Employee wellbeing is no longer optional – it’s your performance strategy (Part 2: How to turn insight into action)
In Part 1, we explored what is really going on in today’s workplaces: rising stress levels, younger employees struggling with mental health, and well‑intentioned wellbeing initiatives that often fail to change day‑to‑day habits. We also looked at how negative patterns around sleep, movement, nutrition and always‑on working quietly impact both health and performance.
Designing an employee wellbeing strategy in 2026 needs to take a different approach.
The Burnout Report 2025 showed that despite over 57% of UK businesses having a formal Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), the results in the absenteeism and the levels of stress people experience at workplaces showed that those initiatives were not effective.
Tick‑box corporate wellbeing programs for employees tend to focus on broad concepts and isolated activities. A lunch-time yoga session, access to a mindfulness app, or mental health awareness online training may help people switch off their mind or perhaps even become aware of several lifestyle choices impacting their health, but these wellbeing initiatives rarely change what people do to cope with daily stresses and balancing work-life demands. It’s no surprise that only 27% of workers feel their mental health is genuinely prioritised by their employer, with 18% viewing current wellbeing efforts as a ‘tick‑box exercise’ rather than real support.
HR and People Lead teams need to design wellbeing programmes that have the employee at the centre, where a person has the opportunity to learn how to build self‑efficacy, self‑autonomy and self‑determination – the three S behaviours - in their health. These will create a real impact in employee wellbeing, their future coping strategies, and ultimately improve the rates of sickness leave, absenteeism and performance.
Here are some practical steps you can take to turn the three S behaviour change approach into a structured, measurable wellbeing strategy that supports both your staff and your business.
Ultimately, a strategic approach to wellbeing in the workplace is:
Designed around business goals incorporating employees’ needs
Focused on implementing new systems, not relying on what worked best in the past
Aligned with leadership behaviour and company culture
Planned with a measurable outcome that combines prevention (job design, workload), not just ‘tick-box’ training.
At the heart of this is habit change. Health and wellbeing solutions shouldn’t simply involve telling people what “good” looks like. They should aim to teach teams practical tools to help them build new behaviours that make change stick, improving not just their work life but their life outside work as well.
Step 1: Assess employee needs
Any effective wellbeing initiative starts with listening to your employees. Assumptions from managers' past experiences rarely reflect what people actually experience in terms of stress, workload and emotional drain day-to-day. Useful ways to assess their needs include:
Short surveys about habits in the working environment
Focus groups across different teams and seniority levels
Reviewing sickness patterns and absence reasons
Looking for patterns, such as late‑night emails, number of meetings per person per day, skipped lunches, long stretches at the desk, and finishing late patterns outside of deadlines. Providing anonymous surveys to gauge stress levels, perception of individual value and contribution to the company, and risk of burnout questionnaires are good examples of collecting and assessing data to begin devising a wise corporate wellbeing strategy.
Step 2: Choose high‑impact topics
Rather than trying to cover everything at once, it’s beneficial to break wellbeing programmes into workshops and sessions on specific topics. High‑impact areas usually include:
Sleep - helping employees learn about circadian rhythm, give the opportunity to discuss and analyse their own sleep habits and how these affect their daily energy, engagement in work, levels of concentration and overall performance.
Energy - connecting energy dips and peaks to their daily choices - the foods they choose for lunch, for snacks; how much movement they have during the working day, giving practical tips on how to structure their day to avoid the 3 pm slump and avoid late-night working.
Stress - educating about the physiological aspect of stress, how stress affects the body and mind, and practising stress relief tools and exercises together with the group - showing employees the practices they can use during their working day, between meetings, before an important presentation or pitch.
Nutrition - focusing on practical examples, such as how to snack to avoid energy highs and lows, educating about the importance of three meals per day, creating home-cooked meals in little time available and choosing the foods that enhance their physical and mental wellbeing.
When corporate wellbeing programmes focus on these fundamentals, you support both immediate performance and long‑term physical and mental health.
Step 3: Create engaging workshops
Workshops and sessions should be designed around one key question: “Will our people do something differently tomorrow because of this?” Elements that work well include:
Focused sessions that consider diary pressures
Simple explanations of why a habit is important
Interactive elements that encourage employees to get involved
Micro‑commitments, such as one change to test for the next week
For example, in a session focused on sleep optimisation, design it around a lengthy Q&A where people can share their sleep dilemmas, and then create an opportunity to discuss proven good sleep hygiene tools. A realistic change for many could be to tweak their small daily habits: avoiding caffeine after 3pm, setting a ‘screen-off’ time, and creating a daily wind‑down routine. All of these need to be shown with ‘how to’. Link these solutions to teaching people self‑efficacy, and the aim is to demonstrate how small, achievable changes lead to big benefits.
Step 4: Build in support
After a wellbeing session, workshop, Lunches or Learns, it’s essential you provide ongoing support. A strategic corporate wellbeing programme helps staff feel cared for and valued. Structured support may look like:
Offer additional coaching or drop‑in sessions for individuals - with a relatively small spend for the company, the value of these individual sessions is tremendous. I have seen it many times how eager people are to share what they’re going through with work stress and health issues, and how grateful they feel that help is here, in the same room with them.
Provide simple tracking tools that employees can use privately - start with post-session surveys, feedback forms on what worked best and worst, etc.
Encourage teams to create a new individual team’s behaviour around wellbeing. (One of the executives from my wellbeing programme encouraged everybody in his team to do cycles of deep breathing exercises several times per day; they did it together as a team.)
Step 5: Measure habit change
To move employee wellbeing programmes beyond a tick-box exercise, measuring success needs to go further than “We ran three webinars and 200 people attended”. Some useful metrics include:
Self‑reported changes over the coming months
Uptake and completion of specific wellbeing-related challenges
Analysis of sickness absence trends over time
Qualitative feedback from managers
Even simple before‑and‑after surveys can highlight genuine shifts in behaviour. Collecting data can help you refine your corporate wellbeing programme and demonstrate tangible return on investment to stakeholders.
Partnering with Boost My Energy
If you want to introduce effective wellbeing solutions that improve employee wellbeing over longterm, it helps to work with a partner who understands habit change. Boost My Energy combines Health Coaching, evidence-based approaches and customisable formats to design programmes that focus on real‑life habits, not theory.
From needs assessment and topic selection to engaging workshops and ongoing support, we help your employees build self‑efficacy, self‑autonomy and self‑determination. To explore how a tailored corporate wellbeing programme could work in your organisation, get in touch today and start designing a programme that actually changes employee habits.