs are sincere, and they are aimed at the wrong layer.

This is the reframe at the heart of the ecology of work, and it is uncomfortable for anyone who has bought a program instead of a change.

Treating symptoms in one layer

Single-layer fixes are attractive because they are visible, budgetable and low-conflict. You can announce a wellbeing week without confronting a bullying manager or an impossible target. The trouble is that the ecosystem does not respond to the layer you find easiest to touch, it responds to the one that is actually broken.

When the fix and the problem live in different layers, people notice. Offering perks while pay slips behind the cost of living reads as a distraction, and it can lower trust rather than raise it. The gesture becomes evidence that leadership is looking away.

There is a deeper reason these programs persist despite failing. They let an organisation feel it is doing something about wellbeing without touching the things that are expensive or uncomfortable to change, such as workload, pay bands or a favoured but harmful manager. The program becomes a way of managing the leadership team’s conscience rather than the workforce’s health.

Breaking the habit means being willing to hear that the answer is not a new initiative at all. Often the most regenerative move is to remove something: a pointless report, a layer of sign-off, an always-on expectation. Subtraction rarely gets a launch event, and it frequently does more for the ecology of work than anything you could add.

The interdependence the fixes ignore

Interdependence is the core law of any ecosystem, and it is the thing point fixes ignore. When one person resigns, their workload lands on colleagues, whose stress rises, whose own risk of leaving climbs, and the loop tightens. A leader who sees only the first resignation misreads the whole chain.

Reading the interdependence is what lets you intervene where it counts. Sometimes the highest-leverage move for engagement is not an engagement initiative at all, but a change to workload, decision rights or manager support two steps upstream. The ecology of work trains you to look for that upstream point.

A common pattern makes this concrete. A team’s engagement scores drop, so the organisation runs a values workshop, which changes nothing, because the real cause is a manager two levels up who floods the team with last-minute reprioritisations. The workshop treated the social layer while the damage was being done in the organisational one, and the money spent bought a little more cynicism.

The regenerative move is to trace the symptom back to its source before spending a cent. Ask which layer the pain is actually coming from, who controls it, and what the smallest honest change there would be. That discipline is unglamorous and it is where the results live.

Regenerative management as the response

Regenerative management is my answer to a sick ecology of work. Where traditional management aims to extract performance and reduce harm, regenerative management aims to leave the whole ecosystem healthier than it found it, creating positive value for staff, managers, the business and the community around it. It treats a workplace the way you would treat land you intend to farm for generations.

This is the frame my forthcoming book sets out in full, and it grows directly from the ecological view.

The word regenerative is doing deliberate work here. Sustainable management aims to do less harm, to hold steady and not deplete. Regenerative management sets a higher bar, aiming to leave people and the systems around them better off than before, the way regenerative farming rebuilds the soil rather than merely slowing its exhaustion. Applied to work, that means a workplace that adds to people’s health, skills and prospects instead of drawing them down.

From managing resources to cultivating an ecosystem

The shift is from managing human resources to cultivating a human ecosystem. A resource is something you spend, while an ecosystem is something you tend so that it keeps giving. That single change of metaphor rewires how a leader treats workload, recovery, learning and trust.

The word resource itself carries the old thinking. It frames people as an input to be optimised, drawn down and replaced, which is exactly the logic an ecological view rejects. Tending an ecosystem means paying attention to recovery and renewal, not only to output, because a system run permanently at full extraction collapses.

Regenerative management also widens the circle of who counts. Alongside staff and shareholders, it holds the health of the team, the community and the environment as part of the return, which connects the ecology of work to the broader work of managerial transformation. The point is a workplace that renews the people and the world it touches rather than depleting them.

The six principles of regenerative leadership

Regenerative management is carried in practice by the six principles of regenerative leadership, my framework for leading in a way that renews rather than depletes an organisation. They translate the ecological idea into how a leader actually behaves day to day. I treat them in depth in the dedicated resource, so here they anchor the response rather than repeat it.

If the ecology of work is the diagnosis, regenerative leadership is the practice that heals it. The two are built to be read together, one naming the system and the other showing how to tend it.

Principles for a balanced ecology of work

A balanced ecology of work rests on a handful of principles borrowed from living systems. They are less a checklist to complete than a set of tensions to keep in balance, and most organisations are strong on some and blind to others. Naming them helps a leadership team see which they have been neglecting.

The principles reinforce each other, so progress on one tends to lift the rest.

