Wellbeing is no longer a sentiment. It’s a test of how organisations are run

Across Culture Amp’s global benchmarks, employee confidence that leaders demonstrate that employee wellbeing is important (defined as having the appropriate working conditions, opportunities and resources to thrive at work and in their personal lives), has declined steadily over the past five years, falling seven percentage points since 2021. This decline has occurred even as organisations have expanded wellbeing initiatives and leadership development efforts. 

The pressure inside organisations remains real as teams are pushed to do more with less. Nearly one in four employees globally reports feeling overstressed at work. Three in ten say they don’t feel comfortable sharing how they are really feeling, which is a deterioration over recent years. Burnout rates climb, costing $5m per year in lost productivity. These are persistent signals that the structure of work itself has not materially changed.

What’s telling is where employees place responsibility. Almost nine in ten say their manager is available for support. That suggests wellbeing challenges aren’t primarily about care or connection at an individual level. They are about volume, prioritisation and pace; the cumulative effect of meetings, competing priorities and work that expands without clear boundaries.

In other words, wellbeing is being shaped less by how leaders show up in conversations, and more by how work is managed. As the year progresses, momentum takes over. New priorities are added without old ones being removed. Standing meetings continue by default. Everything remains important, so nothing is protected.

Over time, employees draw clear conclusions about what the organisation actually values. The consequences are measurable and uneven. Women are consistently less likely than men to feel able to take time off when unwell, and less likely to feel safe taking risks at work. These are not peripheral indicators. They are core conditions for learning, innovation and sustainable performance. When these gaps persist, organisations are not just undermining wellbeing – they are constraining capability and narrowing the range of ideas they can draw on.

Employees don’t need more empathy. They need clearer and more open decisions about how work is designed and bounded. 

Acknowledging that work design requires ongoing refinement and adjustments, in my own team at Culture Amp, we regularly step back and look at the mechanics of work itself, informed by data and insights to help us focus attention on where best to act. Some guiding principles that shape this process:

1. Be explicit about goals and priorities: Teams experience less overload and execute more effectively when leaders are clear about what matters most, and as a result, limit how many priorities can run at the same time.

2. Remove work as deliberately as you add it: Overload is driven less by new initiatives than by the failure to formally stop low-value projects, legacy priorities and standing meetings.

3. Make trade-offs visible: When leaders are explicit about what will not be done, employees are more confident that priorities are real and better able to focus their effort.

4. Treat meeting load as a productivity variable: High meeting density correlates strongly with stress and reduced focus. Reducing frequency and attendance has an immediate impact on energy and execution.

5. Manage work as a finite system: Wellbeing and performance improve when organisations treat time, attention and energy as constrained resources, not infinitely expandable ones.

As pressure builds through the year, organisations that address this early will be better positioned to sustain performance. When leaders are willing to manage work as a finite system, wellbeing stops being an aspiration and becomes what it actually is: a direct outcome of how the organisation is run. 

Justin Angsuwat is the chief people and customer engagement officer at Culture Amp