Enabling World Insight Series
Making employee wellbeing genuinely work
THE CHALLENGE :
Wellbeing is one of the most talked-about priorities in HR today and one of the most persistently mismanaged. Organisations invest in EAP helplines, mental health days, yoga sessions and step-count challenges. Yet a striking global finding stops us in our tracks: 96% of CEOs believe they are doing a good job of taking care of employee wellbeing, and 86% of managers agree. But only about 50% of employees feel the same.
That perception gap is not a small statistical rounding error. It is a chasm. And it is the starting point for this article.
Drawing on expert insights and research from corporates, EAP services, counselling, organisational behaviour, and wellbeing consulting across India, Canada, South Africa, the UK and the US, the message is consistent – wellbeing cannot be a programme. It has to be a practice, personal, continuous, culturally calibrated, and backed by genuine organisational commitment.
The Perception Gap: Why What You Think You Are Doing Is Not What Employees Experience
80–90% of talent say a positive or negative candidate experience can change their mind about a role or company in either direction.
The Global Wellness Institute estimates that the cost of poorly managed wellbeing globally reaches $2.2 trillion, equivalent to 10–12% of global GDP. That is not a “nice-to-have” statistic. It is an enterprise risk number.
Yet organisations continue to design wellbeing programmes based on what leadership believes employees need, rather than what employees actually experience.
The perception gap has a structural cause: surveys about wellbeing are usually designed by the same leaders who are being assessed.
You get the answer the way you ask the question. A leader who asks, “I hope you are happy, right?” has already shaped the response. Thoughtfully designed anonymous surveys, with questions employees actually understand, tell a very different story.
The gap between what leaders think they are doing on wellbeing and what employees actually experience is not a rounding error; it is a fundamental misalignment. And you cannot fix a problem you have not accurately diagnosed.
Several dimensions are frequently neglected:
- Occupational wellness– whether employees find meaning and growth in their actual work (perhaps the most powerful and least addressed dimension);
- Intellectual wellness– the human need for learning, mentorship, and development; and
- Social wellness– the quality of relationships at work. The longest-running Harvard study on what makes people healthy and happy consistently identifies relationship quality as the single most important factor.
A programme that addresses physical health while neglecting meaningful work and relationship quality treats the visible symptoms while ignoring the root cause.
Personalising Wellbeing: The Most Important and Most Complex Challenge
We live in an era of hyper-personalisation. The music we hear, the content we consume and the products we buy are tailored to individual preference. The same expectation is now arriving in the workplace. Employees do not want a standard wellbeing programme. They want an experience that reflects their actual situation, needs and stage of life.
This is both right and genuinely difficult. The core challenge is how an organisation learns what individual employees need without crossing into invasive territory, violating data privacy, or creating conditions where employees share only what they think the organisation wants to hear.
Three practical foundations of effective personalisation stand out:
- EAP data: EAP providers hold the most accurate picture of what employees are actually struggling with, because people access those services voluntarily and in genuine need. Aggregated, anonymised trend data (patterns, not names) provides the most honest baseline for programme design.
- Anonymous surveys, designed with care: questions employees can understand, clear explanation of how the data will and will not be used, and visible action on what is heard.
- Focus groups with representative employees on the ground, one of the most powerful and underused sources of genuine insight.
A further practical approach is segmentation by life stage and circumstance: young parents, employees approaching retirement, early-career professionals, people managing chronic health conditions, and those working remotely or in hybrid arrangements. Each segment has different needs. A wellbeing approach that acknowledges this is far stronger than one that treats everyone the same.
Trust is the non-negotiable prerequisite for personalised wellbeing. Before an employee will share anything meaningful about their situation, they need absolute confidence that the information will be used only to help them, never to assess, evaluate, or judge them.
The Buffet Model: Moving from Mandated Programmes to Informed Choice
One of the most powerful practical insights is the wellbeing “buffet” – a rich, diverse offering of programmes, services and resources from which employees can select according to their own needs, preferences and timing.
The buffet approach puts the hyper-personalisation where it belongs, with the individual. The organisation's job is to make the buffet rich, diverse, well-communicated, and genuinely accessible. The employee's job is to choose what they need from it. Both sides have to show up for this to work.
The mandated, one-size-fits-all programme pushed to everyone regardless of need or interest is both less effective and more resentment-generating than its designers usually realise.
