Impact on individuals and the call for change

Challenging workplace conditions and ineffective HRM has profoundly negative impact on individuals doing these jobs

Work life balance is limited, meaning people often have to sacrifice a personal life, and their commitment can lead them to out the mission before anything else, leading to burnout. This is most easily conveyed by heading the words of staffers themselves:

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It was for a long time a viper's nest of bullying and harassment and sexual abuse and #metoo
Politics is so fast paced, and it can eat people out and spit them out
You are just so vulnerable that you live or die on your usefulness from one day to the other, without any sort of objective performance criteria.
I don't know how that system has lasted so long, it’s unacceptable.
Sometimes it feels almost like some sort of eighteenth century feudal system where MPs hand out these jobs.
The period following the naming of cabinet, which is followed almost immediately by chiefs of staff, some of us in Ottawa refer to as the Hunger Games
People put up with a lot of nonsense because they feel privileged to be where they are

There's a high number of women in particular who have had to leave these roles if they want to go and have a family life
But the lifestyle of a special advisers doesn't really lend itself well, particularly in Westminster, to your mid-thirties where you settle down with a big mortgage, kids, family and everything else
It was a lot of just very young staff with very high turnover, and they worked around the clock, and if you were going to have children it was a very hard place to work.

I’m seeing that a lot of my colleagues are very tired and burning out. It's not fair to staffers. We are people too.
Of course you get tired as well. You don't realize until you stepped out and stepped off the treadmill that it's relentless and you're constantly going
I was asked to stay late to work on mental health blogs and collateral and really sacrificed my own mental health in doing so.
Burnout is really high, and that's because there's just no opportunity to take a step back. You don't eat well because you're always on the go, and there's a lot of drinking because that's how you cope.
I've burned out before; I have friends who have burnt out and gone away and other folks who I see are still burning out.
I saw a lot of good people who just burnt out and it wasn't their fault…it was just natural when you're under that amount of pressure for that long of a time.
As a result that you have a massive turnover rate in politics. People come in, work 24 hours a day, burn out, and go on to their next job.
They are hard jobs and people just burn out and they leave
The risk of burnout is high as staff become battered and bruised and unable to keep running on the relentless treadmill whilst being fired at in all directions.
The job was really taking a toll on my health at that point so it was time for me to go
It led me, after basically three years of it, to being really burnt out after my first job.
When they leave they're battered and bruised, and if that is their first experience of paid work, it's a terrible way to start a career.

Developing more positive practices

Nevertheless, more positive practices have been developed by staffers and civil/public servants in their role and are currently under development.

Individuals new in post or those seeking to advance reform can use this site to get ideas for better practices.

For those with access to academic libraries, you might also like to read a book chapter which discusses what managers can do to help people cope with these jobs:

Lees-Marshment, Jennifer (2026) ‘Leading wellbeing practices in Prime Ministers’ Offices’ Chapter 19 in Rethinking Leadership for Clinical, Counselling and Health Psychologists: Managing Complexity and Change for Thriving Workplaces Edited by Amra Saleem Rao Routledge