‘Burnover’ is the Hidden Workforce Crisis Undermining Australia’s Not-for-Profits

A growing body of data suggests Australia’s not-for-profit sector is facing a workforce challenge that goes far beyond burnout, with far-reaching implications for service delivery and community impact.

In 2025, the Pro Bono Australia Salary Survey found that 29 per cent of people who left their jobs in the not-for-profit sector said burnout was the main reason they quit, a sharp rise from 21 per cent in 2024.

Drawing on his experience as an executive in the Victorian Government, including a near-fatal health crisis caused by extreme burnout, burnout recovery specialist and founder of The Big Refresh, Nick Orchard, coined a term to describe this tipping point: Burnover.

“Burnout is often framed as a personal resilience issue,” Orchard said. “But when people start walking out the door, it becomes an organisational risk.”

“That’s why I call it burnover. It affects budgets, culture, service delivery and ultimately the communities organisations exist to serve.”

For not-for-profits already operating on razor-thin funding and rising community demand, the financial impact of repeated burnover can quickly become crippling. According to the Australian HR Institute, replacing an experienced team member can cost anywhere between 30 per cent and 200 per cent of their annual salary once recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity are factored in.

The strain is already visible on the frontline. Almost half of CEOs and senior leaders say staff turnover is too high, according to the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). Meanwhile, in the housing and homelessness sector alone, 71 per cent of organisations report rising staff stress and burnout, and nearly half say it is now threatening service delivery, according to the ACOSS Housing Crisis Pulse Check.

“It’s not just as simple as replacing an employee,” Orchard said. “When experienced staff leave because they’re burnt out, they take their skills, expertise, and organisational knowledge with them.”

“Even the best candidate cannot walk into a job and start operating at a high level. That knowledge takes time to build, which means existing staff tend to take more on, and morale suffers as a result. That pattern is how burnover becomes a cycle.”

Middle leaders are often at the centre of the burnover cycle. While Australian data is still emerging, international research shows 77 per cent of nonprofit middle managers receive no formal leadership training, while 75 per cent report high burnout.

With limited formal training and mounting expectations, Nick Orchard says it’s little surprise many of these leaders are the first to fall.

“Middle leaders are often caught between high-level expectations and the challenges of managing a frontline team day-to-day,” Orchard said.

“Without clear systems, role clarity and decision-making support, the pressure builds until, eventually, something has to give. And too often, that ‘something’ is the job they once loved and the cause they believe in.”

This is the paradox at the heart of burnover in the NFP sector: It doesn’t happen because people don’t care, but because they care too much, for too long, without enough structural support.

The solution, Orchard says, isn’t yoga or wellbeing days, but to build organisational structures that prevent the problem from the ground up.

“We need to look at the systems around people,” he said. “What are we asking of them? Where are the bottlenecks? If burnover is predictable, we can design against it.”

While the problem may be rising across multiple industries, the stakes are uniquely high for cause-driven organisations. Without addressing the problem meaningfully, burnover risks undermining the sector’s capacity to support the very communities they exist to serve.

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Nick Orchard is an IECL-certified performance coach with nearly 1,500 hours of coaching practice and a background spanning government, non-profit leadership, teaching, and even a stint as a hip-hop artist. After experiencing a near-fatal burnout during his time as a senior executive, Nick rebuilt his life using evidence-based, gamified practices that helped him reframe limiting self-beliefs and create sustainable wins. That recovery became the foundation of The Big Refresh, his flagship eight-week coaching program designed to help professional teams, high performers, executives, and creatives beat burnout, reclaim clarity, and build lasting momentum. Nick has worked with hundreds of clients, including leaders and teams from the Victorian Government, Australian Federal Government, Arup, Carers Australia, Uniting, and the Australia and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. He helps clients across sectors, from CEOs and government directors to award-winning creatives, navigate burnout, imposter syndrome, and self-sabotage while achieving ambitious goals without sacrificing wellbeing.