A logistics company with 100+ employees cut their entire wellbeing budget just as they entered a restructure. A financial services firm, at their last financial year budgeting round, decided to keep theirs “ticking over” with no expectation of outcomes. Both believed they were making the right call. Both decisions looked reasonable at the time. Both are now costing them — just in very different ways: one in rising absence and grievances, the other in a missed opportunity to turn wellbeing into the competitive advantage it could have been.
If you’re the senior leader who signs off the wellbeing budget, this will probably sound familiar: wellbeing programmes that don’t deliver clear results, boards asking harder questions about ROI, and a nagging sense that despite good intentions, something fundamental isn’t working.
You’re not alone. Over the past seven months, we’ve conducted original research with twelve senior leaders across sectors – from SMEs to global organisations – who hold budget responsibility for wellbeing. Separately, we’ve worked directly with organisations facing these exact challenges. What emerges is a clear pattern: many leaders already know what good looks like – wellbeing as a strategic function, not just a set of initiatives. Getting there, though, is a steep learning curve. It takes a real shift in thinking at every level of the organisation – in ownership, in manager capability – and that shift has to happen alongside the day-to-day pressures already facing the business. In times of crisis, there’s a natural pull away from that longer-term work and towards the immediate fix: cutting budgets, pausing investment, deferring the harder change. That’s exactly why wellbeing is often the first thing cut under pressure, and, when times are good, rarely the thing that gets the sustained attention needed to embed it properly.
The Wellbeing Theatre problem
Here’s where that gap shows up in practice. Even leaders who know wellbeing should be strategic often find it defaults to a checklist – EAPs, mental health first aiders, awareness days, health checks. Tick those boxes, and it can look like wellbeing is being done.
Running initiatives isn’t the same as having a strategy. It’s wellbeing theatre – visible, well-intentioned, and almost impossible to connect to a result.
The logistics company had run health promotion initiatives for three years. They had an EAP. They had mental health first aiders. And when the board asked what outcomes those programmes had delivered, HR couldn’t answer. So the budget was cut – right when sickness absence was climbing, grievances were increasing, and nine line managers across two sites were each managing their teams differently, creating a culture of unfairness and mistrust.
Some managers excelled at checking in with their team and had a high level of awareness, whilst others felt uncomfortable having these conversations and even felt that they weren’t relevant at work. Others still felt fearful of potential repercussions for mental health if they had to have a conversation about performance. This led to them taking on a disproportionate amount of work themselves to compensate, putting themselves under undue stress.
They cut their wellbeing budget specifically when they needed it most – because they didn’t realise how wellbeing could actually have worked. Not through webinars and workshops, but by clearly identifying the issues and prioritising steps to address them. Top of the list would have been line manager training to improve consistency and help staff through the period of change.
The financial services firm tells a different story. Around 350 employees. No official wellbeing role, but wellbeing driven by four enthusiastic employees who organised health checks and menopause awareness training. When it came to renewing the budget, senior leaders decided to keep it “ticking over.” They believed it was the right thing to do – but hadn’t yet made the shift from seeing wellbeing as something organisations are simply expected to provide, to seeing it as a strategic lever in its own right. That shift hadn’t happened yet, so nobody expected or questioned the outcomes.
In reality, they were missing an opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Like many in financial services, they were competing hard for a narrow pool of specialist skills, and attracting that talent had become a strategic priority. But whilst they were spending budget on wellbeing, nobody had responsibility for translating that business challenge into a wellbeing strategy that could actually support it. With the right owner in place, a clear vision could be communicated across the company, working towards a reputation as an employer of choice.
Both organisations were still early on that learning curve: activity was still a stand-in for strategy, and the business potential of getting wellbeing right hadn’t yet been recognised.
What senior leaders actually think about wellbeing
Here’s what our research found: senior leaders don’t see wellbeing as competing with performance – they see the two as mutually reinforcing. But the gap between that belief and what’s actually happening on the ground is vast.
The leaders we spoke to described four critical insights:
1. Wellbeing does not equal comfort – it includes challenge
Leaders described a shift away from “fruit on Fridays” and towards creating environments where people genuinely thrive. But that includes constructive challenge. One leader put it this way:
“People need to be challenged and stretched. And when that’s not the case, people get stagnant, they get dissatisfied.”
Environments that fail to foster accountability, or that never ask people to grow beyond their comfort zone, lead to disengagement. Work, when well-designed, is protective – it provides structure, meaning, and even relief from pressures outside the workplace.
2. Wellbeing must align with business realities
Leaders operate under real commercial pressure. Wellbeing investment must be justified in business terms – not as a cost, but as protection against turnover, absence, presenteeism, and reputational risk.
Leaders also described the limits of employer responsibility. One leader captured something we heard repeatedly – employees treating personal boundaries as non-negotiable, even when it leaves colleagues exposed:
“Well, I’ve got the gym, so Byeee! My wellbeing is more important than yours. When you manage 7 or 10 people, there’s a real issue around how we empower leaders to navigate that balance.”
