How to promote a culture of wellbeing in your workplace

Key takeaways

• Stigma limits benefit use: Many employees hesitate to seek help even when mental health resources are available.
• Managers are the front line: Training leaders to spot distress and offer support improves retention and reduces stigma.
• Language matters: Explicitly using "mental health" (not just "wellness") normalises conversations and reduces fear.
• Measurement drives improvement: Tracking psychological safety, EAP use and survey scores helps you iterate and improve culture change efforts.

Data proves it time and again: organisations succeed when their workers are happy and healthy, and they struggle when they're not. According to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, poor mental health alone costs the economy an estimated AUD $70 billion annually, with mental health-related claims on track to double by 2030. In the workplace, the impact exceeds AUD $14 billion annually in lost productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover. People showing up and engaging matters.

But it's not enough to simply "promote a culture of wellness" in your workplace. According to the TELUS Mental Health Index (MHI), 36 per cent of workers in Australia have high mental health risk, 43 per cent have a moderate risk (September 2025) and 41 per cent feel under constant stress (January 2025). Yet many employees still hesitate to seek support, even when benefits are available. 

This gap reveals a critical truth: access to mental health benefits is necessary but not sufficient. Employees also need to feel psychologically safe. Building a truly supportive workplace requires an organisation-wide strategy that everyone, from the C-suite down, can enthusiastically embrace. Through strong infrastructure, targeted programs, stigma reduction and clear communication, you can help build a healthier, more resilient culture of wellbeing among your employees.

Wellbeing goes beyond wellness

Many organisations in recent years have chased “wellness” as the ultimate goal when it comes to their workers. But to achieve the kind of workplace morale that actually drives success, people leaders need to be thinking beyond old ideas about wellness and focus on employees’ more holistic wellbeing.

What’s the difference? 

The concept of "wellness," as it's commonly understood, only covers a fraction of what goes into wellbeing. Wellness usually means physical health, and maybe mental health as well, but financial, social and environmental health are also critical components to a person's overall wellbeing. These are essential aspects of a holistic approach to employee support. "Wellbeing" better encompasses the various aspects that may not be commonly thought of when workers hear the word "wellness," and being able to effectively communicate your offerings is just as important as the kinds of offerings you choose.

Creating psychological safety where employees feel comfortable discussing mental health issues is equally important as the programs you offer. When workers feel safe to speak up about struggles without fear of judgment or career consequences, they’re more likely to use the support available to them.

The first step to a culture of wellbeing: organisational infrastructure 

Before you can promote and sustain a culture of wellbeing in your workplace, you need to infuse your organisation’s structure with norms that will make this kind of culture easy to spread and sustain. In Australia, this isn’t just good practice, it’s a legal requirement. Under Work Health and Safety laws, employers have a duty to manage psychosocial hazards and maintain a psychologically safe work environment.

One in five adults in Australia experience mental illness, which shows why workers need clear support at work. Wellbeing should be baked into every facet of the business in one way or another; seen from a bird’s eye view, it should be no wonder your employees’ wellbeing contributes to your success as a company.

Some facets to consider when looking for ways to keep your organisation accountable to its culture of wellbeing:

• Governance structures: How will you ensure the programs and policies you implement will work as designed? What processes and reviews need to be put in place? Consider having experts on your team—people with specific accreditations in mental health and other aspects of wellbeing—who can use their expertise to keep the organisation consistent and up-to-date on the latest developments in workplace wellbeing.
• Leadership training: According to the Mental Health Index (MHI), people leaders across Australia wouldn’t know how to support an employee dealing with a mental health issue, and many say their organisations don’t offer training on how to handle these situations. The experts mentioned above, in tandem with learning and enablement specialists, can help you design training programs for your people leaders, which can help ensure sensitivity and a culture of wellbeing are baked into management styles across the company.
• Normalise mental health language: To help reduce stigma, use clear, direct language. Rather than hiding behind vague terms like “stress” or “wellbeing,” explicitly use the term “mental health” in your workplace mental health policy, employee handbooks, benefits guides, manager playbooks and intranet content. Clearly state that mental health conditions are treated with the same importance as physical health conditions. Include this language in onboarding materials, open enrolment meetings and quarterly all-hands communications. Non-clinical, inclusive language can help employees at all levels feel the topic is relevant to them, whether they’re seeking support or simply wanting to maintain their mental health.
• Policies, commitments and processes: You may want to start with national standards like the Safe Work Australia Code of Practice for managing psychosocial hazards, which you can adapt to fit your organisation and its values. Ensure your policies align with the Fair Work Act and outline clear, confidential steps for requesting support or accommodations. Commitments like these, made publicly and communicated internally, can guide decision-making when leadership needs to develop policies for supporting employees when they’re struggling and when they’re thriving.

