Burnout, Long Hours and the Big Four People Model
Former Deloitte Malta HR Manager Mikela Fenech Pace talks to Claudine Cassar about workplace culture, staff turnover, career progression & whether the traditional Big Four people model needs to change
Key Takeaways
Mikela Fenech Pace is an HR consultant, executive and team coach who spent three and a half years as HR Manager at Deloitte Malta. During her time at Deloitte, she worked on staff retention, recruitment, training and career development, wellbeing and mental-health initiatives, as well as the restructuring of the firm’s HR function. She now advises organisations and leaders on culture, employee engagement, organisational transformation and team effectiveness.
Full bio at the end of the article.
The Interview
You have worked across very different organisations and now advise leaders and teams. What does a genuinely healthy corporate culture look like to you in practice?
To me, a healthy culture is first and foremost a safe culture — but safety should not be confused with comfort or the absence of accountability. It is a workplace where people can ask questions, challenge respectfully, admit mistakes and receive honest feedback without fear of humiliation or retaliation.
Expectations are clear, objectives are communicated and people are trusted to deliver without being unnecessarily controlled. Success is celebrated, while mistakes are examined for learning rather than used to assign blame. People know where they stand, what is expected of them and how their contribution connects to the wider purpose of the organisation.
Culture is not created through one initiative or a set of values displayed on a wall. It is built through hundreds of small, repeated behaviours — how leaders respond to bad news, whose voice is heard in meetings, whether difficult feedback is delivered with respect, and whether the organisation’s actions match its words.
Healthy cultures are not conflict-free. They are cultures in which disagreement can be handled constructively, accountability is fair and people retain a genuine sense of belonging.
During your career, you have been responsible for introducing initiatives around wellbeing, mental health and staff retention. What have those experiences taught you about what employers can do to make people genuinely feel supported and valued?
The workplace has become increasingly complex. The old idea that people should leave their personal lives at the door was never entirely realistic, but it is even less so today. Employees are navigating financial pressure, caring responsibilities, mental-health challenges and, in some cases, domestic abuse or other serious personal circumstances. Workplaces are also more culturally and generationally diverse, so people may experience and express support very differently.
This raises an important question — where does an employer’s responsibility begin and end? An organisation cannot solve every problem in an employee’s life, nor should it attempt to do so. It can, however, create the conditions in which someone feels safe enough to ask for help and is directed towards appropriate support.
Wellbeing initiatives have value, but they cannot compensate for unhealthy workloads, poor management or a culture in which people are afraid to speak. Employees feel valued when they are listened to, treated fairly, given clarity and supported by managers who notice when something has changed.
A strong HR function is vital, particularly when it has credibility at board level while remaining connected to employees on the ground. But HR cannot own wellbeing or culture alone. Leaders set the tone, managers shape the daily experience, and HR must be willing to advise, challenge and, where necessary, hold the organisation to account. Support becomes credible when responsibility is shared and words are consistently matched by action.
When you see burnout in the workplace, what are usually the underlying causes? How much comes down to individual resilience, and how much to the way work itself is organised?
We need to be careful not to use “burnout” as a catch-all term for every period of pressure or tiredness. Work will sometimes be demanding, particularly in professional services. The concern arises when intense pressure becomes chronic, recovery becomes impossible and the individual feels they have little control or support.
Burnout is rarely explained by one factor. Excessive workload matters, but so do unpredictability, conflicting priorities, limited autonomy, poor management, insufficient recognition and a perceived lack of fairness. Even highly resilient people can struggle when they remain in a badly designed system for long enough.
Different people also have different capacities at different stages of their lives. That is not simply a generational issue or a question of toughness. Health, caring responsibilities, experience, personal circumstances and the level of control someone has over their work will all influence how pressure is experienced.
The answer is not to remove every demanding situation. It is to build sufficient elasticity into the workplace: clearer priorities, realistic resourcing, periods of recovery, sensible flexibility and honest conversations about capacity before performance begins to deteriorate.
