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Leaders: Your well-being fix should be your highest priority

Major League Baseball and Ivy League research confirm that tackling well-being is hard work — but well worth the effort.
An open book reveals calm water on the left page, symbolizing serenity, while the right page showcases a silhouette of a head with a star inside, representing a well-being fix.
Adobe Stock / Paul Maguire / Unsplash / Emily Campbell
Key Takeaways
  • When companies fail to create an environment where people are less stressed and more engaged, they leave money on the table.
  • Organizations need to take a variety of approaches to make sure employees and teams continue to thrive.
  • Marti Wronski — COO for the Milwaukee Brewers — believes that unraveling the root causes of stress requires support from the C-Suite.
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Excerpted from Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team, by Paula Davis, copyright 2025. Reprinted by permission of Wharton School Press.

Some leaders may dismiss the factors associated with developing a positive work culture as soft, but it is a new frontier (and important differentiator) in the competition for talent and is a key ingredient in business success. When companies fail to create an environment where people are less stressed and more engaged, they leave money on the table by choosing not to change. When people feel burned out, overwhelmed, disengaged, disconnected, lonely, overloaded, languishing, or some combination thereof, performance, productivity, motivation, and engagement suffer, and that has bottom-line consequences.

The cover of "Lead Well" by Paula Davis, featuring a stack of colorful sticky notes. Subtitle: "5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team." Wharton School Press logo at the bottom.

There are significant business outcomes associated with creating a thriving work culture. So what are the economic benefits to improving well-being, increasing engagement, and reducing burnout? And where should companies invest in order to improve the employee experience? An interesting report from PwC examined that exact question. It defined the employee experience as “the sum of all perceptions an employee has about the interactions with the organization in which he or she works” and explored 11 elements or drivers of a positive employee experience to see which, if any, impacted absenteeism, productivity, and turnover. The report found the following:

  1. A good employee experience leads to lower absenteeism, lower turnover, and higher productivity. 
  2. The 11 drivers that can impact employee experience include autonomy, development opportunities, reward, human-centered leadership, work environment, training, flexibility and schedule satisfaction, diversity, stress, well-being, and corporate social responsibility policies. 
  3. Well-being, providing development opportunities, and providing training for employees led to the best outcomes in terms of financial benefits to the company. The financial outcomes were expressed as a percentage of total turnover and investing in these three specifically showed savings of up to 4.9%. 
  4. Providing training to employees, decreasing workplace stress, focusing on developing human-centered leadership, and providing competitive compensation and benefits are the drivers most associated with reduced turnover. 
  5. Companies investing in all 11 drivers could realize a savings of up to 12.6% of total revenue. 

Importantly, the report also found that investments in different elements of the employee experience had different effects, which means that organizations need to take a variety of approaches to make sure employees and teams continue to thrive. This is important because many organizations take a very general approach to their well-being efforts. And most organizations get stuck here—at the “beginner” stage—and make only a minor impact. Organizations that become more proficient in this space, and thus see a more significant ROI associated with their efforts, take a more systemic approach, which incorporates:

  • Shared accountability for well-being among organizational leaders who prioritize it 
  • System-level interventions that are measured 
  • Consideration of well-being as a strategic investment 
  • A clearly articulated business case for well-being 
  • Operational decisions that consider well-being

Marti Wronski [chief operating officer (COO) for the Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball team] helped me understand why leaders and organizations can get stuck doing this work. Helping to identify and unravel root causes or sources of stress, disconnection among teams, silos, high workloads, and more can be grinding and painstaking work to do right and to do well. It takes time, involves lots of listening, and requires support from someone in the upper levels of the organization. In Marti’s experience, leaders often drop off when they realize that there is so much to be fixed or unraveled and don’t know where to start. When leaders find themselves in this situation, she said, they need to regroup and reground themselves in the why and consider whether a particular approach may not be working. Peeling back the organizational layers to get to the root causes is work, but it’s work that’s worth it.

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Fortunately, there is now robust research to support your efforts. Happier workers are more productive, less likely to leave their jobs, less likely to miss days of work for health reasons, and tend to be more collaborative, creative, and committed to their jobs. Researchers from Harvard and Oxford used crowd-sourced data from Indeed to examine the link between well-being and company performance. They looked at data from 1,636 publicly listed companies and measured employee well-being using the Indeed Work Well-Being Score, which looks at dimensions of work happiness, purpose, stress, and job satisfaction. They discovered that well-being was a significant predictor of company performance across a variety of indicators. Specifically, they found that higher levels of well-being generally predicted:

  • Higher firm valuations
  • Higher return on assets
  • Higher gross profits
  • Better stock market performance

The researchers also found that higher levels of well-being are “not only predictive of contemporaneous company performance, but also of future firm performance.” This is so because they found that well-being positively influences productivity, creativity, social relationships, health, recruitment, and retention.

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