One of the biggest risks to the success of your wellbeing program isn't vendor mismanagement or lack of benefit access. It's the managers you're counting on to deliver programming to the rest of your population.
Gallup found manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, a nine-point drop since 2022, with five of those points gone in a single year. Managers now sit barely ahead of the 19% of people they lead, and the engagement edge that once came with the job has all but disappeared.
Those numbers don’t just indicate a problem with manager engagement, but also a broader wellness strategy dilemma. Gallup estimates managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, so when managers run out of capacity, their teams follow, and so does every program that depends on them.
The question for wellness teams isn't just how to help employees manage stress and burnout. It's what happens to wellbeing at work when the people carrying it run out of steam.
The Squeeze, By the Numbers
- The role is taking a toll. In Lyra Health's 2026 research, drawn from 500 benefits leaders and 7,500 employees in six countries, 54% of managers said their role is harming their mental health, 46% are considering leaving, and 22% have gone so far to take mental health leave.
- Senior managers are struggling quietly. In Modern Health's survey of 1,000 U.S. employees at companies with 250 or more workers, 82% of senior managers said their job is harder than ever, and 40% had received a new mental health diagnosis in the past year, more than three times the rate of non-managers.
- AI is raising the bar. Eighty percent of senior managers in the same survey said AI has raised expectations for their own output, which is double the rate of non-managers.
The Last-Mile Problem
Most wellbeing strategies are designed at the top and carried out team by team. HR and benefits teams select the programs, set the incentives, and send the launch email, while managers are tasked with bringing it all to life: rallying their teams around the latest challenge, nudging people to sign up, noticing who's quietly struggling, signing off on time away, and modeling the very habits they're asked to promote.
Each of those asks is small and reasonable, but until now, no one has been adds them up. Manager time doesn't appear on a benefits dashboard the way vendor fees and claims do, so the cost stays invisible until it shows up somewhere else—in a resignation, leave of absence, or a team whose engagement drops without an obvious cause.
Wellness program analysts call this common drop-off the “last-mile problem.” Employers have invested heavily in what wellbeing programs offer, but very little in the capacity of the people expected to deliver them.
The Safety Paradox
But the last mile has a second, quieter cost. Managers are asked to build psychological safety for their teams, yet many don't feel it themselves—in Modern Health's survey, 61% of senior managers said they avoid taking mental health days out of fear.
Teams read behavior more closely than policy. A manager who never takes a day off signals what the time-off policy really means, no matter what the handbook says. That makes manager wellbeing a precondition for every other wellbeing effort, not a separate initiative competing for budget.
Related: Relieving the Burden: How to Address the Mental Health of Managers
Why More Training Doesn’t Close the Gap
Lyra's research notes that organizations have already added training and resources to help manage burnout, yet many managers still handle high-stakes moments in real time without consistent, practical support. Only 37% of senior managers in Modern Health's survey felt strongly equipped to spot burnout on their teams, let alone their own.
Training may provide coping and stress management skills, but it also adds hours to a role that's already short on them. Gallup warns against carewashing, which is a term for surface-level wellbeing support that leaves the root causes of burnout untouched. A burnout-recognition course delivered to a manager with no time to act on it is a version of exactly that.
The same logic applies to AI. When output expectations rise, resilience programs can't offset a workload that keeps growing. Instead, the fix has to factor in the workload.
Design a Wellbeing Program That Doesn't Run Through Managers
Managers matter too much to engagement to keep treating them as the delivery channel. The better approach protects their capacity and lets the wellness program reach employees directly.
- Count the manager load. Before launching an initiative, ask what it requires of managers and how much time. Track manager engagement, time off, and program participation as their own group, so a company-wide average doesn't hide the people slipping fastest.
- Centralize delivery. Give the program a dedicated owner and let communications, reminders, tracking, and rewards run without managers in the middle.
- Make managers participants first. Offer programming built for their own stress, sleep, and workload, not just tools for supporting others.
- Build wellbeing into the operating rhythm. Put it on the company calendar and into existing rituals, so it isn't one more thing to fit in.
- Have leaders go first. When senior leaders take time off visibly and join programs themselves, managers learn it's safe to do the same.
- Adjust workload when expectations rise. Treat capacity as a resource the business spends and budget it.
Related: The Surprising Link Between Wellness Programs and Middle Manager Burnout
💡 What This Looks Like in Practice: Global Prairie's Wellness Program
Global Prairie, a 100% employee-owned marketing and consulting firm, shows what wellbeing looks like when it's built into how a company runs rather than handed down through managers.
The program has a dedicated internal People and Operations team, so it doesn't depend on any one manager's spare time. That team uses customizable challenges, automated text reminders, and a mobile app to keep participation simple for employee owners.
But more impactfully, leadership and culture are built into the Global Prairie’s wellness program itself, without managers having to assume the burden. Challenges reward joining calls with the company's founders and taking part in group activities, while themed months (i.e. STEPtember and Mental Health Awareness Month) put physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing on the company calendar.
For people leaders, that design makes wellbeing something they take part in alongside their teams, rather than another responsibility to deliver.
The results hold up: 99% of users have stayed active in Global Prairie’s program over four consecutive years, and program engagement runs at 105%* against a 53% industry average.
Read Global Prairie's Full Success Story -->
* Engagement counts total challenge participations, so it can exceed 100% when people join more than one.
The Bottom Line
Every wellbeing strategy spends manager capacity, whether or not anyone budgets for it. The employers who get the most out of their programs are invariably the ones who count that cost and design around it, building programs that reach every employee directly and supporting managers as people rather than treating them as delivery channels.
That's the job a wellbeing platform should do. WellRight runs communications, progress-based incentives, and team challenges automatically, so managers can support wellbeing without having to administer it.
Plus, segmentation lets wellness teams give people leaders programming built precisely for their unique needs. Guided WellPaths and a health risk assessment connect managers and employees with the right support, while reporting shows HR how participation differs across groups, including the managers most at risk of slipping through the cracks.
Your managers shouldn't have to carry your wellbeing strategy on their own. Request a demo to see how WellRight helps you support every level of your workforce, from frontline employees to the people leaders who guide them.