A wellbeing buffet that works has four characteristics:
- It is comprehensive (physical, mental, financial, social and occupational).
- It is diverse in format (one-on-one counselling, group sessions, digital tools, peer support, manager frameworks and self-service resources).
- It evolves continuously as needs change and evidence accumulates.
- It is well communicated.
Communication is the single most underestimated factor. One organisation found that after consistently reinforcing awareness at the end of every session, EAP adoption rose significantly, not because the content had changed, but because repeated exposure gradually normalised use. Do not assume employees know what is available. Even high-quality programmes fail when they remain invisible. Creative, consistent and culturally adapted communication (including in the places where employees actually have undivided attention) matters as much as the content itself.
49% of candidates withdrew from recruitment when interview scheduling took too long in 2023, up from 38% in 2022. Among all applicants, 72% expect first contact within a week. Top talent will not wait.
Psychological Safety: The Foundation That Makes Everything Else Possible
A central theme in the wellbeing conversation is psychological safety, a concept coined and popularised by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson, which describes the degree to which employees feel they can be themselves, speak honestly, challenge ideas, make mistakes, and raise concerns without fear of humiliation, exclusion, or retaliation.
Psychological safety is not a feel-good aspiration. It is the foundational condition that determines whether all other investments in wellbeing and engagement deliver any return at all. Without it, employees mask, performing a version of themselves that is socially acceptable to the dominant culture, and masking is exhausting. A 2023 McKinsey study found that employees who experience high psychological safety at work are 76% more engaged and significantly less likely to experience burnout.
Psychological safety is not a programme or an initiative. It is the quality of the environment in which everything else happens. When it is absent, employees perform wellness rather than experiencing it. When it is present, they can bring their whole self and that changes everything.
The experience of psychological safety is not uniform. Employees from underrepresented groups, those who are LGBTQ+, those with disabilities, those from minority ethnic backgrounds, and neurodivergent colleagues consistently experience workplaces as less psychologically safe.
This is frequently not because environments are deliberately hostile, but because they were designed around majority-culture & neurotypical norms, and the friction of operating outside those norms is a real and constant cognitive and emotional drain. Inclusive design that accounts for the full range of human difference rather than the dominant majority is demonstrably more psychologically safe for everyone.
The practical language of psychological safety does not require that every leader learn the academic definition. What matters is the operational reality: Do employees feel respected? Can they voice a different opinion without consequence? Can they raise a concern without fear? In organisations where dignity and respect are genuinely core to the operating culture, explicitly embedded in the code of conduct, actively role-modelled by senior leaders, and consistently enforced, psychological safety is present whether anyone has named it or not. The label matters less than the lived experience.
The Manager: The Most Important Variable in Employee Wellbeing
Research consistently identifies the manager as the single most important variable in an employee’s experience of wellbeing, more than the EAP, the mental health day or the wellbeing app. How do managers start meetings, respond when someone is struggling, balance compassion with accountability, and connect individual work to organisational purpose?
The same event can be handled in two completely different ways. “You missed the meeting, where were you?” closes the conversation. “I noticed you missed the meeting; is everything okay?” opens it. That choice, made hundreds of times a year in every team, is the lived reality of wellbeing. No programme compensates for a manager who consistently makes the wrong choice in those moments.
Managers are not just people leaders; they are the primary delivery mechanism for every wellbeing investment the organisation makes. If the manager is not equipped, aware, and motivated to create a safe and supportive team environment, the programmes above them will consistently underdeliver.
Managers are the primary delivery mechanism for every wellbeing investment the organisation makes. Three capabilities that matter most for managers in the context of wellbeing are i) the ability to look – to notice changes in behaviour, engagement, appearance, and communication that signal that something may have shifted for a team member; ii) the ability to listen – genuinely, dispassionately and without rushing to fix or dismiss what they are hearing; and iii) the ability to link – connect the person to the right resources and professional support without attempting to become a therapist. This three-step framework, Look, Listen, Link, is the most practically useful guidance for equipping managers who are not naturally inclined toward care conversations.
A critical nuance: too much empathy without courage becomes its own problem. A manager who quietly absorbs a struggling employee’s workload, never raises the issue and hopes it resolves itself is practising avoidance, and the rest of the team, who are picking up the slack, will eventually pay the price. The advice: walk toward the conversation, not away from it. Be kind and respectful always but address the situation sooner rather than later.
