Fix Your Wellbeing Strategy: What Managers Are Carrying (and How to Change It)

If January has felt less like a fresh start and more like a continuation of the Great Squeeze, you are not alone. Our head of People Insights, Michelle Page sat down with Founder of Karma Llama, Ange Roberts, to bring radical perspectives to workplace wellbeing.

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A former Royal Air Force Officer turned somatic wellness expert, Ange blends military-grade resilience with the science of emotional regulation. By combining "marching drills with mudras," she helps HR leaders bridge the gap between hard data and human spirit. Together, we’re moving beyond "surviving" to help your teams thrive through a powerful mix of science, strategy, and soul.

The conversation revealed that across organisations, employees are reporting rising stress and a growing sense of being underappreciated.

For HR leaders, this pressure is particularly critical. We are navigating the friction of return-to-office mandates, the financial hangover of Christmas, and persistent capacity gaps, all while being expected to “reignite engagement.” Yet many traditional wellbeing strategies (an occasional yoga session or a well-stocked fruit bowl), are now met with cynicism. Employees increasingly see these initiatives as performative attempts to patch over an unsustainable workload rather than address its root causes.

This exposes the core tension HR faces today: we are being asked to fix burnout and disengagement with tools that were never designed for structural pressure.

Drawing on insights from this discussion, one thing is clear: supporting employee wellbeing is no longer about adding more initiatives. It requires a fundamental shift in how we equip and support managers… we must move beyond tick-box wellbeing and toward structural, cultural change.

To do this, HR must drive three critical thought-leadership shifts to support the “squeezed middle” of management.

The Proximity Paradox: Why Returning to the Office Reduced Empathy

There is a prevailing assumption that face-to-face interaction automatically improves connection. However, the data suggests a paradox.

During COVID, line managers were forced to be intentional. Without physical visibility, they had to ask, “Are you okay?” They learned to read tone, energy, and facial expression over video calls, often without distraction.

Now that teams are back in the office, that level of individualised care has quietly tailed off. The busyness of the physical environment allows managers to assume everyone is fine simply because they can see them. As a result, wellbeing conversations slip down the priority list, precisely as stress levels continue to rise.

The HR takeaway: We cannot rely on osmosis for wellbeing. Managers need support and training to recreate the intentional boundaries and focused attention they practised remotely, even within a noisy, open-plan office.

The Identity Shift: From Sponge to Architect

One of the most powerful mindset shifts for new managers is redefining how they relate to pressure.

Many believe their role is to be a sponge, absorbing stress from above so it doesn’t hit their team. While well-intentioned, this approach leads quickly to burnout if additional efforts aren’t taken.

HR must help managers shift from Sponge to Architect:

• The Sponge absorbs pressure until they are saturated and ineffective.
• The Architect designs the workflow. They do not hold the stress; they organise it, delegate it, and build structures that allow the team to function.
  

This mirrors the military principle of Mission Command, where responsibility is delegated to the lowest capable level. Rather than bottlenecking decisions, leaders create clarity, trust, and autonomy, protecting both performance and energy.

Structural Wellbeing: Three Practical Interventions

If we want to move from performative wellbeing to meaningful impact, recovery must be embedded into how work is designed, not bolted on afterwards. Here are three practical frameworks HR can introduce immediately.

1. Redefine SMART Goals: Swap “Relevant” for “Recovery”

SMART objectives are a staple of management training, but the “R” (Relevant) is often redundant. If a task wasn’t relevant, it wouldn’t exist.

• The shift: Replace Relevant with Recovery.
• In practice: When setting a high-pressure deadline, managers explicitly plan the recovery that follows. “We need to push hard for this deadline, and here is the recovery plan immediately after.”

This builds trust and gives teams a visible endpoint, rather than an endless grind.

2. Protected Cognitive Space

In hybrid environments, managers often move from meeting to meeting with no time to think, reflect, or check in with their teams.

• The shift: Introduce no-meeting days (for example, Tuesdays or Thursdays).
• In practice: This creates protected cognitive space, reducing the frantic task-switching that drives exhaustion and mistakes.

3. The End-of-Day Ritual

Blurred boundaries between work and home remain one of the biggest stressors for hybrid teams.

• The shift: A consistent end-of-day team ritual.
• In practice: A short huddle with three questions:
  
  1. What went well today?
     
  2. What is the focus for tomorrow?
     
  3. What are you looking forward to when you get home?
     

That final question matters. It deliberately shifts the brain into “home mode,” helping employees disconnect and genuinely recover.

The Manager Is the System

We are seeing a generation of managers promoted for technical ability, yet left unsupported when it comes to the emotional and structural demands of hybrid work. The consequences are clear: disengagement, burnout, and a retention crisis where two-thirds of people cite poor management or culture as their reason for leaving.

If Q1 is going to be more than a continuation of the Great Squeeze, HR must stop patching symptoms and start redesigning how work actually happens.

This is not about running another yoga class. It is about empowering managers to act as architects of their teams’ time and energy, treating recovery with the same seriousness as performance, and building cultures that can sustain both.

Get started now with our guide 'Wellbeing at work: A step by step playbook'. Download it here