Employees experience the company through their manager: the workload they are handed, the hour messages arrive, whether a bad week gets noticed. When managers are stretched and untrained, no wellness budget makes up for it. Invest in managers first, and design the rest of the program around what they can realistically do.
What Gallup’s numbers say
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, the 2026 edition covering 2025 data, found global employee engagement fell to 20%. Manager engagement fell further, from 27% to 22% in 2025, and Gallup links the overall decline largely to that drop among managers.
Read that as a design problem, not a character flaw. Managers sit between strategy and delivery. They absorb pressure from above and below, are often promoted for individual skill rather than people skill, and rarely get protected time to lead.
Asking them to champion a wellness program on top of all that is how programs fade quietly. The launch email goes out, managers forward it, and nothing about the working week changes. The program then gets judged on attendance numbers that managers were never in a position to move.
For HR and People leaders, the practical consequence is a change in where the first dollars go. Before buying anything for employees, spend on manager time, manager skill and manager support. Everything else lands better once that is in place.
A more useful question than “how do we get managers to promote the program?” is “what would managers need to make next week better for their team?”
Five habits that matter most
Of everything a manager could do for wellbeing, these five habits shape the working week most directly. Each takes minutes, not hours, and none needs a budget.
A weekly workload check-in
Fifteen minutes per person, in the same slot every week. This is a conversation about load and priorities, not a status update, and it works best when the manager talks less than half the time.
“What’s taking most of your energy this week? Is anything stuck or unclear? If something has to slip, what should it be? What do you need from me?”
Write down the one thing you agreed to do, and start next week’s check-in by reporting back on it.
Boundaries people can see
Teams copy what managers do, not what the policy says. A manager who sends messages at 10 p.m. sets a 10 p.m. norm, however often they say “no need to reply.” Use scheduled send, and say out loud when you are logging off for the day.
Noticing early
A change in tone, a missed handoff, a usually talkative person going quiet. The skill is to notice and ask, privately and plainly: “You’ve seemed stretched this week. How are you doing?” Then listen more than you talk, and resist fixing it in the first minute.
End with one concrete offer, even a small one: moving a deadline, taking a meeting off their plate, or simply checking in again on Friday. Noticing without any follow-up feels like being watched rather than supported.
Specific recognition
“Great job” fades by lunch. “Your rewrite of the handover notes saved the night shift twenty minutes” sticks, and tells the person exactly what to keep doing. Aim for one specific acknowledgment per person every two weeks, in whatever form that person prefers: public, private or written.
A simple formula helps: what the person did, the effect it had, and a thank-you. Three short sentences, sent the same day, are worth more than a paragraph at the annual review.
Referring, not diagnosing
Managers are not counselors. When a conversation moves beyond work, the manager’s job is to listen, offer flexibility where possible and point to the EAP. Give every manager a card with the EAP contact details and a sentence to use: “That sounds like a lot to carry. The EAP is confidential, and here is how to reach them. What would help at work this week?”
Give managers capacity, not tasks
Every ask of a manager needs something in return. Otherwise the wellness program becomes one more pressure on the people already carrying the most.
| If you ask managers to | Give them |
|---|---|
| Hold weekly check-ins | Fewer recurring meetings, so the time exists |
| Model boundaries | Senior leaders who do the same |
| Notice strain | Training in what to look for and what to say |
| Refer to the EAP | A current referral route and a script |
| Recognize specifically | A simple channel and a reminder in the calendar |
| Protect team recovery | Authority to move deadlines or reassign work |
Check span of control while you are at it. A manager with 18 direct reports cannot hold 18 weekly check-ins and do anything else. Either the span changes, or the check-in moves to every two weeks with a short written update between.
Every team needs someone in its corner between rounds, and for most employees that is the manager. Managers need a corner too. A peer group of six to ten managers meeting monthly for an hour, with a facilitator, gives them somewhere to bring the hard conversations before those conversations go wrong.
Example: a 140-person call center has 12 team leads, each with a dozen agents and back-to-back queue targets. Before asking leads to run check-ins, the operations director removes one daily stand-up and gives each lead a protected 90 minutes a week off the phones. The check-ins start the following Monday, and the leads meet as a peer group on the first Thursday of each month.
Run a four-week manager sprint
You can run this with one cohort of eight to 16 managers next month. It takes about three hours of each manager’s time, spread across four weeks.
- Week 1, 60 minutes. Introduce the five habits. Each manager picks one to practice for three weeks and tells the group which one.
- Week 2, 30 minutes in groups of four. Share what happened in the first check-ins, then practice the noticing conversation in pairs, swapping roles once.
- Week 3, 30 minutes. Walk through EAP referrals, with your EAP provider on the call if possible. Cover what the EAP offers, how confidential it is and what managers should never ask.
- Week 4, 45 minutes. Each manager runs the team burnout risk check with their team beforehand. The group then compares what came up and what each manager will change.
Keep the sprint inside working hours. A manager program delivered at 7 a.m. teaches the opposite of what it says.
At the end, ask every manager two questions: which habit stuck, and what got in the way of the others. The answers tell you what to fix in the system, not only in the managers.
What not to ask of managers
Some requests undermine trust faster than any training can rebuild it. Leave these off the list:
- Tracking their team’s steps, sleep or app usage
- Diagnosing stress, anxiety or burnout
- Chasing participation targets for optional sessions
- Running wellness activities on top of a full load, with no time given back
- Holding conversations they were never trained for, then carrying the consequences alone
If a manager’s own wellbeing is suffering, the five habits will be the first things to slip. Ask senior leaders to hold the same weekly check-in with the managers who report to them. The habit has to run all the way up.
Signs your managers are overloaded
Watch for these before you add anything new to a manager’s plate. Each one comes with a first move.
- One-to-ones keep getting cancelled. Look at the manager’s calendar with them and remove one recurring meeting.
- Managers answer messages late at night. Ask what they could not finish in the day, and who else could own it.
- Every decision gets escalated. Clarify what managers can decide alone, in writing, with examples.
- The same few managers absorb every new hire. Spread onboarding across the team, or slow hiring for that group.
- Managers stop asking for help. Ask them directly in your next one-to-one: “What would you drop if you could?”
These are signals about the system, not judgments about the person. Treat them that way and managers will tell you more.
Where to start
Our leadership workshops for managers include a half-day session on these five habits for up to 30 people, from $3,600 (indicative). For change that lasts, The Corner is our manager enablement program: six sessions for a cohort of up to 16, with practice and peer support between sessions, from $14,000 (indicative).
Book a discovery call and tell us how many managers you have and what they are carrying. We will suggest the smallest useful first step.