How the Workplace Contributes to Mental Ill-health and What to Do About It
Mental health at work is not a niche concern. Research consistently shows that while one in seven members of the general population experiences a mental illness in any given year, at the workplace nearly one in two employees report anxiety or depression connected to work-related factors. The workplace is not just a place where mental health symptoms appear, it is actively a contributor to them.
Common organisational contributors include unclear roles and expectations, cultures of fear around speaking up, high-demand low-autonomy management styles, chronic overwork, harassment or exclusion, and the absence of psychological safety. These are structural features, not peripheral ones, and they create and sustain mental health risk at scale.
The mental health challenges employees bring to work stem from two sources: what they carry from their personal lives and what the workplace itself generates. Organisations can influence the second directly. And when they do, they reduce the burden on the first.
Research suggests that approximately 70% of the mental health vulnerabilities a person carries into adulthood are embedded in childhood experience up to the age of eight. A further 12-18% are shaped by adolescent experience, and 8-20% by relationship-related challenges in adult life. Organisations are not responsible for repairing childhood experiences. They are responsible for understanding that people arrive with histories, and that a supportive or unsupportive workplace environment determines whether those histories become barriers or can be managed alongside meaningful work.
The Five Gaps That Prevent Progress and How to Close Them
Five distinct gaps explain why wellbeing and mental health conversations in India and in many comparable markets consistently fail to translate awareness into action:
- The knowledge gap – many people do not know what mental health conditions are, what the symptoms look like, or what professional help is available. This is the foundational gap, and it has to be addressed before any other intervention can be effective.
- The awareness gap – even when people have general knowledge about mental health, they may not recognise what is happening in themselves or in a colleague. Awareness of one’s own state and sensitivity to changes in others are distinct and developable skills.
- The perceptiveness gap, – the tendency to label people who are struggling in stigmatising ways (‘pagal hai’) rather than recognising what is actually happening- prevents the kind of supportive response that would make a difference. This is where language training and Mental Health First Aid programmes have their most direct impact.
- The skill gap – knowing that someone needs help is not the same as knowing what to do. Managers and colleagues need practical, rehearsed frameworks like Look, Listen, Link that give them the confidence to act without overstepping into clinical territory they are not qualified for.
- The support system gap – even when individuals want help and managers want to refer them, the support structures are often not in place, not known about, or not trusted. Closing this gap requires consistent, creative communication about what is available, combined with organisational cultures in which using those services is normalised rather than stigmatised.
Closing all five gaps is a multi-year commitment, not a campaign. But the organisations that consistently and patiently close them see measurable improvements in EAP utilisation, engagement scores, retention, and productivity. The business case and the human case are exactly the same in this domain.
Mental Health First Aid: The Infrastructure of Awareness
One of the most practical and scalable interventions is Mental Health First Aid, a structured programme that equips non-specialists to recognise distress, respond effectively, and connect people to professional support. Just as every workplace trains a proportion of its people to provide physical first aid in emergencies without expecting them to be doctors, Mental Health First Aid trains people to provide initial support and connect them to resources without expecting them to be therapists.
The impact of Mental Health First Aid in reducing stigma is well-documented. It changes not just knowledge but attitudes, and those attitudes create the conditions in which people feel safe disclosing that they are struggling. In organisations where MHFA is combined with consistent awareness programming, EAP utilisation increases not because more people are struggling, but because more people feel comfortable and confident accessing support when they need it.
Make your staff your allies in the journey of mental wellbeing. They are your first line of awareness, your first line of response, and your most credible communicators. Equip them, and the culture changes from the inside out.
A specific and important piece of guidance emerged around a scenario every people manager and HR professional eventually faces: when an employee appears to be in crisis, the question arises of whether to involve their family. The consistent guidance from mental health professionals was clear. Always seek the employee’s consent before contacting anyone on their behalf; never assume family is the right resource, because in some cases family may be a source of stress rather than support. Build crisis protocols into manager training so the decision about what to do doesn’t have to be made in the moment without preparation. In genuine emergencies where a person cannot make decisions for themselves, follow established involuntary treatment protocols, but always act in the most dignity-preserving way possible.
Reducing Stigma: What Actually Works
Stigma is the most powerful barrier between need and help-seeking in the mental health domain. It exists in society, in workplaces, and within individuals as the internal voice that says ‘I should be able to cope with this’ or ‘if I talk about this I will be seen as weak’. Reducing stigma is not a single intervention; it is a sustained, multi-year process of normalisation through education, conversation, and visible leadership behaviour.
