Is the era of meditation breaks and free therapy sessions over? After years of putting money into employee wellness programmes, companies have started to scale back. Among those reducing their budgets are Google and Meta, once celebrated for perks such as free yoga classes, on-site meditation rooms and subsidised gym memberships. According to a report, more organisations are reducing their investment in wellness programmes, from 6 percent of companies surveyed in 2023 to 14 percent in 2024.

This instinct to deprioritise well-being in favour of cost savings is understandable, but risky. Neglecting employee welfare undermines not only individual well-being but also organisational resilience and long-term performance. This growing disconnect between well-being initiatives and business performance suggests a fundamental flaw in how we approach employee health. Indeed, the future of work lies in treating well-being not as a perk to attract talent, but as a foundational principle of organisational design.

1. Measuring what matters

Organisations have traditionally considered workplace well-being as a peripheral concern – too "soft" to measure and too removed from "hard" performance. But that's changing.

First, researchers have adapted validated measures of well-being, such as the PERMA-W scale and the Workplace Well-Being Index, which evaluate emotions and sense of purpose in the workplace context. These allow organisations to directly assess how employees experience their work, rather than relying on indirect indicators such as turnover or absenteeism. In other words, well-being can be measured as rigorously as revenue or productivity.

Second, measurement enables accountability. Companies can now test whether interventions improve employee well-being without trading off performance. Four-day workweek initiatives provide a compelling example. A recent study tracked nearly 3,000 workers at 141 businesses who switched to a four-day workweek with no pay reduction. The findings showed that workers reported greater job satisfaction and experienced less burnout, with improvements especially apparent in those who reduced their working time by eight hours or more per week.

Over 90 percent of companies opted to keep the four-day workweek after the trial, suggesting that well-being improvements can be achieved without sacrificing performance. Other measurable interventions include mental health programmes, flexible working arrangements and ergonomic workplace redesigns – all of which can be tracked against both well-being metrics and business outcomes.

The lesson? Well-being is not an abstraction. It is measurable, manageable and tied to other key metrics that organisations care about.

2. Considering structural elements of workplace health and safety

Organisations must also think more broadly about what matters for employee well-being. If we think of well-being at the organisational level too narrowly – as something derived from individual survey scores or provided through perks and flexibility – we risk missing threats to healthy workplaces that materialise at the structural level. Workplace harassment is one such threat.

Too often, harassment is treated as a legal matter or a diversity issue to be managed separately from broader organisational dynamics. Instead, Emily E. LB. Twarog from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, whose historical research examines resistance to sexual harassment in the United States service sector, argues that harassment should be recognised as a general issue of workplace health and safety. Like exposure to dangerous chemicals or unsafe equipment, harassment harms not only the individuals directly targeted but also the entire workforce through stress, fear and disengagement.

Research supports this broader view. It's well-established that targets of sexual harassment experience low job satisfaction, psychological distress, anxiety and depression, as well as job loss, career interruption, increased turnover and absenteeism. But the damage extends beyond individual targets. Jana Raver from Queen’s University and Michele Gelfand from the University of Maryland found that sexual harassment at the team level creates interpersonal difficulties and relationship conflict, affecting both direct targets and bystanders, ultimately impairing team cohesion and performance.

This reframing of harassment as a health and safety issue highlights the systemic conditions that allow harassment to occur. It points towards the need for more structural solutions – such as stronger collective bargaining – that can reduce its prevalence in contemporary organisations.

3. Redefining organisational success

The final, and perhaps overarching, insight is that organisations must not only redesign structures to support employee well-being, but also redefine the cultural norms that shape how success and performance are understood in the first place.

For instance, research on "Masculinity Contest Cultures" (MCCs) – workplace environments that valorise displays of strength, endurance and dominance while devaluing collaboration and vulnerability – shows how workplaces that reward such stereotypically masculine values often breed bullying and harassment. These cultural norms not only normalise toxic behaviour but frame it as evidence of strong performance. Recent high-profile endorsements of “hardcore” work cultures and criticism of work-life balance as weakness demonstrate that MCCs are not rare anomalies but remain pervasive in how we think about successful workplaces.

Jillian Chown from Northwestern University calls us to consider overtly competitive and aggressive cultures (unsurprisingly rife with harassment) as indicators of failed organisational designs, as opposed to the work of a few bad apples. If organisations want to make well-being a foundation, they must move beyond targeting individuals and instead redesign the systems, processes and cultural narratives around what constitutes success.

Take a global financial institution that we worked with. As part of redesigning its well-being strategy – and after consulting directly with employees – senior leadership implemented significant structural changes. They strengthened anti-harassment and anti-bullying policies, appointed independent roles to handle confidential complaints, and positioned the third-party investigation and whistle-blowing channels within the organisation’s well-being resources. In doing so, they reframed well-being as a structural and cultural priority rather than a discretionary benefit, and recognised the central role that respectful workplace relationships play in sustaining it.

The way forward

So, how can we design organisations where well-being is a foundation rather than a trade-off? Here are our recommendations:

• Start by implementing direct well-being metrics in your performance dashboards, giving them the same weight as productivity or profit-oriented KPIs.
• Audit your organisation for structural issues that affect workforce well-being, such as workplace harassment, and address them systematically rather than case-by-case.
• Challenge and reshape cultural norms that equate toxicity with success or bullying with performance. Consider whether your recognition systems inadvertently reward harmful behaviours.

Leading organisations are already showing the way. Patagonia’s approach to work-life integration has yielded consistent profits while maintaining exceptionally low turnover. And the results of Salesforce’s comprehensive well-being programmes correlate with industry-leading innovation metrics. These companies demonstrate that organisational success depends on well-being and can be achieved not in spite of it, but because of it.

As we navigate an era of AI transformation, remote work complexities and fierce competition for knowledge workers, the organisations that thrive will be those that recognise well-being as a competitive advantage, not a compromise.