From Wellness Programs to Workplace Transformation: How Leading Organizations Are Rethinking Workforce Wellbeing

By Jessica Grossmeier, PhD, MPH

For those who lead wellbeing initiatives in their organizations, a familiar frustration often emerges: launching programs employees genuinely want, measuring participation, tracking engagement, yet still wondering why the needle barely moves on burnout and stress. This challenge is widespread. According to McLean & Company’s 2025 research, only 43% of employees say their company’s wellbeing programs effectively meet their needs. Burnout affects 83% of workers, and employee engagement dropped from 88% to 64% in just one year (DHR Global, 2026).

The gap isn’t about effort or quality. Organizations invest heavily in meditation apps, gym memberships, resilience training, and mental health resources. These programs provide real value to individual employees, but they can’t fully counteract a work environment that generates stress faster than any program can address it.

Why Individual Programs Reach Their Limits

Individual wellness programs provide important support, but they operate within constraints when workplace conditions themselves create strain. Think about the logic: programs help employees build resilience and coping skills, which matters. Yet those same employees return to environments where the sources of stress remain unchanged.

Consider a common scenario: an organization offers stress-management workshops while teams operate while understaffed. Employees attend the workshop, learn valuable breathing techniques and mindfulness practices, then return to 60-hour weeks with compressed deadlines. Even with the best intentions, the implicit message can become problematic: wellbeing is something individuals manage on their own, not something organizations address together through how they structure work.

The World Health Organization’s 2022 guidelines on mental health at work recommend that organizations implement interventions targeting working conditions alongside individual support, rather than relying primarily on individual resilience. This dual approach recognizes that both elements contribute to workforce wellbeing, and both deserve attention and resources.

Building on Individual Programs with Systemic Support

The good news is that individual programs need not be abandoned or declared ineffective. Rather, the opportunity lies in enhancing their impact by also addressing how work gets designed and managed. This means examining job design, workload distribution, leadership practices, decision-making autonomy, and team dynamics alongside the individual resources organizations already provide.

A meta-review of more than 50 systematic reviews (covering 957 studies in total) found that organizational interventions improve employee well-being more reliably than individual programs alone. The strongest results came from changes to work schedules and job design. More importantly, combining organizational changes with individual support created longer-lasting improvements than either approach in isolation.

The Work Wellbeing Playbook, developed by the World Wellbeing Movement in collaboration with the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and Indeed, synthesized 3,000+ academic studies to identify six core drivers of workplace wellbeing: development and security, workplace relationships, independence and flexibility, variety and fulfillment, earnings and benefits, and risk/health/safety. These drivers don’t operate independently. A flexible schedule matters less if the workload is crushing. Fair pay helps, but not if the work feels meaningless. Effective wellbeing strategies address multiple drivers simultaneously, recognizing how they interact within specific workplace contexts.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Some organizations are moving beyond piecemeal wellness programs to build wellbeing into how they operate. Their approaches vary based on industry, size, and culture, but share common elements worth examining.

Making Leadership Accountable

Novo Nordisk measures psychosocial risk through regular surveys tracking influence, recognition, meaningfulness, social support, predictability, and balanced demands. In 2024, they set measurable targets for executives to reduce stress levels by 10% year-over-year across their business units. This creates accountability that goes beyond telling managers to “support wellbeing” without defining what that means or tracking results.

Using Data to Find Problems

Banca Transilvania tracks 15 work-related factors through their Employee Engagement Index, including work-life balance, workload stress, process efficiency, and resource availability. Results get shared at team, department, and director levels. Managers review findings with their teams and identify specific improvements. This approach works because it surfaces real issues (insufficient staffing to handle current demand) rather than generic concerns (need for better wellness benefits).

Redesigning Work, Not Just Offering Flexibility

Research shows that work design changes, including workload redistribution, flexible schedules, and autonomy, drive well-being more than perks alone. Organizations like Microsoft and Salesforce treat flexible work as essential to performance, not a perk. Employees get autonomy to manage schedules and locations in ways that let them meet performance goals without sacrificing wellbeing. Microsoft’s Viva Insights platform supports focused work time, meeting-free days, and boundaries around communication. The distinction matters: flexibility means employees can work from home, but redesign means the work itself is structured so they’re not checking email at 10pm regardless of location.

