4 Things Leaders Should Focus on to Boost Employee Well-Being

Ted Kitterman
2025-03-18T07:48:35-04:00
4 Things Leaders Should Focus on to Boost Employee Well-Being
Great Place To Work

Consider these creative ideas from great workplaces for improving holistic wellness for every employee.

HR professionals are increasingly concerned about well-being.

Partnering with Johns Hopkins University Human Capital Development Lab, Great Place To Work? researchers identified that employee well-being has declined to pre-pandemic levels. And in polling, HR practitioners are increasingly sounding the alarm on mental health and work-life balance.

“I think that we as HR professionals have got to be leaning in and really talking about this,” says Amy Dufrane, CEO of HRCI, an organization that offers certifications and professional development to the HR industry.

“We've got to lean in on this area of mental health and anxiousness,” she says. That means embracing flexibility and challenging assumptions around what mental health warnings look like in the workplace.

What drives employees to have more psychological wellness?

Great Place To Work research found several key drivers of psychological and emotional well-being at work.

One of the most significant? A healthy work-life balance made employees three times more likely to say they had mental and emotional well-being at work. If they said they could be their authentic self in the workplace? That made them 2.4 times as likely.

The third and final driver, being able to count on colleagues to cooperate, made employees two times more likely to report high levels of well-being.

These drivers came from analysis of 1.3 million employee surveys collected by Great Place To Work in 2024. When looking at regression analysis based on its 60-question model, these three key ingredients for a psychologically and emotionally healthy work environment emerged.

This data reveals three key areas you should investigate when employees report higher levels of mental fatigue, burnout, or toxic workplace culture: boosting cross-team cooperation, improving flexibility and work-life balance, and making sure every employee feels a sense of belonging.

Why psychological and emotional health matters

Well-being has a direct impact on business performance, and HR teams can use data to show a financial value to levels of mental and emotional wellness across the business.

Concerned with turnover and employee retention? Employees are twice as likely to want to stay on the job when they have a psychologically health workplace. They are also three times more likely to recommend your workplace to others, becoming crucial ambassadors to help attract top talent and refer open roles to their network.

Well-being even has a proven impact on core business performance like customer service, with employees being 48% more likely to say the company offers excellent service when they also have high levels of well-being.

Where leaders should focus

What kinds of activities can move the needle on well-being? DuFrane says HR leaders in her network are finding success with key areas:

1. Creating spaces for people to talk openly about mental health

That might be an employee resource group or another protected space within the organization, Dufrane says. It could mean bringing in a mental health provider for a dedicated conversation.

“A company can hold a virtual event if you’re not physically together,” she says. “Have a virtual counselor come in and talk about some strategies that if you're feeling anxious, or how to bring down your heart rate.”

2. Make sure managers can provide information about your employee assistance program (EAP)

“Lots of employers have employee assistance programs, but they go underutilized,” Dufrane says. Employees don’t know what is offered or are concerned that using the program will be shared with their employer and might hold back their career.

Dufrane stresses the importance of having one-on-one sessions where they can ask questions about these resources, and people leaders are often a first point of contact for employees. “I think we're undercommunicating about this right now,” she says.

3. Turn communication into smaller, digestible chunks

One long email or SharePoint page with every resource your company offers is going to be less effective than more consistent communication delivered in bite-sized chunks.

“That's how we need to be communicating to people now — smaller chunk sized, just little bites and having a drumbeat around those communications,” Dufrane says.

4. Overcommunicate your values

As employees face a tumultuous news cycle and messages that trigger anxiety, it’s crucial to continuously communicate your values as an organization, Dufrane says.

“This is the time for companies to really demonstrate to their employees: ‘We really do mean our values and we really do care about you, and this is what we're going to do to help you,’” she says.

If you don’t, employees will not feel comfortable bringing their full selves to the workplace. “They're not going to deliver the best results for the organization,” Dufrane says. “It's not just a U.S. problem — it's a global challenge that we have.”

The antidote? “Lead with compassion and kindness.”

5 creative ways great workplaces support employee well-being

Here are some of the creative and generous ways great workplaces are supporting the holistic wellness of their employees:

1. A dedicated well-being team

It’s no secret that working in health care poses real challenges for employee well-being. The American Medical Association found that half of all respondents meet the criteria for burnout, per a recent poll. Five years after the pandemic, health care workers continue to experience higher levels of fatigue and burnout.

Meeting the challenge has prompted the best organizations in health care to creatively leverage resources within the organization. A dedicated wellness team at Wellstar Health System has a clear mandate to improve employees’ experience. The team operates wellness rooms that offer a calming environment for employees to recharge, and leads Transforming Workplace Wellness, an action planning program that trains leaders on how to improve wellness across their teams.

Using Great Place To Work’s survey platform, Wellstar was able to measure that 65% pf leaders who participated in the Transforming Workplace Wellness program saw increased employee engagement in their department.

Another hospital, Baptist Health South Florida has a Pastoral Care team that takes responsibility for well-being, including counseling, crisis intervention, grief support, and life cycle support for staff. The team also manages an Employee Sunshine Fund, which offers interest free loans and gifts to employees facing financial hardships.

Having a dedicated team that responds to the immediate needs of your workforce can make dramatic improvements to employee well-being — and ensures that well-being doesn’t fall off your organization’s radar.

2. Mental health resources

Beyond an EAP, what kinds of mental health resources are having an impact at great workplaces?

Visa offers a Psychological Safety Resource Hub with tools, resources and simple do’s and don’ts to help foster psychological safety across the organization. The resources got an extra boost with targeted programming during Mental Health Awareness Month in May.

NVIDIA takes things one step further with 100 employees getting trained as Certified Mental Health First Aid team members with the National Council for Mental Health. These advocates in the workplace are educated on mental health signs and symptoms, available resources and how to preserve confidentiality, becoming an essential resource for employees looking to talk to someone about mental health or substance abuse problems.

3. Offering more balance to always-on teams

How can you offer a better work-life balance to roles with challenging schedules? Maintenance teams at Camden Property Trust must respond to after-hours calls, which were often cited in exit interviews as one of the biggest downsides of the job.

To respond, Camden enlisted the help of its 24-hour contact center, which receives the after-hours maintenance requests, to improve management of the calls and work to reduce the number of incidents that required a site visit. Meeting weekly with maintenance teams, the contact center developed a maintenance cheat sheet to troubleshoot some common problems via phone. With the success of this program, the maintenance team was able to introduce quiet hours for 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., reducing the number of after-hours calls and improving working conditions for all.

4. Support financial well-being

Delta Air Lines heard from an employee survey of more than 40,000 employees in 2023 that financial wellness was a top concern. To respond, they launched an emergency savings program with financial education resources. After completing an education course, employees earned $1,000 which they can put towards decreasing debt or setting up a rainy-day fund. The program met its two-year participation goal in just two months and participants reported a 62% increase in their sense of financial control.

Comcast NBCUniversal launched a Financial Navigator program where employees can speak with a coach to learn how to improve their savings, pay down debt and navigate retirement or investments. Since launching in 2023, over 20,000 employees have engaged with the program.

5. Make physical wellness a social activity

Physical well-being is a vital aspect of holistic employee wellness. The most creative companies are now fusing efforts to encourage physical activity with opportunities for social connection.

At ServiceNow, 2024 marked the first ever WellFest, a two-week global event dedicated to all aspects of well-being. Activities included yoga and meditation sessions, gardening classes and cooking lessons.

With loneliness creating wellbeing challenges across then workforce, having events that boost both physical and social wellness can be an effective deployment of resources for companies of any size.