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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.