What “Fine” Actually Costs Your Business

Ask most managers which of their people are struggling, and they’ll name the ones who are visibly struggling. Late. Distracted. Missing deadlines. Taking more sick days than usual.

They almost never name the ones who show up early, hit every deadline, say “yep, all good” in every check-in, and are quietly running on fumes.

That second group is where most of the real cost is hiding.

The real number behind “fine”

Safe Work Australia estimates mental health conditions cost Australian businesses over $6 billion a year in lost productivity. That figure gets quoted often, and it’s usually assumed to be about absenteeism - people not showing up.

It isn’t, mostly. The larger share of that cost is presenteeism: people who are physically at their desk, technically doing their job, operating at a fraction of their actual capacity because they’re managing stress, overthinking, or burnout underneath a composed surface.

Presenteeism doesn’t show up on a sick-leave report. It shows up as decisions that take longer than they should. As good people who used to bring energy to a room now just getting through it. As a slow erosion of the judgment and initiative you’re actually paying for, while the attendance numbers look completely normal.

Why “fine” is often the least reliable answer in the building

There’s a specific reason high performers are the hardest group to read accurately, and it has nothing to do with dishonesty. It’s that the people most capable of managing a difficult internal state are, by definition, the best at making it invisible. The skill that got them promoted - staying composed under pressure - is the same skill that hides the problem from the people trying to help.

So when a manager asks “how are you going,” and gets “yeah, good, flat out but good,” that answer is often completely genuine and completely incomplete at the same time. The person isn’t lying. They’re reporting the version of themselves they’ve learned to present, not necessarily the one running the actual numbers underneath.

This is why engagement surveys and check-in culture alone don’t solve presenteeism. They’re asking the performing version of the person to self-report, and the performing version has gotten very good at reporting “fine.”

What actually moves the number

PwC’s research puts the return on workplace mental health investment at roughly $2.30 for every $1 spent - a genuinely strong business case on paper. But the return depends entirely on what that investment is aimed at.

A wellness session that teaches people to manage stress better, while leaving the underlying pattern - performing composure instead of addressing what’s actually driving the exhaustion - untouched, tends to produce a short-term mood lift and very little lasting change. People feel good for a week. The pattern underneath hasn’t moved.

What actually changes the number is addressing the mechanism directly: giving people the tools to stop performing composure and start genuinely processing pressure differently, so the shift holds under the exact conditions that usually break it - a bad week, a tight deadline, a difficult conversation. That’s the difference between a program that feels good in the room and one that shows up later in decision quality, retention, and how people actually show up when things get hard.

This is the specific gap Recode. Rise. Reclaim. is built to close - not another wellness session, but a structured, one-day process built on a methodology I was personally trained in by Joseph McLendon III, designed to install a different default response, not just offer a temporary reframe.

What this looks like in practice

Teams that have been through this work report a consistent shift: clearer decisions under pressure, leaders who model composure instead of reactivity, stronger resilience through genuine change (not just surface-level resilience training), and less of that quiet, hard-to-measure presenteeism that doesn’t show up anywhere except in the quality of the work itself.

None of that requires identifying who’s “struggling.” It works precisely because it doesn’t rely on people self-reporting a problem they’ve learned to hide well.

If this sounds like your team

If your highest performers are saying “fine” and you suspect there’s more underneath that answer, that’s worth a conversation, not a guess. I work with organisations to bring this directly to their teams, either through Recode. Rise. Reclaim. as a group booking, or through a dedicated session built for your team specifically.

If you’d like to talk through what that could look like for your business, book a 15-minute call: https://empower-u-coaching.com/

Or bring your team to Recode. Rise. Reclaim. on 5 December in Sydney, with group rates available: https://event.empower-u-coaching.com/