Three approaches have demonstrated real impact:
- Leader disclosure – when senior leaders share their own mental health experiences without shame, they give everyone below them permission to do the same. Celebrity examples, Virat Kohli’s public discussion of loneliness and depression during his captaincy, and Deepika Padukone’s ‘I’m not ashamed’ campaign demonstrate that high performance and mental health struggle are not mutually exclusive.
Stigma did not come from somewhere; we all built it together over years. And we can dismantle it the same way: one conversation, one disclosure, one moment of empathy at a time. Start with yourself. It starts with me.
- Visible, repeated communication of available resources so that accessing support feels normal rather than exceptional.
- Reframing of wellbeing from ‘getting help when you are sick’ to ‘thriving as a regular goal’ is perhaps the most powerful anti-stigma intervention of all. When organisations talk about wellbeing as a dimension of performance, as the condition that enables people to do their best work, to experience flow, to be fully engaged, they fundamentally shift the conversation away from deficit and pathology toward aspiration and growth. In this framing, accessing a wellbeing resource is not an admission of weakness. It is an act of intelligent self-investment.
Hybrid Working and Wellbeing: The New Complexity
he shift to hybrid and remote working has added a significant new layer of complexity to the wellbeing challenge. The positive dimensions are real for many employees, and particularly for many neurodiverse employees, remote working reduces commute stress, sensory overload, and the exhausting effort of performing neurotypicality in an open-plan office.
The flexibility to manage work around personal and family rhythms has genuinely improved life for many.
But hybrid working has also introduced or intensified several wellbeing risks. Workplace loneliness – nearly 50% of remote and hybrid workers report experiencing some degree of loneliness – is a significant and under-addressed issue. The blurring of work-life boundaries, which many thought would resolve itself as hybrid settled in, has instead become more pronounced; without the physical commute that once separated work and home life, many employees find it structurally harder to switch off. And for new joiners, the challenge of navigating an organisation’s unwritten rules, relationships, and culture without physical presence is a genuine source of anxiety that structured onboarding can address but not fully solve.
A hybrid workplace requires a deliberately designed wellbeing offer, one that reaches people where they are, in formats they can access, regardless of when or where they work. The assumption that wellbeing programmes designed for co-located teams will translate seamlessly to distributed teams is consistently wrong
The practical response for organisations is to ensure the wellbeing buffet is genuinely accessible to employees wherever they are and however they work. Digital tools, app-based services, virtual counselling sessions, and online peer support groups all extend the reach of the wellbeing offer beyond what was possible in an office-centric world. And the manager-led human connection, the Look, Listen, Link approach, conducted through a well-facilitated one-on-one conversation rather than a physical check-in, if anything, more important in a hybrid world than a co-located one, precisely because it is less likely to happen naturally.
The Way Forward: Five Things Every Organisation Can Do
Five consistent imperatives emerge for organisations serious about making wellbeing genuinely work:
- Close the perception gap. Run honest, well-designed anonymous surveys. Use EAP trend data. Convene focus groups with people on the ground. Act on what you learn and communicate the changes.
- Build the buffet. Create a diverse, accessible, evolving portfolio of services. Communicate it creatively and repeatedly. Make access normal, not exceptional. Retire what is not used. Retire programmes that are not being used and replace them with things that meet real, current need.
- Invest in psychological safety. Whether or not you name it, build the practices that make it real. Model leader behaviour that shows respect and openness, build trusted redressal mechanisms, and send consistent cultural signals that it is safe to speak up & be yourself.
- Equip every manager. Train them in Look–Listen–Link and Mental Health First Aid. Give them conversation frameworks, not just policies. Hold them accountable for the quality of the team environment as well as the quality of output. Remind them that the conversation they are avoiding is usually the one they most need to have.
- Reframe the agenda. Stop talking about wellbeing only as support for people who are struggling. Start talking about it as the condition that enables everyone to thrive. That shift from deficit to aspiration, from reaction to investment, changes the culture of the conversation and, with it, employees’ willingness to engage with everything you are offering.
Wellbeing is not a programme that runs alongside the work. It is the condition in which work happens. Get that condition right, and everything else engagement, performance, retention, innovation improves with it. Get it wrong, and no programme in the world will compensate.
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