Building Connection Into Work

Leading organizations recognize that workplace relationships are a key driver of wellbeing and performance. They build opportunities for community and connection into work processes and create expectations for conduct that fosters respect, fairness, and collaboration. For example, Accenture has designed office spaces that balance privacy, collaboration, social time, and meetings. But physical space is only part of their approach. Policies cover inclusive dress codes, respectful conduct, community involvement, flexible arrangements, and spaces supporting diverse needs (wellness rooms, interfaith rooms, lactation rooms, all-gender restrooms). The goal isn’t just allowing connection but creating conditions where it naturally develops.

Linking Wellbeing to Business Outcomes

Organizations getting this right measure wellbeing outcomes and connect them to business results. They use employee surveys, pulse checks, engagement scores, and focus groups to track satisfaction, engagement, burnout, work-life balance, and overall wellbeing. Then they link these to employee performance, productivity, financial results, and company reputation.

This creates a business case that resonates with executives who need proof that wellbeing investments deliver returns. Recognition programs like Fortune 100 Great Place to Work, the Health Project’s C. Everett Koop National Health Award, and the Global Healthy Workplace Award identify organizations taking systemic approaches rather than just offering good benefits packages.

The Real Challenges of Implementation

The case examples above are inspiring, but they don’t reveal the journey and commitment required. Most organizations featured in wellbeing articles spent years building these systems. They navigated budget constraints, secured executive buy-in, tested solutions through pilot programs, and addressed employee skepticism stemming from previous wellness initiatives that promised more than they delivered.

Wellbeing leaders face similar challenges that deserve direct acknowledgment. Small organizations can’t simply replicate a Fortune 100 organization’s approach without thoughtful adaptation. A 50-person company doesn’t need executive stress-reduction targets by business unit, as it likely operates as a single unit. But the underlying principle still applies: assign accountability for specific wellbeing outcomes and measure progress.

The organizational dynamics can be complex. Redesigning jobs requires collaboration with managers who built successful careers in current systems and may have valid concerns about change. Flexible work policies sometimes face resistance from leaders who associate physical presence with productivity, often based on their own experience. Measuring psychosocial risk can surface issues that require budget allocation, which becomes difficult when wellbeing isn’t yet connected to measurable business outcomes in an organization’s strategic planning.

A Practical Starting Point

Wellbeing leaders can begin expanding their approach while maintaining the individual programs their employees value. Consider starting with one work condition that creates measurable strain. This might be meeting overload, unclear priorities, or chronic understaffing. Choose something specific that data can confirm and that leaders in the organization have the influence to address. Design a pilot that changes this condition rather than only offering resources to cope with it. Measure both wellbeing outcomes and business metrics that matter to the leadership team. Use what emerges to build the case for broader systemic changes.

Organizations making meaningful progress on workforce wellbeing share an important characteristic: they’ve broadened their view of wellbeing from an HR program to a business strategy. This shift requires patience, collaborative relationships across the organization, and willingness to surface and address difficult truths about working conditions. The journey takes time, but it creates lasting improvements rather than temporary engagement that fades when underlying conditions remain unchanged.

Individual wellbeing programs become significantly more effective when they support employees who work in sustainable, well-designed environments. The combination of individual resources and systemic improvements creates conditions where people can genuinely thrive. That’s the difference worth pursuing.

About the Author

Jessica Grossmeier is an award-winning researcher, speaker, and author of two books: Reimagining Workplace Well-being and Well At Work. As a leading authority in workforce well-being, she collaborates with employers and well-being service providers to create evidence-based strategies to support individual and organizational thriving. Recognized as one of the most influential women leaders in health promotion by the American Journal of Health Promotion, Jessica serves as a Senior Fellow for the Health Enhancement Research Organization, Strategic Advisor-ROI of Care for Compassion 2.0, Chairs the Workplace Wellbeing Initiative of the Global Wellness Institute, and serves on several advisory boards. For more information: www.jessicagrossmeier.com

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The blog submissions featured on this site represent the research and opinions of the individual authors. The Global Wellness Institute and the Workplace Wellbeing Initiative are not responsible for the content provided. The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Global Wellness Institute or the Workplace Wellbeing Initiative. Readers are encouraged to consult with a qualified healthcare professional for specific health concerns.