The principles in practice

These are the principles I return to when helping an organisation rebalance its ecology of work. Each one describes a capacity to build rather than a box to tick.

1. Interdependence: read the whole web before acting, since every change ripples through the system.
2. Autonomy: give people real control over how they work, and support their health while you do it.
3. Collaboration: design work so teams combine skills across silos rather than competing for scraps.
4. Accountability: flatten the barriers to initiative so people can act without constant sign-off.
5. Adaptability and resilience: treat curiosity, learning and honest mistakes as the price of staying alive.
6. Diversity, equity and inclusion: hold difference as a strength and make sure everyone has a voice.
7. Environmental and ethical responsibility: run the organisation transparently and within its wider limits.
8. Continuous development and participation: keep growing people, and involve them in the decisions that shape their work.

What changes when you apply them

Applied together, these principles change the texture of daily work more than any single program can. Decisions move closer to the people doing the job, problems surface earlier because it feels safe to raise them, and the organisation adapts faster because it is not waiting on one desk. The ecosystem starts to regulate itself.

A few of these principles deserve a closer look, because they are the ones organisations most often get wrong. Interdependence sounds abstract until a key person leaves and you watch the load cascade through a team that was already stretched. Autonomy is easy to grant on paper and hard to mean, since it requires managers to give up the comfort of control and coach instead. Participation is the one most often faked, with a survey that asks for input and a leadership that never visibly acts on it.

The point is not to score well on all eight at once. It is to find the two or three your organisation has been neglecting and rebalance towards them, then let the interdependence between the principles do some of the work for you. A leadership team that builds real autonomy usually finds accountability and adaptability rising alongside it.

The payoff shows up across the numbers that matter. Health claims and turnover ease, engagement steadies, and innovation rises because people feel safe enough to try things. None of that comes from a poster, and all of it comes from tending the system.

What a healthy ecology of work returns

A healthy ecology of work is not charity, and framing it as a cost is the fastest way to lose the argument in a boardroom. When the system is balanced, the organisation sees higher productivity, stronger retention, a better reputation and more innovation, because people who feel well and trusted give more and stay longer. The return shows up across the very numbers leaders already watch.

It helps to be concrete about where that return lands, because each layer of benefit answers a different objection.

Productivity and engagement

Engaged people simply do better work. Gallup’s analysis of thousands of business units finds that the most engaged teams outperform the least engaged on both productivity and profitability by a wide margin, and the gap compounds over time. A balanced ecology of work is the ground that engagement grows in, so this is where the first and clearest payback appears.

The reverse is just as real. Disengaged people rarely announce themselves, they slow down, make more errors and stop offering ideas, and the cost hides inside a dozen other line items. Reading the ecology of work lets a leader see that lost output for what it is, a system problem with a system fix.

Retention and employer reputation

Losing good people is one of the most expensive things an organisation does, once you count recruitment, onboarding and the knowledge that walks out the door. A workplace whose ecosystem is healthy holds onto its people, which connects the ecology of work directly to employee retention and loyalty. Flexibility, fair pay and good management now sit near the top of what candidates weigh.

Reputation follows the same logic outward. People talk about where they work, and a workplace that renews its people earns an employer brand that no recruitment campaign can buy. In a tight labour market that reputation is often the deciding factor for the candidate you most want.

Innovation and resilience

Innovation needs people who feel safe enough to be wrong in front of each other. A healthy ecology of work, with real psychological safety, is what lets a team raise a half-formed idea or admit a mistake early, which is the raw material of both innovation and safety. Fear produces silence, and silence produces neither.

Resilience is the quieter cousin of innovation and just as valuable. An organisation whose people are well, trusted and connected absorbs shocks better, adapts faster and recovers sooner, because the ecosystem has slack and goodwill to draw on. A depleted system has neither, and it breaks at the first hard season.

These returns are hard to isolate in a spreadsheet, which is why they get undervalued. No single line item says innovation from psychological safety or retention from fair management, so the benefits of a healthy ecology of work are spread thinly across many accounts and easy to miss. That accounting blind spot is part of why organisations keep underinvesting in the thing that would help them most.

The leaders who get this treat the ecology of work as infrastructure rather than perk. They fund it steadily, measure it honestly across the layers, and expect the payback to arrive as fewer crises and more capacity rather than as a single headline number. Over a few years, that patience is what separates a workplace that renews itself from one that grinds its people down.

