I’ve fully embraced the cliche and, every New Year, I make business resolutions. This year, I’m focused on well-being. As a tech entrepreneur in the healthcare space, well-being is often at the forefront of my mind.
After attending a strategic forum for business leaders earlier this year, I walked away with a deeper understanding of wellness and how, as an employer to a remote workforce, I can support employees and their well-being by taking strategic aim at ending the workplace’s most dreaded feeling: burnout.
When exhaustion is up, productivity goes down
At the pace of business today, we’re all at risk for burnout. With calendars full of meetings and an overflowing inbox greeting us before we’ve had our first cup of coffee, many people are feeling exhausted before they even start their day. Need a business reason why exhaustion is detrimental to your company? It’s not difficult to find statistics and research proving exhausted employees have impaired work performance, according to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
According to research presented by Frank Giampietro, chief well-being officer at Ernst & Young, productivity decreases and IQ starts to drop at 350 digital interactions per day (digital interactions include emails and Slack messages). Have a busy day of solving problems and interacting with colleagues? That 350 adds up fast.
Furthermore, productivity decreases and burnout risk increases when schedules present multiple meetings in a row with no breaks — just looking at a packed schedule first thing in the morning can cause anxiety to peak.
Related: Prioritizing Your Employees’ Well-being Is the Smartest Business Decision You Can Make — Here’s How.
Questions to ask yourself for holistic employee wellness
To achieve holistic wellness for employees and avoid burnout (while keeping productivity up), here are nine questions employers should ask themselves in 2025:
1. Are you supporting their physical health?
Supporting physical health can mean times for walks during the workday, friendly step challenges or gym stipends. Flexibility with workday and meeting scheduling of course creates the most opportunity for physical health. This way, someone can catch their favorite noon yoga class or get in a swim before the workday begins.
2. Can meeting behavior be addressed?
According to Giampietro, even a five-minute break between meetings increases well-being scores and lowers anxiety. Stick to meeting etiquette guidelines and include agendas and action items with each invite. Better yet, cancel some unnecessary meetings. At the very least, every meeting attendee should know why they are there and what the outcome is.
3. Are you going far enough with flexibility?
Schedule flexibility that allows for switching loads of laundry, attending a middle school recital or an important friend gathering is commonplace. Go further and consider what else may impact an employee’s workday and time. There may be a major event taking place in their city or, common in 2024, extreme weather that needs time and attention for preparation and cleanup. Extra time in the day away from work to manage life responsibilities can go a long way for an employee’s well-being.
4. Are you giving them opportunities to step away from work?
Providing sufficient PTO is table stakes. When building my company’s benefits, it was imperative we created a robust PTO policy and that employees felt able to take time away and reset. To officially ensure paid time off is truly time off, keep an eye on workloads, coverage and training. With workloads that are balanced amongst team members on a day-to-day basis, a vacation shouldn’t cause disruption. With cross-team member training, tasks that must be completed during outages can be handled easily.
Related: Why Personal Health and Wellness Are Key to Business Longevity
5. Are you giving employees opportunities to feel like the work that they’re doing is meaningful?
According to Harvard Business Review, meaningfulness is more important to us than any other aspect of our jobs — including pay and rewards, opportunities for promotion and working conditions. When work is meaningful and creates some kind of difference or solution, employees are engaged, committed and satisfied. While I know it is easier to connect to meaning in some industries than others, we all have reasons why we do what we do.
6. Are you providing comprehensive insurance benefits that cover behavioral health services?
I’m proud of the superior benefits package we offer employees — especially its free or low-cost options for therapy and other behavioral health options. If you’re lacking such benefits, lobby for them internally. There is no reason why everyone should not have access to behavioral health services. If you have mental health resources available to your employees, encourage their use of them with reminders and instructions. Eliminating barriers to accessing benefits is almost as important as actually offering them.
7. Are you optimizing practices at work?
Generative AI capabilities have advanced rapidly. While risks have to be weighed, some tools offer a real opportunity to eliminate administrative tasks and optimize work. Create intentional time for learning and practicing and in no time, some work tasks may experience efficiencies.
8. Are you measuring your wellness plan or your current burnout likelihood?
As the president and COO of my company says “If it moves, measure it.” In our digital world, there is a constant flow of data. This is good news for wellness because you can discover patterns in the data and later, use it to prove the effectiveness of changes. In one success story from Giampietro, within 30 days of implementing policies to prevent burnout, employees across EY reported increased well-being scores.
9. Are you leading by example?
Perhaps the most important question to ask yourself is: Are you personally taking a holistic approach to well-being? This means being unavailable sometimes, changing a meeting into a walking meeting, optimizing your work and encouraging your leadership team to do the same. Walking the walk will go a long way in achieving well-being.
Related: Burnout is Not a Badge of Honor. Follow These 4 Mental Wellness Strategies for Long-Term Success
Business benefits for ending burnout
Endless studies — and personal experience — have concluded that healthier and happier employees are better employees who are less likely to experience burnout. Another business reason to address burnout? Retention.
Especially in the tech sector, employees can choose to take their talents to any company. Losing talented contributors to addressable issues and burnout can be costly. Recruiting, hiring and training are big line items in any business’ budget. Holding onto talented employees can make a significant difference in the bottom line.
While company wellness efforts of the past are admirable and no doubt, have been impactful, I hope many join me in welcoming a broader approach to holistic well-being in 2025. It could just be the year we find optimal work-life balance.