Before you start, establish a baseline

Before you can design your overall wellbeing strategy, you’ll want to start with two critical levers: information about your employees and tools that will help you track your success as you hone your approach. The information part can be gained with the data you already have about your employees (Who are they? What are their needs?). You can augment that data with voluntary employee surveys. Regular employee wellbeing assessments can establish a baseline for stress levels and job satisfaction. This step is critical: according to the HUB International 2025 Workforce Vitality Gap Index only 50 per cent of employers analyse employee demographics when making benefits decisions, demonstrating a significant missed opportunity that can perpetuate utilisation gaps.

Once you have your information, how will you define and measure employee wellbeing? Surveys can play double duty as a qualitative tool to help you keep tabs on your progress. If you choose to use them as a routine diagnostic, make it easy for people to weigh in quickly, using quick pulse surveys and regular check-ins to understand team needs over time, and get on with their workday. If you’re looking for more in-depth responses, you’ll have to make the asks less frequently. Either way, you can incentivise participation with programs you already have; things like gift card drawings or an employee recognition platform can maximise response volume.

Quantitative tools, meanwhile, can be any metric that may link employee wellbeing (physical, mental or otherwise) to your organisation’s overall success. You can measure productivity and employee performance with key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results, or other statistics. You can track the rate of absenteeism and the rate of long-term and short-term disability leave. 

Understanding employee mental health trends with data insights can also help. The TELUS Mental Health Index tracks whether employees can focus, sleep, manage pressure and perform. The results help provide clarity on how workers are actually doing, what’s influencing their wellbeing and where stressors are rising.  

No matter what you choose to track, keep in mind that the quantitative can’t always tell the whole picture of your program’s success. For example, low EAP utilisation, despite offering services, may indicate stigma barriers, not lack of need, as many employees hesitate to seek support due to fear of judgment or concerns about career impact. Measure your progress on psychological safety by asking employees: “Do you feel comfortable discussing mental health at work?” and “Would you disclose a mental health condition to your manager?” These psychological safety metrics help you understand whether stigma is actually decreasing.

Equip managers to reduce stigma and improve trust in the workplace

The workplace is an uncertain place for employees these days, even with the most stellar wellbeing programs. It’s essential for people leaders to maintain their workers’ trust and keep morale in the workplace up by listening, both informally and formally. Training leaders can help organisations apply data about the benefits of wellbeing programs; managers can translate statistics into reasons that resonate with their people because they know them best.

A key to making your strategy work is recognising how different groups perceive your efforts. Managers and workers often see things very differently. According to the MHI, managers in Australia are 3x more likely than non-managers (September 2025) to rate employer support for mental health as excellent. That creates a huge difference in perceived support and should be tracked through employee engagement or buy-in over time. This gap suggests that leaders don’t always know how their teams actually feel. This disconnect can damage workplace morale and prevent employees from seeking the support they need.

To help close this gap, you should equip managers with structured training on how to help support their teams and reduce stigma. Managers are often the first point of contact when an employee is struggling. This makes them critical to your stigma reduction efforts.

Workplace training about mental health should cover:

• How to recognise early signs of distress in team members and support problem solving around workload, conflict or other barriers
• How to start caring conversations without judgment or clinical language
• How to guide employees to their EAP and other mental health benefits
• How to discuss workplace accommodations for mental health with sensitivity
• How to set clear boundaries where managers are supportive listeners, not therapists

Provide managers with practical tools including one-page “mental health response” guides and sample scripts for check-ins, tailored to their direct reports, accommodation discussions and return-to-work conversations. Help them understand that their role is to create psychological safety, avoid judgmental language and connect employees to professional support, not to diagnose or treat conditions.

Reduce stigma through leadership storytelling and visible role modelling

When senior leaders openly share their own experiences with burnout, anxiety, therapy or caregiving responsibilities, it has a powerful impact on company culture. It sends a clear message that mental health challenges don’t limit career success.

HR can help support leaders by finding safe forums for storytelling, such as CEO town halls, internal podcasts or written question-and-answer features. Coach leaders to share their stories in a way that normalises seeking help while respecting personal privacy and cultural differences. These conversations should include practical details, such as how they accessed their EAP, what therapy or counselling helped them and how they use mental health days. 

Leaders must also model healthy boundaries. When executives take their vacation leave, avoid sending late-night emails, openly use mental health days and visibly seek support when needed, they give their teams explicit permission to do the same. This visible role modelling says far more than any policy document: mental health support is normal, expected and valued in this organisation.

Design targeted programming

The third component of a strong, organisation-wide culture of wellbeing is the part most people think of when they hear the words “wellbeing program”: the individual offerings, flexible plan designs, specialised programs and inclusive resources that cater to your unique workforce.

This is where the information you gathered at the outset will come into play, helping you make targeted programming choices to support employee wellbeing based on who you have working for you and what they need, rather than going with generic options that don’t speak to lived experiences. Offering flexibility in working styles and accommodating family needs can also make those choices more meaningful in practice. The “targeted” part is key to how employees perceive, and thus engage with, wellbeing programs.

