Why Don’t Wellbeing Programmes Move the Numbers?

That’s not a dig at wellbeing. Looking after your health matters, and I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching people how to do it. But if the thing wearing people down is how they’re led, no app is going to fix that. You can’t yoga your way out of bad management.

What does the research say?

• Oxford researcher William Fleming looked at 46,336 workers in 233 UK organisations. People who took part in individual programmes, like mindfulness, resilience and stress training, apps and coaching, were no better off than people who didn’t. In his words, “across multiple subjective well-being indicators, participants appear no better off.” The one exception was volunteering and charity work (Fleming, Industrial Relations Journal, 2024).
• Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores (Gallup, 2015).

To be fair to the programmes, Fleming’s study is a snapshot of UK workers at one point in time, not a trial. But it points the same way as the Gallup figure. Fleming himself suggests looking at organisational changes instead, like scheduling, management practices, staff resources, performance reviews and how jobs are designed. That’s worth thinking about before you renew the contract.

Why do they miss?

They start with a solution, not a problem. A lot of programmes get bought because another company did it, or because there’s budget left at the end of the year. Nobody stopped to ask what was actually causing the pressure. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

They put the weight on the person. The message, even when nobody means it, is that if you’re struggling you need to be more resilient. People hear that. And if their manager is the problem, it can feel like being told it’s their fault.

They don’t touch the work itself. If a team is short of people, has five top priorities and a manager who never listens, a lunchtime webinar on stress won’t change any of it.

Nobody measures what changed. Most programmes report how many people signed up or attended. Very few report whether absence or turnover went down. So nobody knows if it worked, and it gets renewed anyway.

Is wellbeing a waste of money, then?

No, and I want to be clear on that. The person still matters. Sleep, food, exercise, how someone handles stress, all of that makes a real difference to how they show up.

The problem is doing only that. When you work on the person and ignore the organisation, you get people who feel a bit better for a week and then go back into the same pressure. When you work on the organisation and ignore the person, you miss what’s going on in their life outside work.

People Sustainability means working both sides. Fix the conditions that are wearing people down, and give people what they need to look after themselves. Either one on its own is half a job.

What does work instead?

Start by finding out what’s actually going on.

Identify. Where is pressure building, and why? Is it one team, one manager, or something about how work is set up? Ask people directly, keep it confidential, and look at it alongside your turnover and absence data.

Develop. Then act on the real cause. If it’s leadership, help those managers lead better, with clearer priorities and the confidence to have honest conversations. If people need support with their own health and energy, give them that too, aimed at what came up in the data.

Sustain. Make the changes part of how the business runs, and measure again. If the numbers didn’t move, change what you’re doing.

That’s less exciting than launching a new app, honestly. But it’s the version that actually shows up in your absence report.

What should you ask before you buy the next programme?

A few simple questions save a lot of money.

What problem is this meant to solve, and how do we know that’s the problem? Which teams need it most? What number should change if it works, and when will we check? And is anything about how these teams are led or organised going to change at the same time?

If nobody can answer those, it’s probably wellbeing theatre. It looks like you’re doing something, and it gets nice feedback, but it won’t move the numbers.