Business is not perfect. But it is essential.
That is how the Institute of Directors frames the role of enterprise in society: business thrives when leaders think long-term and act for the many, driving jobs, investment and innovation that sustain resilient societies.
So here is the uncomfortable question for CEOs: if business is essential to a resilient society, why are so many workplaces still designed in ways that deplete the very humans they depend on?
This is the leadership blind spot.
Wellbeing was never meant to be a bolt-on
Human sustainability is not an employee benefits package. It is not a wellbeing week, a mindfulness app, an EAP, or a webinar squeezed between two impossible deadlines.
Human sustainability is the deliberate design of work, leadership, culture, systems and accountability so that people can stay healthy, connected, purposeful and able to contribute over time.
For too long, workplace wellbeing has been treated as something bolted onto the side of the business. A soft initiative. A HR project. A nice thing to do when budgets allow.
The evidence is already clear
Nearly two decades after Dame Carol Black’s 2008 Working for a Healthier Tomorrow review, she reflected at the Work Foundation’s recent health and work summit that many of the problems identified then are still with us. “The structural problems have not gone away,” she said. She also warned that we have “fiddled at the edges” with fragmented initiatives rather than building a system capable of lasting change.
Her statement hits home because it is true.
We do not need another report to tell us we have a problem. We do not need another glossy guidance document that employers can quietly ignore. We do not need more awareness without authority, more standards without capability, or more campaigns that never touch the boardroom for accountability.
The evidence cupboard is already groaning.
Britain’s Healthiest Workplace data shows lost productivity has more than doubled since 2014, with the average UK employee losing 49.7 days of productive time in 2023 due to absenteeism and presenteeism. Lost productivity due to ill health is estimated to have cost the UK economy £860 billion between 2014 and 2023.
The New Economics Foundation’s work on wellbeing at work points us towards the answer: wellbeing is shaped by personal resources, organisational systems, functioning at work, and people’s lived experience of work. In other words, this is not about fixing employees. It is about designing better conditions for human beings to function well and feel good.
The CEO’s blind spot
This is where CEOs come in.
The blind spot exists because many senior leaders still see wellbeing as downstream: sickness absence, EAP usage, burnout recovery, mental health first aid, exit interviews. Necessary, yes. But too often reactive.
Human sustainability asks a braver question: what are we designing upstream that is making people unwell in the first place?
Work-related stress is not a fluffy issue. The Health and Safety Executive is clear that employers have a legal duty to protect their workers’ health and to protect them from work-related stress by assessing the risk and acting on it, just as they would with any other health and safety risk. There is no health without mental health.
Yet psychological health still does not receive the same seriousness as physical safety in too many organisations. A broken machine gets isolated, investigated and repaired. A broken culture gets rebranded as benefits and rewards packages.
This is bigger than the workplace
Policy makers have responsibility. Regulators have responsibility. Employers have responsibility. But so do all of us.
Wellbeing is not only shaped inside the workplace. It is shaped by poverty, trauma, loneliness, inequality, housing, financial insecurity, relationships, physical health, mental health, purpose and whether people feel the world around them is collapsing faster than they can cope.
These systems are interconnected. Policy, business, society and the individual are not separate boxes. They are one living system. Pull one thread and the whole fabric moves.
That is why I welcome the work Dame Carol Black continues to do on work and health. It is also why I contribute to the Policy Liaison Group on Workplace Wellbeing, a cross-sector forum convened by College Green Group that brings employers, providers and policy makers around the same table to understand how decisions land in real workplaces.
And it is why I am thankful for my working-class Northeast upbringing. It has given me 48 years of insight, grit, experience, determination and purpose. I have lived and worked inside systems that failed people. I have also seen what happens when systems are redesigned to help people thrive.
From awareness to collective action
The first decade of workplace wellbeing was about awareness.
The next must be about collective action.
As my book launches on 7 July, my message to CEOs is simple: human sustainability is not a side project. It is business strategy. It is moral, financial and legal responsibility. It is how we protect people, strengthen organisations, support the economy and build a society worth working in.
Take one thing from this article: you are part of the solution, if you choose to be.
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