How to tell if your ecology of work is healthy

Diagnosing your ecology of work starts with reading each layer honestly and looking for where the signals contradict each other. Good headline engagement scores sitting on top of rising sick leave, for instance, usually mean the survey is measuring compliance rather than health. The aim is to find the layer that is actually setting your ceiling.

This section is decision support rather than a sales pitch, so use it to work out where your own effort should go.

A diagnostic across the layers of your ecology of work

Run each layer of the ecosystem past the same three questions: what does health look like, what does trouble look like, and where would the evidence show up. The table gives a starting frame you can adapt to your own organisation.

Layer	Healthy signal	Warning sign	Where to look
Physical	Spaces and tools fit the work	Chronic discomfort and workarounds	Injury data, facilities requests
Social	People speak up freely	Silence in meetings, cliques	Exit interviews, meeting behaviour
Cultural	Stated values match daily behaviour	Cynicism about the values	What gets rewarded and punished
Psychological	Mistakes are raised early	Problems surface late and expensive	Near-miss and complaint patterns
Economic and institutional	Pay and security feel fair	Anxiety about restructures and cost of living	Retention, engagement verbatims

The single most useful habit is to read the layers against each other rather than one at a time. A high engagement score sitting on top of rising sick leave, or a proud set of values sitting next to a bullying complaint, tells you more than any figure alone. Contradictions between layers are where the truth usually hides.

It also pays to weight the voices closest to the work. The people doing the job can usually name the broken layer in a sentence, long before a survey detects it, if they trust that saying so is safe. Building that safety is both a diagnostic tool and a first repair.

Where to start when everything needs work

Most leadership teams reading that table will see several red flags at once, which is normal and not a reason to freeze. The trick is to sequence rather than attempt everything, starting where the leverage is highest. A short set of questions helps you choose.

• Which layer is currently setting the ceiling on everything else?
• Where would one change relieve pressure on several other layers at once?
• What can we fix that sits inside our control this quarter?
• Which fix, if we get it wrong or fake it, would cost us the most trust?

Answering those four honestly usually narrows a sprawling problem to one or two moves worth making this quarter. That focus matters, because a scattered response signals to people that leadership is performing concern rather than fixing anything. One real change in the layer that matters does more for an ecology of work than five announcements spread across layers that were already fine.

Where the answers keep pointing at how managers themselves work, the next read is a closer one. The managerial transformation diagnostic scores management practices circle by circle, and it shows where a weak score has its cause in the circle before it.

How I can help you regenerate your ecology of work

I help organisations read and rebalance their ecology of work, then build the leadership habits that keep it healthy. The work runs from a keynote that reframes wellbeing as an ecosystem, through a diagnostic across the layers, to longer programs that embed regenerative management in how a leadership team operates.

The through-line is always the same: tend the system, rather than decorate its symptoms.

Keynotes and the book on regenerative management

My keynotes give a room the ecological lens in a single sitting, so a leadership team stops arguing about perks and starts talking about the system. They draw on the same material as my forthcoming book on regenerative management, translated for whatever crisis your sector is facing right now. The aim is a shift in how the room sees the problem, which is the precondition for any real change.

A keynote also gives a leadership team a shared language, so the ecology of work stops being an abstraction and becomes something people can point at in their own organisation. That common vocabulary is often what turns a good talk into a decision made the following week.

Diagnostics, workshops and leadership programs

Beyond the stage, I run a diagnostic that maps the health of each layer of your ecosystem and finds the one setting your ceiling. Workshops then help a team act on it, building the principles above into real decisions about workload, autonomy and voice. For deeper change I run leadership programs and manager communities that keep the practice alive long after the launch.

The diagnostic is deliberately blunt about the layers a wellbeing survey usually flatters. It looks at pay and security, at how decisions really get made, and at whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth, alongside the softer measures. The point is to hand a leadership team an honest map, so the effort and budget land on the layer that is actually holding the organisation back.

Where a wellbeing effort has stalled, the fastest way forward is often to widen the lens, connect the change to leading change through coalitions, and stop asking one program to carry the whole ecosystem.

Conclusion

The ecology of work asks leaders to stop seeing a list of problems and start seeing a living system, where the desk, the culture, the manager, the pay packet and the climate all shape the same person. Read that way, the failure of most wellbeing efforts stops being a mystery. They were tending one leaf while the roots went dry. Regenerative management is the response, and a healthier ecology of work is what it leaves behind: a workplace that renews the people and the world it depends on rather than wearing them down.

Frequently asked questions about the ecology of work