Employers are too focused on changing individual workers’ mental health when they should be improving their organization’s health.
Ron Z. Goetzel, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist, Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Karen B. Kent, MPH
Senior Program Manager, Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Enid Chung Roemer, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist, Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Business leaders understand a simple truth: Healthy employees are good for business. Physically and mentally healthy employees are generally more productive, miss fewer days of work, experience fewer injuries, stay with their employers longer, and cost less in healthcare.
The opposite is equally true. Toxic workplaces — characterized by poor leadership, unrealistic workloads, and ineffective organizational structures — drain morale, increase turnover, stifle innovation, and ultimately hurt business performance through lost productivity, disengagement, and weaker financial results.
Fixing the employee, not the workplace
Too often, organizations try to “fix” the employee instead of fixing the workplace. They roll out coaching, resilience training, and mindfulness apps. These mental health resources are an essential part of a comprehensive benefits package, but they also send an unintended message: “We’ve given you the tools, now it’s up to you.” The implication is subtle but powerful. If you are stressed out, burnt out, or overwhelmed, the problem must be your coping skills.
What if that is backwards?
Employees do not burn out simply because they forgot to meditate. They burn out because they are navigating impossible workloads, unclear priorities, ineffective managers, constant organizational change, and cultures that reward exhaustion more than excellence. You cannot solve organizational problems one employee at a time. It is like handing out inhalers while ignoring the smokestacks causing a city’s pollution.
The question leaders should ask
Healthy organizations understand this distinction. They recognize that well-being is not simply an employee benefit; it is an organizational capability. Instead of, “How can we make employees more resilient?” they ask a harder question: “What are we doing that requires so much resilience in the first place?” That shift in thinking moves the conversation beyond individual behavior and toward organizational health and culture — the systems, policies, leadership practices, and environments that shape employees’ daily experiences.
What healthy organizations do
At the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, we have spent years studying businesses that successfully create healthy, high-performing workplaces. Through the Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health in the Workplace, we have identified eight best practices shared by employers that integrate employee well-being into their organization’s culture and operations.
Exemplary employers build cultures where health, respect, and psychological safety are shared values. They provide robust mental health resources and benefits. They establish and visibly enforce clear workplace policies addressing bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination, safety, and inclusion. They design physical and social environments that support health and human connection. They equip leaders to address workload, autonomy, scheduling, and work-life balance, along with mental health training to recognize distress and direct employees to supportive resources. They measure outcomes that matter. They continuously innovate, ensuring programs are grounded in evidence rather than trends.
Participation is not impact
As organizations invest millions into employee well-being, they must remember that participation is not the same as impact. A meditation app cannot undo the damage of chronic understaffing, a resilience workshop will not fix impossible workloads or abusive managers, and no amount of coaching can overcome a workplace culture that systematically creates stress faster than employees can recover from it.
Organizations must stop focusing only on fixing broken employees and turn attention to fixing themselves. Sometimes the most important message an employer needs to hear is the one borrowed from every difficult breakup: “It’s not me. It’s you.”
