The Workplace Is Making Your Healthcare Workers Sick

Healthcare workers are among the most committed people in any workforce. They chose a profession built around service, often at significant personal cost. High stress, demanding schedules, physical strain, and emotional weight are built into the job description.

What should not be built in is a workplace that makes all of that harder.

JLL recently published global research on frontline workers across industries. The healthcare findings are worth sitting with, especially if you are responsible for the facilities where your clinical and support staff spend their days.

High performance, underserved spaces

Healthcare facility workers report the highest self-assessed performance of any frontline segment in JLL’s study of 3,411 workers across 26 markets. They have a strong sense of purpose and deep commitment to their work.

And yet they are among the least supported by their physical environment.

52% want flexible scheduling. Only 29% have it. That is the largest flexibility gap of any industry in the study. They are asking for quiet spaces to decompress between patients, access to kitchens and outdoor areas, dedicated rest spaces, and ergonomic support. Not perks. Fundamentals.

The building is not a neutral container. It is either working for your people or working against them. Burnout does not happen in a vacuum.

44% of frontline workers are experiencing burnout, higher than office workers at 39%. And the research is direct about something the workplace industry has been slow to acknowledge: the physical environment is a direct contributor, not just a backdrop.

When acoustics are unmanaged, ergonomics are ignored, and there is nowhere to recover between demanding patient interactions, the body and mind absorb that stress over time. Shift after shift.

57% of burned-out frontline workers have caregiving responsibilities outside of work. 63% hold management positions. These are people already carrying a lot. The workplace either helps or it adds to the load.

The retention implications are significant. 48% of highly burned-out employees are considering leaving within the year, compared to 22% overall. That is not a staffing problem. That is a built environment problem.

What it looks like when it works

High-performing frontline environments share common features: ergonomic design that reduces physical strain, managed acoustics and air quality, genuine recovery spaces, access to natural light, and food services that offer real choice.

The organizations getting this right treat wellbeing infrastructure as a core part of the building program from the beginning, not something addressed after the fact. When staff feel like the space was designed with them in mind, performance and retention follow.

The conversation worth having

At Furngully, we work with healthcare clients across New England who are asking these exact questions. How do you design for the people delivering care, not just the people receiving it? How do you make the case for investing in staff spaces with the same intentionality applied to patient-facing areas?

It starts before anything gets specified. It starts with understanding what your people need and what is currently getting in the way.

Watch the full video below to hear more on what the JLL research reveals about healthcare workplace design and what high-performing environments are getting right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morgan is Director of Workplace at Furngully, a New England-based commercial furniture and workplace design firm. With a background spanning commercial real estate advisory, people operations, and C-suite consulting, she works with clients across the Boston market to design environments that perform for the people inside them. She is also the co-founder of The Kita Center, a Southern Maine nonprofit, and host of The Squeaky Wheel, a web series on workplace effectiveness

Source: The Forgotten Workforce: Delivering a high-performance workplace for frontline workers, JLL Research, January 2026. https://www.jll.com/content/dam/jllcom/en/global/documents/others/26-insights-the-forgotten-workforce-delivering-a-high-performance-workplace.pdf