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If a workplace is toxic, can HR actually fix it? And if not HR, then who?

Chris Wilson continues with HR expert Karin Kradischnig, founder of Coaching4HR, on whether broken cultures can be repaired and what it costs the people who try. They are honest about the limits: HR cannot hold a culture together on its own, and leadership accountability is the part nobody can substitute for.

They also talk about how HR people support everyone else without going under themselves.

• Why leadership accountability is the thing change depends on
• Where HR's power to fix a toxic environment actually stops
• What a workplace looks like once trust has been rebuilt rather than declared

Season 1, Episode 13

Part 1 covers how toxic workplaces form and why HR ends up in the middle.

Connect with Karin Kradischnig: https://www.kradischnig.at/ (German) and https://www.linkedin.com/in/karin-kradischnig/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membership

Website: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com/community

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

What makes a workplace toxic, and why does HR so often end up caught in the middle of it?

Karin Kradischnig, HR expert and founder of Coaching4HR, joins Chris Wilson with twenty years of HR and leadership experience behind her. They work through where workplace toxicity actually starts, what it does to the people inside it, and why HR's position is more compromised than most employees realise.

Part 1 is about recognising it: the signs, the silence, and the reasons good people say nothing.

• What defines a toxic workplace, past the word being overused
• The part leadership plays in creating it, or quietly permitting it
• Why employees stay silent even when they can see exactly what is wrong

Season 1, Episode 13

Part 2 continues with accountability, rebuilding trust, and what HR can realistically change.

Connect with Karin Kradischnig: https://www.kradischnig.at/ (German) and https://www.linkedin.com/in/karin-kradischnig/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membership

Website: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com/community

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout recovery is not finished the day you go back. Staying well once you are there is a separate problem, and mostly not one you can solve alone.

Chris Wilson speaks with HR consultant and workplace wellbeing advocate Janina Liensberger-Desnica about what makes recovery hold. They get into the stigma people meet on returning, the gap between a policy that reads well and one that meets an actual human need, and the conditions under which relapse becomes likely.

Janina brings the view from inside HR on what support looks like when it is real rather than performed.

• The stigma people face coming back, and where it actually comes from
• Why flexibility and trust do more for long term recovery than programmes
• The relapse risk when recovery is not supported once someone is back at work

Season 1, Episode 12

Connect with Janina Liensberger-Desnica: https://www.janina-liensberger.com/ (German)

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Returning to work after burnout is often harder than the burnout was.

Chris Wilson is joined by Janina Liensberger-Desnica, a strategic HR consultant working in organisational development, to talk about what happens once the sick note runs out. The self doubt. The guilt. The expectations nobody states but everybody holds, on both sides.

They also talk about the physical side of recovery and what Chris has been exploring about his own, and about what it means to rebuild a sense of who you are at work when the old version is what broke.

• Why going back can feel like a second mountain rather than the finish line
• How shame and guilt show up during reintegration, and who they protect
• What genuine return to work support looks like, beyond a phased plan

Season 1, Episode 11

Connect with Janina Liensberger-Desnica on LinkedIn.

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Supporting someone through burnout recovery costs the person doing the supporting, and HR is rarely given anywhere to put that.

In the second half, Chris Wilson and HR consultant Martina Teufner get into what real recovery support looks like once you accept the limits of the function. Where HR has to hold its own boundaries, what employees actually need before they feel safe again, and why trust and transparency do more than any return to work checklist.

They also talk about peer support, and what a workplace built around people rather than process might look like.

• Supporting recovery without burning out the people doing the supporting
• What makes reintegration feel safe rather than merely permitted
• Peer support at work, and why it reaches places policy cannot

Season 1, Episode 10

Part 1 covers the emotional impact of burnout and what recovery demands.

Connect with Martina Teufner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-teufner/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout recovery does not end when someone returns to work. In a lot of ways that is where the hardest part starts.

Chris Wilson and HR consultant Martina Teufner talk about the emotional reality of walking back into the workplace after burnout: the fears people carry in with them and rarely say aloud, and the distance between a reintegration policy and whether anyone trusts it.

Martina is direct about where HR can genuinely help and where a process on paper does nothing at all.

• What returning after burnout actually feels like from the inside
• The real risk people weigh up before speaking honestly at work
• Why reintegration processes fail, and where HR can be a bridge instead

Season 1, Episode 10

Part 2 continues with recovery culture, HR's own boundaries, and what meaningful change looks like.

Connect with Martina Teufner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-teufner/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Corporate burnout is not about being too busy. It is about what is actually burning you out, which is usually not the hours.

This solo episode goes into the workplace dynamics that build burnout long before anyone reaches collapse. Toxic cultures, expectations nobody says out loud, emotional labour that never appears in a job description, and the gap where leadership should be.

The point is not to let individuals off the hook, it is that treating burnout as a personal failure guarantees the same thing happens to the next person in the role.

• Why overwork is usually a symptom rather than the cause
• How micromanagement and emotional labour do the quiet damage
• What organisations can change to prevent burnout instead of treating it

Season 1, Episode 9

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Preventing burnout means changing what a workplace rewards, not adding something to the wellbeing budget.

Picking up where Part 1 finished, HR consultant Martina Teufner and Chris Wilson work through the how: balancing business targets against the people expected to hit them, training managers to notice burnout early, and building a culture that does not quietly punish the person who admits they are struggling.

They also talk about the fear of speaking up, and why so much of prevention comes down to whether honest conversations are survivable.

• Supporting flexibility without treating performance as the trade
• Why leadership behaviour sets the limit on everything below it
• Toxic silence, and what makes it safe enough to break

Season 1, Episode 8

This is the second half of the conversation. Part 1 covers the foundational risks.

Connect with Martina Teufner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-teufner/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membership

Website: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com/community

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Corporate burnout is not an employee problem. It is a systems problem, and prevention starts with policy rather than perks.

HR consultant Martina Teufner returns to talk with Chris Wilson about what actually prevents burnout before it starts, and what only looks like it does. Drawing on twelve years in HR, she is direct about which interventions work and which are decoration.

They get into rigid structures, leadership that has not moved with the work, and what happens when nobody can find out what the policy actually says.

• The red flags companies routinely miss in their own data
• Work life balance against work life blending, and why the distinction matters
• Why flexible work prevents more burnout than any wellbeing perk

Season 1, Episode 8

Connect with Martina Teufner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-teufner/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout is not only about working too much. It is about feeling unseen, unsupported, and stuck in a system that does not account for you being a person.

In the second half of the conversation, HR consultant Martina Teufner and Chris Wilson go further into why burnout goes unnoticed inside companies, and why the support so often is not there at the moment someone needs it. Martina describes the power imbalance HR works under, caught between looking after people and delivering what the business wants.

They also get into what psychological safety means once you strip the phrase of its corporate use.

• The power imbalance HR professionals work inside, and who it protects
• What a healthy workplace culture actually looks like in practice
• The early signs leaders and HR are best placed to notice

Season 1, Episode 7

Start with Part 1 if you have not heard it.

Connect with Martina Teufner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-teufner/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.