Employee well being and productivity took center stage in the wake of the pandemic and the ensuing record number of resignations. The physical and mental toll was intense, and the message from employees was loud and clear: Employees value psychological and physical health more than the stability of a paycheck. More than half of US employees have said that greater work-life balance and better personal well being would be very important in their next job, ahead of job security (57 percent) and pay (53 percent).
TL;DR
- Employee well being and productivity are closely linked.
- Employees increasingly value health over pay stability.
- Micromanagement heavily damages physical and mental health.
- Measuring well being only works if leaders act on the results.
What is Employee Well Being?
While the focus on employee wellbeing is intensifying, the concept and its link to productivity are not new. Well being expands on wellness, and organizations have long used corporate wellness programs to promote health, reduce absenteeism, and lower healthcare costs.
Gallup has studied wellbeing for decades and identifies five common elements people need to thrive:
- Career — you like your company and what you do every day.
- Social — you have meaningful friendships.
- Financial — you manage your money well and feel financially secure.
- Physical — you are healthy and have energy for work and activities you enjoy.
- Community — You like where you live and engage with groups like churches or service organizations.
What is the Impact of Employee Well Being on Productivity?
Employee well being has moved from a nice extra to a measurable business issue. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 report tracks both engagement and well being. It found that:
- Global employee engagement fell from 23 percent to 21 percent in 2024,
- Low engagement cost the world economy $438 billion in lost productivity, and
- The share of employees who rate their lives as thriving also fell, to 33 percent.
Preventative wellness also helps leaders avoid executive burnout, which protects the bottom line as well as the people.
How Do You Measure Wellbeing?
To measure wellbeing, you need to know what your employees want at work and in life and if they are getting what they want. HR leaders can run brief, anonymous pulse surveys at regular intervals using a framework like the following. A monthly pulse survey gives current data on stress and engagement, which annual reviews cannot.
Net Thriving
Gallup developed Net Thriving. It is a simple poll that enables employees to assess their status in each of the five elements of wellbeing on a 1-10 scale:
- Thriving: people with positive views of their present life and the next five years.
- Struggling: people who struggle in their present lives and have uncertain or negative future views.
- Suffering: people who report their lives are miserable and have only negative thoughts of the future.
The Warwick-Edinburgh Scale (WEMWBS)
Like Gallup, the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) uses a scale of 14 elements to enable people to self-assess their wellbeing. Examples are:
- I am optimistic about the future
- I am thinking clearly
- I am interested in new things
Participants answer using a 1-to-5 scale, with a total score ranging from 14 to 70.
How Do You Improve Employee Well Being?
Multiple studies show that the most significant factor influencing employee well being beyond the basics of food, shelter, and health is management—more specifically, micromanagement. Poor management practices, such as excessive oversight and a lack of trust, increase stress and decrease productivity.
Gallup’s Seven Strategies for Well Being At Work
Beyond giving employees more autonomy, Gallup identified seven strategies to apply to each of its five elements of wellbeing, integrating them into your work routines:
- Development — ask about employees' wellbeing goals just as you would career development goals.
- Recognition — recognize wellbeing achievements and milestones like you recognize performance achievements.
- Communication — communicate workplace wellbeing goals with clarity about human and business outcomes you expect.
- Incentives — create incentives to participate in wellness that produce results.
- Events — create events that drive awareness of Net Thriving culture and change behaviors.
- Rules and Guidelines — make certain rules and guidelines foster and do not work against thriving in the five elements.
- Facilities—design your office space to facilitate movement, offer views of the outdoors, and support collaboration.
Pfeffer’s Strategies for Improving Well Being
Pfeffer recommends these strategies to improve employee wellbeing:
- Provide job control — as seen, autonomy is key to wellbeing.
- Provide social support — having friends "protects your health as much as quitting smoking and a great deal more than exercising."
- Demonstrate commitment to offering help — you can "signal in ways large and small that it cares about its employees' wellbeing."
- Encourage people to care for one another by creating internal GoFundMe vehicles that enable employees "to help each other during times of crisis, such as a natural disaster, an accident, or an illness."
- Fix the language. Words like "management" and "staff” in the workplace often emphasize divisions between leadership and employees, which can further alienate people and erode any sense of shared community or identity."
- To support shared connections, create events that "bring people into contact in a pleasant and meaningful context—from holidays to community service to events that celebrate employee tenure or shared successes, such as product launches."
Support Work-Life Balance With Flexible Schedules
Employees want a say in where and when they work, and a mismatch has a cost. Flexibility supports employee well being and productivity only when expectations are clear. Teams can set core collaboration hours when everyone is available and keep the rest of the day for focused or asynchronous work. Managers should also agree on digital communication boundaries, such as which messages can wait until the next morning.
Balance Well Being and Productivity in Remote Teams
Remote teams can burn out quickly when work and home blur together and back-to-back video calls leave little time to recover. Replacing some live meetings with asynchronous updates, such as short written status notes, cuts call fatigue and protects focus time.
Routine administrative tasks add to the load. Handing scheduling, inbox management, and other repetitive work to a virtual administrative assistant lowers executive workload and gives remote teams more time for focused work.
Measure and Act on Employee Well Being
Measure employee well-being to demonstrate to employees that this is a critical goal for your company. Use a framework like Gallup or WEMWBS to track overall employee well-being over time and demonstrate whether you are meeting your goals. The good news is that measuring well-being through polls is not a difficult task. A more challenging fact is that if you measure well-being but fail to address issues and low rankings, you risk losing the trust of your teams.
Improving employee well being and productivity is ongoing work: measure, act on the results, and measure again. Acting takes time that busy leaders often lack, and handing routine admin work to a virtual assistant is one way to free it up. It also pays to track how remote and hybrid arrangements affect well being and team morale.
About the Author: Bill is Prialto's senior content marketing manager and writes about the future of work and how businesses can be more productive and successful. His work has appeared in the World Economic Forum Agenda blog and CIO magazine.
FAQs about Employee Wellbeing and Productivity
How does work-life balance directly impact employee productivity?
Supporting a healthy work-life balance prevents workplace burnout and directly enhances individual job performance. When staff members are provided with flexible scheduling or remote work options, they can manage personal commitments alongside professional tasks with less anxiety. Ultimately, organizations that cultivate this flexibility experience fewer absences, higher levels of employee engagement, and steadier revenue growth.
What are the most effective ways to measure employee wellbeing?
Organizations can measure employee wellbeing by using validated tracking frameworks such as Gallup's Net Thriving scale or the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale. Utilizing short, anonymous pulse surveys allows leadership to gather precise metrics on how employees evaluate their physical, financial, and mental state. However, the most critical step is to consistently act on this data, as failing to address low rankings will quickly erode team trust.
Why is employee autonomy considered a critical driver of workplace wellness?
Decades of research indicate that giving employees control over how, when, and where they perform their duties significantly boosts both mental and physical health. Conversely, micromanagement and excessive oversight increase employee stress levels and severely hinder creative problem-solving. Fostering a high-trust environment with fluid roles protects workers from exhaustion and enhances overall operational efficiency.
How can managers build a more supportive and resilient workplace culture?
Managers can foster a resilient culture by building strong social support networks and celebrating individual and team achievements. Establishing clear, open lines of communication about organizational goals helps reduce uncertainty and connects daily work to a broader sense of organizational purpose. Additionally, aligning workplace rules to foster mutual care ensures that employees feel safe, respected, and motivated to perform at their best.