Has organizational wellbeing peaked?

Alarmingly, Canadian workers are looking more stressed and less sure about why their work matters these days, according to a recent study. 

Overall wellbeing in Canada sits at 43.7 out of 100, with a 15-per-cent drop in workers’ sense of purpose in only six months, according to a report by Dialogue Health Technologies. And Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report puts global engagement at just 21 per cent — which has flattened since the pandemic after years of increases — with lost productivity draining US$438 billion from the world economy in a single year. 

In Canada, productivity has been declining for decades, as real GDP per capita has dropped from 3.5 per cent in the early 1970s to just under 0.5 per cent currently, according to BMO Capital Markets. 

In the US and Canada, only about a third of employees are engaged at work, according to the report. And when the “why I’m here” belief collapses, productivity follows. Higher absence, slower teams, and rising safety incidents are now business problems, not just HR headaches.

So, can business leaders stop the wellbeing plummet and jolt their organization’s productivity — or has wellness peaked? And if they can’t reverse the wellness slide, is the cost of doing nothing even higher for productivity? 

Strategic investment in mental health, wellbeing 

“We need to be very strategic around pitching the investment and funding towards mental health,” says Tammy Sergie, Chief HR and Privacy Officer at mental health and addiction treatment organization EHN Canada.

“There’s a lot of dialogue around the importance of mental health and the impact it has on businesses and why, but we need to be strategic around positioning the value in front of the decision-makers — we need to look at other metrics that are measurable in the world of people, like turnover and productivity, and ways that better track the cost of absenteeism in our organizations.”  

Sergie believes that until HR leaders can “monetize some of the symptomatic reactions” to the impact of poor mental health, wellbeing will stay a poster on the wall instead of a line on the CEO’s dashboard. 

“The reality is that mental health is multifaceted and you can't segregate a human into specific buckets," she says. “An individual in the workplace is still an individual and a whole, so their financial well-being, their emotional well-being, and their physical well-being is all one well-being, so employers need to find a way to invest in all aspects of that relationship with their employees.” 

The real cost of stress and disengagement 

Dialogue’s data shows Canadians rating mental health, sleep, financial security, work environment and work-life balance as critical to their well-being, yet roughly a third feel negative about each and say things have worsened over the past year. At the same time, Gallup finds workers in North America among the most stressed in the world, with stress now tied less to personal resilience and more to how organizations are run. 

Translate that to a large organization — if stress and weak purpose push even 10 per cent of staff into chronic absences, burnout, or quiet quitting, it’s not just a morale issue. The organization may have to deal with understaffed shifts, missed deadlines, more safety incidents, and managers burning time replacing people instead of delivering strategy, according to Sergie. 

If the wellbeing slide is going to be slowed or even reversed, HR leaders are the ones who have the data that can reveal the pain points.

“There are nuances and data points available to the HR team and we need to learn to be more strategic around how we use that data,” she says. “And then put that monetized big picture to the board and the executive team and really continue to lobby the importance of the investment in this particular initiative.” 

In a large organization, those signals are louder: clusters of disability claims that quietly push benefits premiums up; whole teams with rising sick time; voluntary resignations where employees walk away without another job: “Are you leaving an organization without a job? That, to me, is an indicator that a person likely got to a point of burnout or breaking point,” says Sergie. 

A C-suite scorecard for wellbeing 

With employee wellbeing flattening and productivity declining, HR leaders need to turn wellbeing into a hard metric that sits beside other organizational statistics as something that can boost the bottom line, says Sergie. 

“Monetizing it is the only way the CEOs truly understand it,” she says. “That’s where you need to convert the experience into tangible metrics and data and be able to make the pitch for actively building a culture of wellbeing to the CEOs of the world who may not correlate the direct relation of mental health to the loss of dollars.”  

Sergie’s blueprint for a wellbeing scorecard uses data HR already has: engagement survey items that ask directly about mental health and workload; payroll and time data to compare sick time to workable hours; turnover with a sharp focus on exits without a destination role; disability incidence linked to premiums; and utilization and awareness of existing supports, from EAP and mental health coverage to paid time off and parental top-ups.

“We could actually track the details of mental health versus physical health, and just having an opportunity to track a variety of different metrics and the movement of humans within organizations, and trying to monetize the actual ROI of investing into preventative mental health measures,” she says.  

To determine if building wellbeing can make a difference to the bottom line, HR leaders must move beyond counting yoga participants and instead calculate the cost of doing nothing, says Sergie. 

For example, she has seen HR leaders blindsided when “manageable” disability volumes later stop them upgrading benefits because insurers rate their risk as too high. “Those disability cases that you thought were manageable, it’s just 12 people, it’s not a big deal, might actually cost you and prevent you from being able to buy and afford better benefits for the people that are working,” she says.  

Making culture and productivity pull in the same direction 

If the numbers are the ticket into the C-suite, culture is what turns those metrics into action, says Sergie. An earlier Dialogue study points to a structural problem: 9 in 10 employees say support for wellbeing is important, but less than half see meaningful action from their organization. 

For Sergie, leadership behaviour is the jumping-off point. “In order for the numbers to really take on a life of their own, it’s important that the organization really looks at it from a cultural perspective, that it understands mental health is health and we want to have an open dialogue with our employees,” she says. “That starts with the folks at the very top and goes all the way to every individual that plays a role in an organization.”  

One of Sergie’s clearest examples is a Costco worker whose complex mental health issues had pushed him onto disability.

“This individual struggled for a while — he was on disability and he thought he wasn't going to come back, he was just going to get to the point of retirement — he did his best to navigate through whatever life had served him, but instead his team insisted on sending him into treatment,” she says. “He came back a completely renewed man — he’s a poster child in terms of branding and positive feedback about his employer, and he’s the person they use for onboarding and the culture champion in that location.”  

Stories like that — where the organization’s investment in the worker’s wellbeing paid back more than twice the cost of the treatment — may move executives, but Sergie is clear that narrative alone is not enough. She says HR leaders have to frame deteriorating wellbeing the way operations treats a safety breach — as an incident that demands immediate action. 

Initiatives tied to measurable outcomes 

Sergie points out that building a culture of wellbeing isn’t necessarily about asking for new budget allocations — the work can be about redeploying rather than always asking for new budget. Underused perks should be clawed back and reinvested in high-impact mental health and sense-of-purpose initiatives, tied directly to measurable outcomes like absence, turnover, engagement and claim patterns, she says: “You might actually realize you’re in a better place than you think.”  

With Gallup warning that disengagement now costs the global economy close to nine per cent of GDP and Dialogue flagging a steep slide in Canadians’ sense of purpose, the idea of “peak well-being” may be a red herring — but it could get worse with inaction, says Sergie.

“If we’re not investing into the program now, as employers and as a society, we’re only going to see that multiply and compound, and I think right now is the right time to ring the bells,” she says. 

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in March focuses on mental health. Full coverage can be found here.