3. Wellbeing and performance are mutually reinforcing – when done right
High performance achieved at the cost of wellbeing is not sustainable. One leader said:
“If you want a productive workforce, then you have to have well employees. Where organisations are focused solely on results, it doesn’t bode well long term.”
But sustainable performance requires three conditions: consistency and reach across the workforce, clear strategic alignment to business objectives, and a culture that goes well beyond supporting those in crisis, aiming instead to maximise flourishing for the majority – for example, by celebrating role models for what good looks like.
4. Maturity is built on fundamentals, not initiatives
Leaders described a clear progression: from isolated initiatives to structural investment in the conditions that make wellbeing possible – psychological safety, fair workload, good management, clear processes.
The foundation is line manager capability. Managers are the translators who turn policy into daily behaviour. But they’re increasingly expected to balance genuine care with performance accountability, and many feel underequipped.
One of the more striking findings: a growing concern that wellbeing culture has created environments in which difficult but necessary conversations are being avoided for fear of causing harm. One leader described it as the “paralysis problem”:
“You can become paralysed by it. You need to know when to push and when to support.”
What to do instead
If you’re the senior leader who decides whether wellbeing gets investment or gets cut, here’s where to start:
Step 1: Identify the actual problems. Stop assuming. Conduct a psychosocial risk assessment. Map where stress, unfairness, and inconsistency are showing up. The logistics company had nine line managers taking nine different approaches – and it showed, in the grievances, the absence, and a growing sense among staff that the support they got depended entirely on who happened to manage them. Left unaddressed, that kind of inconsistency undermines everything else you go on to invest in.
Step 2: Give wellbeing a strategic owner. Wellbeing cannot be driven by enthusiastic volunteers or delegated entirely to HR. It needs a professional who can connect wellbeing to business objectives and articulate the case in the boardroom.
Step 3: Invest in line manager capability. Train managers not just on wellbeing conversations, but on how to balance care with accountability. Give them permission to challenge upward and push back on unrealistic demands. This is the single most important variable in whether wellbeing reaches employees in practice.
Step 4: Align wellbeing to your strategic objectives. As the leader, this changes the question you ask. Not “what wellbeing initiatives should we fund?” but “what does our talent strategy actually require from our culture – and is our wellbeing spend building that, or just running alongside it?” Set that expectation, and wellbeing programmes get judged – and defended – on the same terms as any other strategic investment.
Step 5: Measure what matters – and accept that some things can’t be measured. Standard metrics (absence rates, EAP usage, survey scores) are useful but insufficient in connecting the dots to business outcomes. Get clarity on the business objective first, and the wellbeing measure follows. If the objective is attracting key talent, the business measure might be offer-acceptance rate or employer-brand ranking; the wellbeing measure that feeds it is something like sentiment in exit interviews and employee reviews, specifically about how people are managed and supported. Leaders in our research consistently said what they value most can’t be captured this way at all: the energy in a room, the spring in people’s step, the sense of pride and purpose. Start with the business objective, and the right wellbeing measure becomes obvious rather than arbitrary.
The real cost of getting this wrong
“We don’t have the budget for this right now.” You’re not choosing between spending and not spending – you’re already paying, in absence, turnover, disengagement. The only real choice is whether that spend is deliberate. The logistics company cut their wellbeing budget during a restructure – exactly when they needed it most. The cost of not addressing wellbeing (high absence, grievances, turnover, reputational damage) is higher than the cost of doing it well.
“We’ve tried wellbeing programmes before and they didn’t work.” That’s often true – because most “programmes” were never designed as strategy to begin with. The tools weren’t wrong; they were deployed without ownership, alignment, or manager capability behind them.
The bottom line
Wellbeing is not about running initiatives or keeping a budget “ticking over.” It’s about creating the conditions for people to genuinely thrive – and that requires identifying the actual problems, giving wellbeing strategic ownership, investing in line manager capability, and aligning wellbeing to business objectives.
When done right, wellbeing and performance are mutually reinforcing. When done wrong, wellbeing becomes theatre – expensive, ineffective, and the first thing cut when pressure mounts.
The organisations that get this right don’t treat wellbeing as separate from business strategy. They treat it as foundational.
Join us for the full research findings
On Tuesday 25 November, 9:30am – 12:00 noon, we’ll be presenting the full findings from our research into what senior leaders really think about workplace wellbeing, along with the ‘so what?’ – practical insights for leaders to apply within their organisation. Register your interest now and we’ll let you know when the event is open for bookings.
About the author:
After a 15-year corporate career, Angela Steel retrained in nutrition in 2009 and gained an MSc in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck in 2023. She is the founder of SuperWellness, a company that partners with leaders of organisations looking to cultivate a compassionate, high-performance culture. Many organisations are struggling with wellbeing programmes that don’t deliver clear results. That’s exactly what we address, by providing a clear roadmap to outcomes that are unique to your organisation. Our vision is a world where good work is celebrated as a force for flourishing, not just preventing harm. Connect with me on LinkedIn
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