Managers are critical here because they are closest to the everyday experience of their teams. They should be able to notice changes in behaviour, energy, quality or engagement and start an appropriate conversation early. Unfortunately, many managers are promoted for technical excellence without ever being trained to recognise or respond to these signs. That is an organisational capability gap, not merely an individual resilience problem.
Do professional-services firms sometimes confuse long hours with commitment? If someone consistently delivers excellent work but does not work late into the night, can that affect how they are viewed when it comes to career progression?
Historically, professional-services firms have sometimes treated visibility and long hours as evidence of ambition and commitment. That is changing, but proximity bias and presenteeism have not disappeared completely.
Long hours may occasionally be necessary, particularly around deadlines, but they are not in themselves evidence of high performance. In fact, consistently excessive hours may indicate unrealistic resourcing, weak prioritisation or a model that depends too heavily on individual sacrifice. Sustainable high performance should be judged through the quality of the work, client impact, reliability, collaboration, judgement and the person’s contribution to developing others.
Someone who consistently delivers excellent work should not have to perform exhaustion to demonstrate commitment. The risk arises when progression decisions rely on impressions — who is always visible, who answers messages late at night or who appears constantly available — rather than clearly defined evidence.
This is why transparent competency frameworks, regular feedback and properly calibrated promotion discussions matter. At every career stage, employees should understand what the next level requires and how their performance will be assessed. When expectations remain unwritten, traditional assumptions about commitment can quietly become criteria for progression.
Professional-services firms rely heavily on junior staff to deliver client work. What challenges can that model create when it comes to managing workload, development and wellbeing?
The professional-services model can offer exceptional early-career development. Junior employees gain exposure to varied clients, demanding assignments and levels of responsibility that may take much longer to acquire elsewhere. When properly supported, that experience can build confidence, judgement and strong professional discipline.
The same model can also create pressure. Junior staff may be balancing client expectations, billable-hour targets, examinations and several managers who all believe their assignment is the priority. Busy periods can become less of a temporary peak and more of a continuous cycle. Development then risks becoming something people are expected to absorb through pressure rather than something deliberately supported through coaching, feedback and protected learning time.
Many younger professionals remain ambitious and prepared to work hard, but appear more willing to question whether long-term exhaustion is a necessary price for professional development. Firms should not interpret that automatically as a lack of commitment. It is an invitation to examine whether the model remains fit for purpose.
AI creates an important opportunity. If technology makes parts of the work faster and more accurate, the benefit should not be measured only through higher margins or increased volume. Some of that efficiency should be reinvested in better learning, more predictable workloads and time for recovery. Otherwise, we risk using technology simply to accelerate an already pressurised system.
How firms distribute the gains created by AI will become a significant test of their culture.
High staff turnover is often treated as an unavoidable feature of the Big Four model. Can firms become so accustomed to continually recruiting and replacing junior staff that they stop questioning why people are leaving?
Some turnover is built into the professional-services model. Firms recruit large graduate cohorts, while the number of senior and partnership positions naturally narrows at each stage. Many people also join knowing that the experience will provide an excellent professional foundation before they move into industry or another career path.
That does not mean all turnover should be treated as inevitable or harmless. The important distinction is between expected movement and regrettable turnover: losing people the firm wanted and needed to retain, particularly because of avoidable problems involving workload, management, fairness or progression.
The reputation of a Big Four firm can itself become a blind spot. When an organisation knows that people will continue to apply and that its alumni generally leave with strong career prospects, it may feel less urgency to question the employee experience. Continual recruitment can mask the organisational cost of continually losing knowledge, relationships and future leaders.
Exit interviews are useful, but only if the data leads to action. Firms should examine patterns by business area, manager, grade, demographic group and stage of tenure. They should also use stay interviews, asking good people what keeps them there and what might cause them to leave before a resignation arrives.
Attrition should not be viewed as an HR statistic alone. It is a leadership, succession and business-performance measure. The question is not simply, “How many people left?” It is, “Who are we losing, why are we losing them, and what does that tell us about the environment we have created?”
What happens to career progression in professional services when people become parents? Do firms still operate, perhaps implicitly, on the assumption that the ideal future partner is someone whose work can take precedence over almost everything else?