Once you have this data, align your plan design with your culture goals. Consider offering low-cost or no-cost therapy sessions, virtual care options across different time zones and clear pathways from informal check-ins to formal care. You should also integrate mental health support with other benefits, such as disability leave, wellness initiatives and diversity programs. For example, that might mean pairing employee assistance programs with healthcare coverage. This can help prevent siloed and confusing offerings.

It’s important to note that access to mental health benefits needs to be complemented by  psychological safety to help ensure employees actually use the support being offered. This is why it’s important to look for gaps between the support you offer and how comfortable employees feel accessing it. This can be done by reviewing EAP utilisation rates, claims for mental health conditions and employee survey responses about psychological safety and mental health support.

Finally, to help ensure usage you should run transparent communication campaigns that position mental health benefits as a standard part of total rewards, rather than a last-resort crisis service. Help employees understand when and how to access support, whether they’re struggling with a diagnosed condition, managing everyday stress or simply wanting to maintain their mental health. 

Track employee buy-in and measure culture change over time

For your culture change efforts to succeed, you need to measure whether employees actually feel the difference. Beyond tracking program participation, measure psychological safety. Use pulse surveys to ask: “Do you feel comfortable discussing mental health at work?” and “Have you felt judged for seeking mental health support?” Regular employee wellbeing surveys can also establish a baseline of stress levels, work/life balance and job satisfaction, giving you quantitative data to evaluate wellness initiatives over time. Track these scores over time to see if stigma is actually decreasing.

Monitor EAP utilisation rates. According to the 2025 TELUS Mental Health Barometer Australia, 55 per cent of workers don’t know or say their employer doesn’t offer an EAP, and only 52 per cent are satisfied with their employer’s mental health coverage. This gap indicates that awareness and perceived value, not just access, are holding people back.

When you get the mix right—combining infrastructure, training, transparent communication and leadership role modelling—you can see gains in employee performance and buy-in over time.

Wellbeing isn’t a program, it’s an ethos

Mindfulness apps and wellness stipends can’t fix an organisation with unrealistic workloads, overtime, blurred boundaries around the workday, poor leadership and a culture of constant hustle. People need jobs that allow them to prioritise their health. Under Work Health and Safety laws, you’re required to manage psychosocial hazards, which includes excessive workloads, bullying and unclear expectations.

That’s why you should weave wellbeing and psychological safety into your core values, and make them part of your goal-setting and performance reviews. Those values should support meaningful work and a sense of purpose rather than treating wellbeing as individual self care alone. When you reward behaviours that support health and model healthy boundaries as a leader, you’ll see positive changes across your workplace culture, and this shift can make a huge difference to well being.

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Frequently asked questions

How do you build a culture of wellbeing in the workplace?

Building this culture requires leadership commitment, clear policies that use explicit mental health language, stigma reduction efforts and open communication. You must design programs that meet the specific needs of your workers and train managers to support their teams. Most importantly, you must create psychological safety where employees feel comfortable discussing mental health without fear of judgment or career consequences.

What is a mentally healthy workplace?

A mentally healthy workplace is an environment where psychosocial risks are actively managed, employees feel psychological safety to speak up about concerns without fear of punishment or humiliation and mental health is treated with the same importance as physical health. It's a place where stigma is actively reduced through visible leadership support, clear policies and consistent manager training.

What are the legal requirements for workplace mental health in Australia?

Australian employers must manage psychosocial risks under Work Health and Safety laws. This involves identifying hazards like excessive workloads, bullying or unclear expectations and taking steps to eliminate or minimise them. Employers must also comply with the Fair Work Act to protect worker rights, including reasonable adjustments for mental health conditions. These aren't optional—they're legal obligations.

How can managers improve trust in the workplace?

Managers can build trust by listening to employee feedback, modelling healthy work habits (such as taking leave and avoiding after-hours emails) and offering support without judgment. Structured mental health workplace training helps managers handle sensitive conversations effectively. When workers trust their managers, they're more likely to disclose challenges and access support.

What’s the difference between wellness and wellbeing?

Wellness typically focuses on physical health and fitness. Wellbeing is broader and includes mental, emotional, financial and social health. Both are important, but wellbeing takes a more holistic view of what employees need to thrive at work and in life.

Why is psychological safety important for mental health?

Psychological safety means employees feel comfortable speaking up about concerns without fear of punishment or humiliation. According to the TELUS Health Barometer , employees who believe they cannot speak up have mental health scores 15 points lower than those who feel safe. Psychological safety directly enables employees to seek support early, reducing the severity and duration of mental health challenges.

How can we reduce stigma around mental health in the workplace?

Reduce stigma by using explicit “mental health” language in all policies and communications (not vague terms like “stress”). Train managers to respond supportively. Have senior leaders visibly share their own experiences with mental health challenges. Create peer support programs and community spaces that encourage open discussion. Integrate mental health support with other benefits.