Stop talking about wellbeing. Start talking about performance.

The global workplace wellness market is worth $53.8 billion – and growing by 5% every year.

Yet employee wellbeing is declining.

Work stress now surpasses inflation and AI as the leading threat to employee health. Ill health is seen as a bigger risk to job security than automation. And the UK ranks near the bottom of developed nations for employee wellbeing.

Despite billions being spent on wellbeing initiatives, the problem is getting worse.

Something isn’t working.

At the Health and Wellbeing at Work Conference, Gethin Nadin challenged leaders to rethink everything they believe about workplace wellbeing – and explained why the future isn’t about “wellbeing strategies” at all.

It’s about performance.

The business case is settled

For years, wellbeing was positioned as the right thing to do. Today, it’s a commercial imperative.

A 2025 Oxford-supported analysis found that a simulated portfolio of the 100 public companies with the highest Work Wellbeing Scores outperformed stock market benchmarks. Experimental research also shows that meaningfully increasing wellbeing boosts productivity by around 10%, while employees with high wellbeing achieve their work goals 1.5 times more often than those with low wellbeing.

The financial impact is becoming increasingly clear. Investors are paying attention, with high-wellbeing companies consistently outperforming peers in profitability, innovation, and shareholder return. On a global scale, investing in employee health could unlock up to $11.7 trillion in economic value.

Wellbeing is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a measurable driver of results.

If you want AI to work, your people have to work well

Nearly seven in 10 CEOs plan to allocate 10%–20% of their budgets to AI this year, while half believe their job depends on getting AI right.

But AI transformation fails without the right culture.

Organizations with employee-centric cultures are seven times more likely to be AI mature, and employees in high-wellbeing companies are 72% adaptable to AI, compared to 46% in low-wellbeing organizations. When wellbeing is embedded into culture, AI can unlock up to 40% more productivity gains.

Wellbeing isn’t separate from digital transformation. It’s foundational to it.

If work drains cognitive capacity, overloads managers, and erodes trust, technology won’t fix it.

Designing work that supports human capacity is now an AI readiness strategy.

There is no such thing as a wellbeing strategy

One of the boldest ideas in Gethin’s session was this: stop building “wellbeing strategies.”

High-performing organizations don’t treat wellbeing as a collection of initiatives – they treat it as an operating principle. Every policy, process, and leadership behavior should answer one question: does this improve or harm employee wellbeing?

Seen through that lens, many everyday workplace practices take on new meaning. Flexible work isn’t a perk – it’s a health intervention. Predictable workloads aren’t a benefit – they’re a care signal. And supportive management isn’t optional – it’s infrastructure.

In organizational psychology, behaviors signal values. When employees experience empathy, fairness, and meaningful support, they interpret it as organizational care. When they don’t, mental health declines.

Wellbeing is driven less by what you offer – and more by how you operate.

Managers are the multiplier

Managers have more impact on employee health than doctors – and sometimes even partners.

Yet many managers are struggling themselves. Half report burnout, often managing people while carrying a full individual workload. It’s no surprise that only a third of employees now aspire to become managers. The consequences are clear. 42% of employees who voluntarily leave say their manager could have prevented it, while nearly half say no one discussed their satisfaction or performance in the three months before they resigned.

And by the time organizations see the warning signs, it’s often too late. Turnover is a lagging indicator, and exit interviews rarely tell the full story. Presenteeism – employees working while unwell or disengaged – is more costly than absence, but largely invisible.

If we want sustainable performance, we must strengthen manager capability and capacity. Supportive leadership drives both wellbeing and results.

Measure what actually matters

Most organizations still track absence and turnover. But those metrics tell you what already happened – not what’s about to.

Subjective wellbeing data – how employees feel – is a leading indicator of risk. Perceived stress often shows up long before absence, medical claims, or resignation.

At the same time, objective data reveals concentration and cost. In many organizations, 5% of members drive 56% of healthcare spend. That insight allows leaders to identify emerging risk patterns early.

The future requires balance:

• Subjective insight to detect early warning signs
• Objective data to quantify cost and severity
• Clear outcomes that connect people metrics to business performance

When leaders see how wellbeing impacts productivity, customer satisfaction, and financial results, the boardroom conversation changes.

Kill the word “wellbeing”

The word has become diluted. For some, it signals perks, yoga sessions, and surface-level initiatives, rather than something fundamental to how work is designed.

Yet most organizations are focused on performance. CEOs care about productivity. Employees want to perform their best. And many people adopting AI tools say they do so because they help them accomplish more.

So what if we reframed the conversation?

What if a “wellbeing strategy” became a “people performance strategy” – one that recognizes the role health, support and good work design play in enabling employees to succeed?

When employees understand that health tools help them succeed, not just cope, engagement increases. Stigma decreases. And senior leadership buy-in accelerates.

We can still care deeply about people. But when we connect care to capability, and health to high performance, we unlock real transformation.

Design work that does no harm – and does better

Work must protect people from harm and actively enable them to thrive.

That means addressing organizational factors like excessive workload, low autonomy, job insecurity, financial strain, and toxic behaviors. It also means empowering individuals to build sustainable habits around movement, recovery, connection, and purpose.

The strongest approaches share common traits:

• They fit naturally into daily work
• They’re easy to adopt and low-friction
• They reinforce autonomy, relationships, and leadership quality
• They measure business and human outcomes together

Wellbeing works when it’s embedded into the flow of work – not bolted on as a program.

Employees consistently say they want to be more productive, with fewer barriers, and environments that help them grow.

The data now proves what leading organizations already understand: wellbeing isn’t a soft initiative. It’s a performance lever.

The question is no longer whether you can afford to invest in wellbeing – it’s whether you can afford not to.

Ready to measure what really drives performance?

If you’re serious about moving wellbeing from initiative to impact, you need the right metrics.

Our report, Employee benefits metrics that matter, breaks down the data that truly predicts performance – from leading wellbeing indicators to cost concentration insights and engagement signals that boards care about.

Stop tracking lagging metrics. Start measuring what moves the needle.