Many professional-services firms now have strong parental policies and more flexible working arrangements. The more difficult question is what happens informally after someone becomes a parent.
Career progression may be supported on paper while the unwritten model of the ideal future partner still favours uninterrupted availability, mobility and the ability to prioritise work at short notice. This can affect mothers particularly strongly, but it can also affect fathers and other carers who want to play an active role at home.
The issue is not simply the period of parental leave. Pregnancy, recovery, disrupted sleep, childcare responsibilities and the mental load associated with parenting can all change what an employee needs from the workplace. Firms must be careful that flexibility does not quietly lead to fewer opportunities, less visible assignments or assumptions about a person’s ambition.
We should also question the belief that time away from the office represents an absence of growth. Parenting can strengthen prioritisation, negotiation, empathy, resilience and the ability to make decisions under pressure. These capabilities are highly relevant to leadership, even if they do not appear on a traditional technical career framework.
Employers cannot solve the issue alone, and support should not come at the expense of colleagues who do not have children. The objective is fairness: workloads, flexibility and progression criteria that recognise different lives without creating hidden penalties or unfairly transferring the burden to others.
If you were advising an employer that genuinely wanted to build a healthier workplace without sacrificing high performance, where would you tell them to start?
I would tell them to start at the top — and to begin by looking honestly at what leaders currently model, reward and tolerate.
Culture is shaped by everyday leadership behaviour: the language used under pressure, how meetings are run, whether people can disagree, how bad news is received, and whether senior people respect the boundaries they encourage others to maintain. Employees will follow what leaders do far more readily than what an organisation says.
The next step is to understand the current reality. Listen to employees, examine workload and turnover data, and identify where the experience differs across teams. Often the organisation does not have one culture; it has several microcultures created by individual managers.
I would then invest in those managers. They need the skills to set clear expectations, distribute work fairly, give honest feedback, notice changes in their people and hold both performance and wellbeing in the same conversation.
A healthy workplace is not one that lowers standards. It is one that makes high performance clearer, fairer and more sustainable. The real objective is not to protect people from every period of pressure, but to create an organisation in which pressure has a purpose, support is available and recovery is possible.
Who is Mikela Fenech Pace?
Mikela Fenech Pace is an HR consultant, executive coach and team coach based in Malta. She works with organisations and leaders on organisational transformation, corporate culture, employee engagement, leadership development and team effectiveness.
From 2014 to 2018, she served as HR Manager at Deloitte Malta. Her responsibilities included restructuring and rebuilding the HR department, developing staff-retention and student-recruitment strategies, overseeing training and career-development initiatives, and introducing staff wellbeing and mental-health programmes. She was also involved in the integration of 50 employees following an acquisition and brought together HR representatives from the Big Four firms with Malta’s Ministry of Education and Employment and other stakeholders to work on issues affecting the accountancy profession.
She subsequently served as Human Resources Manager at Alf. Mizzi & Sons Marketing Group, where her work included HR strategy, performance management, recruitment and retention, employer branding, digitisation of HR services, and wellbeing and mental-health programmes. Since 2020, she has worked independently through Upstream, advising businesses on people and organisational issues and providing executive and team coaching.
Earlier in her career, Fenech Pace held senior roles in Malta’s public service and diplomatic corps. She headed the Strategic Policy Secretariat within the Office of the Prime Minister, worked on Malta’s response to the 2011 Libya crisis, headed the Sanctions Unit at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and previously served in diplomatic roles including at Malta’s Embassy in Rome. She has also lectured at the University of Malta on conflict resolution and peace studies.
This article is part of the Big4News Expert Voices Series
Expert Voices
Expert Voices features interviews and guest contributions from former insiders, whistleblowers, academics, regulators and experienced practitioners. The series examines the structures, incentives and professional cultures behind events at Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.
About Claudine Cassar
I’m a corporate anthropologist and former Deloitte equity partner. I sold my technology business to Deloitte in 2016 and led the Malta Consulting team for five years. I am the founder and editor of Big4News, which provides independent, clear analysis of PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG — free from corporate spin.
Find me on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, or my author website.
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