For the past 18 months, we’ve been asking the people who hold the budget and carry the accountability for workplace wellbeing a simple question: what do you really think? Not what a strategy document says, but what they see happening in their own organisations.
The research, supervised by Professor Gail Kinman, had two phases. First came in-depth interviews with 12 senior leaders across sectors including legal, manufacturing, transport, facilities management and not-for-profit, from SMEs to global multinationals. We shared the findings from those interviews earlier this year. We then surveyed 71 senior leaders to test what we’d heard on a larger scale. We’ll present the full findings from both phases at our online Research Briefing on 25 November, but I wanted to give you a first look here at how the two fit together, because some of what we found challenges the way our industry talks about wellbeing.
Belief isn’t the problem
If you assume senior leaders still need convincing that wellbeing matters, the data says otherwise. More than nine in ten told us wellbeing is critical to their organisation’s success, and around eight in ten believe it has a significant impact on financial performance.
Ask whether wellbeing is truly embedded in everyday decisions and practice, though, and the picture changes. Fewer than one in six say it is. Only around one in ten have actually seen the financial impact they believe in, and roughly a third feel confident they could measure it.
So the gap isn’t between leaders who care and leaders who don’t. It’s between intention and follow-through. Commercial pressure was the barrier leaders mentioned most, and the interviews showed how it plays out. When budgets are tight and targets loom, wellbeing ends up running alongside the business rather than inside it.
Initiatives get launched, but the harder work of changing how decisions are made, how managers lead and what gets measured is put off until things calm down. In most organisations, things rarely calm down. One leader summed up the cost of pushing people too hard: “You might get short bursts of productivity, but the longevity is short.”
Fewer initiatives, stronger foundations
We asked leaders to rank eight priorities for wellbeing. Psychological safety came top. Benefits and one-off initiatives came last.
That matches what we heard in the interviews. Many leaders described a shift in their own thinking, away from perks and apps and towards creating an environment where people can thrive. Several were frustrated by the sheer number of products and providers competing for attention, each offering a new tool as the answer. As one put it, “Everyone thinks they can do well-being.”
Initiatives still have a place. They just can’t carry the weight of a strategy on their own, and when they’re all an organisation has, it’s no surprise the results are hard to see. Independent evidence points the same way: a 2024 Oxford study of more than 46,000 UK workers found that individual-level interventions such as resilience training made no measurable difference to wellbeing.
Wellbeing isn’t the same as comfort
The finding I find most interesting is how leaders understand psychological safety. They don’t see it as being nice or removing pressure. Nine in ten agreed that wellbeing involves constructively challenging people, not just supporting them. Being stretched, trusted with responsibility and given meaningful work is a big part of what helps people feel capable and motivated.
That matters, because some organisations have come to treat challenge and care as opposites. Leaders pointed out that most people will never reach crisis point; far more will simply drift into feeling disengaged. Mental health support remains essential. But if that’s where our focus ends, we miss the much larger group whose working lives could be better.
Managers are critical but under-equipped
Almost every leader we surveyed said line managers are critical to wellbeing. Fewer than half said their managers have the skills and confidence to support it, and fewer still believed managers can balance wellbeing with performance.
In the interviews, we heard about what I’ve come to think of as a paralysis problem. Some managers are so worried about getting it wrong, or seeming uncaring, that they avoid the conversations that need to happen about workload, performance or absence. That helps nobody, least of all the employee who needs clarity.
Leaders were clear that this won’t be solved by adding wellbeing to a manager’s job description. Managers need time, skills and senior backing. Several also pointed out that how managers are assessed shapes what they prioritise. If wellbeing doesn’t feature in how they’re judged, it’s unlikely to feature much in their decisions.
Change is the weak spot
Of all the working conditions we asked about, the way change is managed scored lowest. Only around half of leaders said change in their organisation is handled with people’s wellbeing in mind.
Given what’s coming, that’s a concern. Restructures, cost pressures and AI adoption are reshaping roles quickly, and these are exactly the moments when wellbeing is most likely to drop out of decisions. They’re also when it matters most. Organisations that treat change management as a wellbeing issue from the start will be in a far better position than those that try to add support afterwards.
What leaders told us they need
When we asked what would do most to raise the credibility of workplace wellbeing, clear standards for what good looks like came top. Leaders weren’t asking for another badge for the website. They wanted to know where they stand, what to prioritise next, and how to show their board the difference it makes. Several also told us how hard it is to compare providers and approaches when there’s no shared benchmark, and how easy it is to mistake activity for progress.
That’s what led us to develop the Flourishing Organisation Standard, an evidence-based accreditation built on this research and a review of 57 wellbeing frameworks from around the world. It sets out 16 components that together make workplace wellbeing work, and make it a driver of performance rather than something that sits alongside it. It’s been shaped by an advisory board of academic and industry experts, and it’s designed to give organisations a clear roadmap and independently verified evidence of progress.
Join us on 25 November
There’s a lot more in the findings than I can fit here, including how leaders define wellbeing in the first place, where responsibility should sit between organisation and employee, and what actually moves wellbeing from good intentions into everyday practice.
On Wednesday 25 November, from 9.30am to 12pm, we’re holding a free online Research Briefing: What do senior leaders really think about workplace wellbeing, and what does it mean for your organisation? Professor Gail Kinman, Elliot Foster and I will present the qualitative and quantitative findings in full, along with practical learnings you can apply in your own organisation. Professor Jim Morgan will then share the first detailed look at the Flourishing Organisation Standard, and a panel of senior leaders will talk about what the findings mean in their world.
If you’re responsible for wellbeing, people strategy or performance in your organisation, I’d love you to join us. Register for your free place here.
About the author
Angela Steel MSc is Founder and CEO of SuperWellness and a Board Advisor on the Flourishing Organisation Standard. Over 15 years, she has worked with more than 1,500 organisations, including Network Rail, the NHS and Loughborough University, helping them build workplace cultures where people thrive. Angela holds a Masters in Organisational Psychology from Birkbeck, where her research on workplace wellbeing leads was presented at the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology Conference. She has since led research into senior leaders’ approach to wellbeing, which forms part of the evidence base for the Standard. Her mission is to help senior leaders build compassionate, high-performance cultures that demonstrate what work, at its best, can be.
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