Introduction

I look at wellness as: Do I have time to do my job well? Do I have things that I can do outside of work that are supported? Is there that feeling of family first, health first, and being a well-rounded individual? That, to me, is what wellness is from leadership. To have that comfort level of being able to have a well-rounded life. Sort of that saying: "Sound body, sound mind." I often feel like it's "Sound personal life, sound work life." And sometimes I do believe that it's [all] just life. It's not work, it's not personal, it's just my life. And I appreciate a boss and a leader that isn't saying I can do that but also lives it themselves.

-Mia, recruiting and training consultant, study participant

Consider for a moment Jayme, a talented veterinarian who is working long hours at her new clinic. The clinic is experiencing a big influx of new patients this year, keeping the staff extremely busy. Most people are working overtime and are exhausted. Employees recently completed an employee survey and were honest about feeling burned out. In response, the human resources team decided to launch training to improve employee wellness. They sent Jayme and her team members a link to a mandatory, online, four-hour resilience training. Jayme was told she had a week to complete the training, even though she had no time during work hours. Despite being depleted of energy by the end of the workweek, Jayme had to finish the training over the weekend to meet the deadline.

If you were Jayme, how would you feel? Would you feel heard by HR or frustrated? Do you think this solution would work? If you think this solution seems unreasonable and unhelpful, you aren't alone. Unfortunately, this is based on a true story-and the real-life "Jayme" (study participants' names have been changed throughout the book to protect confidentiality) felt extremely frustrated. The training felt like a quick check-the-box solution and didn't provide the real help clinic employees needed. In fact, in some ways, Jayme felt like the training made her wellness worse. She wasn't able to fully disconnect from work over the weekend; instead she had to devote four hours of her recovery time to even more work. This story is just one of many. You probably have your own examples of wellness programs implemented at work that felt more like insults than solutions.

Stories like Jayme's led us to write this book. We heard clients, friends, and colleagues complaining about stress at work, burnout, and the resulting impact on their companies, jobs, and well-being. No one seemed to know how to solve the problem. So we embarked on a hunt for the answers. We dug into the research, searching for concrete guidance to help. Although we found some great science that we will share throughout the book, there were still some unanswered questions. Even more concerning, there was no clear roadmap to follow to create a thriving work environment. Thus, we stepped in to bridge that gap.

At the heart of our research, we found that there's a mismatch between how employees and organizations define the term "wellness." Consider what wellness means to you. We asked this simple question to dozens of employees and got a range of responses-from a feeling of balance, to being seen as a whole person, to being able to turn the Zoom camera off and take a walk during a meeting. But one theme rang true throughout the data we gathered: Wellness is not an initiative or a program. Instead, we learned that wellness is improved when employees' day-to-day work conditions support their health and happiness, not a surface-level approach for addressing an otherwise stressful or overwhelming work environment. Yet so much of what companies invest in when they try to promote wellness focuses on individual-level, blanket solutions that address the by-products of stress and burnout instead of addressing the root causes of these workplace problems. This book is here to change how companies take action to improve workplace wellness.

Luckily, our data showed a clear path forward for creating the wellness-focused workplaces employees are looking for. Leaders are the most critical force in determining whether employees feel vital and energized at work, or if they feel depleted and exhausted instead.

Leaders Are the Key to Driving Workplace Wellness

Leaders in modern organizations are put under extreme pressure to drive the bottom line and shareholder value. At times, it can seem like that's the only thing that organizations want leaders to achieve. A report by Deloitte showed that 41 percent of leaders are stressed and 36 percent are exhausted.1 Seventy percent of leaders don't even want to be leaders anymore because they are so unwell. At the same time, C-suites and boards are asking leaders to prioritize navigating uncertain economic conditions and strategically managing capital.2 When leaders are already exhausted and stretched for time, it's no wonder that they often let employee wellness take a backseat to other, seemingly more important priorities.

At the heart of this conundrum is a simple fact: Most leaders view economic growth and financial management as being at odds with cultivating employee health and well-being. And they often believe they are already doing enough for employees. So, they push the responsibility for taking care of employees' wellness to their employer, hoping that a preexisting employee assistance program or a mindfulness session will fix the problem. But this approach is shortsighted. Indeed, organizations have also largely failed to crack the code on what promotes employee wellness at work. Most often, employers address employees' health and wellness through a set of perks or add-on initiatives that they believe signal that they care about employees' well-being. Currently, organizations are investing countless dollars in wellness solutions to align with employees' expectations and to help their employer brand stand out among competitors. These investments are becoming even more commonplace as new generations enter the workforce. Indeed, corporate wellness is an extremely large, and rapidly growing, industry. The global corporate wellness market was valued at $53 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a rate of 4.47% each year until 2030.3 But is this money well spent?

The sad reality is that wellness-related metrics are not improving-rather, they are declining. The data suggests that employees are increasingly burned out. The dollars spent on wellness do not seem to be decreasing levels of exhaustion, stress, and burnout. Even companies that have invested heavily in wellness initiatives have struggled with a lack of results associated with those investments. More than half of U.S. workers report feeling exhausted and depleted of energy on the job, leading to extreme financial losses due to turnover and decreased productivity. In 2022, Gallup estimated the global cost of burnout to be $322 billion.4 All of this data points to one bleak reality: Many organizations are failing to provide environments that help their employees to thrive. We argue that this is because wellness spending is being wasted on programs and initiatives that provide temporary solutions for persistent problems instead of preventing them from happening in the first place. If organizations want to attract, retain, and support happy, productive employees, they have to solve the puzzling gap between resources dedicated to wellness and their intended outcomes. Erroneously, many organizations assume this gap is an indicator that supporting employee health and wellness isn't profitable. This isn't the case-it's just that organizations have been focusing their time and money on the wrong solutions. Leaders are the heart of employee wellness, and they need to be developed appropriately to support their team's well-being while still boosting profits. When leaders recognize that their priorities of economic and financial growth are inherently linked with supporting employee health and wellness, they approach wellness strategically and from the top down.

When we talk to leaders working in companies struggling to support employee wellness, they often tell us they are trying more of the same: meditation programs for employees, step challenges, healthy cooking classes, or training on work-life balance strategies. These popular programs aren't inherently bad, but leaders also share that they don't seem to be fixing the problem. Leaders who truly consider what makes employees happy and healthy on the job aren't surprised to find out that popular wellness solutions fail to drive results. Yet searches for other remedies often leave these leaders empty-handed. A comprehensive employee wellness solution doesn't seem to exist. What should these leaders do?

We wondered the same thing. Now, in Leading for Wellness, we show you the answer. In short, leaders must go beyond the common, bottom-up solutions aimed at individual employees. We argue that these solutions tend to have limited impact because they ignore broader cultural and contextual features that are depleting wellness on a larger scale. In some instances, employers seem to blame employees for their wellness struggles, instead of taking ownership for creating a work environment that better supports employee thriving. This situation can be frustrating for...