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Author and change management consultant Elizabeth Blackley says looking after wellbeing brings multiple returns.
Perhaps it was dusty yoga mats and low-attendance mindfulness mornings that gave workplace wellness programs a bad reputation. However, not only do Australian companies have a legal obligation to protect their employees from mental and physical harm at work, when companies do that long-term and meaningfully, everyone benefits, including shareholders.
“There has been reticence in some organisations to spend on wellbeing programs and that stems from the fact that many of them have been reactionary versus planned, mitigative, upfront and woven-through,” says author and experienced change management consultant Elizabeth Blackley.
In her book, ROW Your Business to Health, Blackley argues that the bottom line “return on wellness” (ROW in the title) should convince leaders and boards to make it a priority. Blackley challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding workplace mental and physical health, arguing the traditional reliance on individual grit is broken.
You can’t meditate away a workload problem
When a mismatch exists between an organisation’s stated values and the daily reality of its employees, the damage can be profound. This disconnect is often felt most acutely by leadership teams, which are tasked with driving corporate growth while maintaining unsustainable personal schedules.
A former HR director for a multinational pharmaceutical company, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls the intense pressure of balancing an ambitious global career with personal health. Her regional role required constant travel and being “on” across multiple time zones.
“Most of my career, I genuinely loved what I did,” she says. “I was very ambitious, highly engaged and really passionate about helping organisations and their people to succeed. I wasn’t someone who disliked corporate life, I was, in fact, quite the opposite.”
Under her stewardship, her division achieved commercial success However, the relentless schedule extracted a heavy physical and mental toll.
“What made it very challenging was that I couldn’t really walk the talk myself,” she says. “People would see me in the office well after hours because I had calls across different time zones, and I was always on the road. The demand of the global role and constant connectivity became unsustainable.”
The turning point arrived when she found herself waking up in tears, rundown and unable to shake off a persistent cold. Shortly afterwards, a senior colleague passed away just a month before his retirement, compounding her realisation that her priorities may have been skewed by the pressure. After being hospitalised, she applied for two weeks of medical leave and her new manager challenged the request, deducting the time from her annual leave balance despite clear medical certificates. Disillusioned by the corporate response and the petty systemic hurdles, she resigned.
“Awareness and reality are two different things,” she says. “Many organisations genuinely care about wellbeing, but if workloads, leadership behaviours and expectations don’t change, employees still end up carrying the burden. You cannot meditate your way out of a workload problem.”
Wellness trumps resilience
Old-school resilience has likely been propping up companies since the Industrial Revolution. As workloads expanded, organisations expected employees to adapt, stretch and manage their own stress.
“The highly resilient people became the most relied upon until they, too, reach a breaking point when they are the frayed person,” says Blackley. “Then it’s, ‘We used to go to Bob, he was great, but we can’t anymore, because he’s just lost it’.”
While directors have traditionally focused oversight of employees – aka human capital – on performance metrics, succession planning and executive remuneration, the modern regulatory landscape requires boards to look deeper into the structural health of their organisations. Workplace wellbeing is no longer a soft asset, it’s a core governance responsibility. The strategy of treating wellbeing as an individual responsibility is failing both risk registers and balance sheets. Boards should now understand how systemic workplace culture directly impacts organisational performance, moving wellbeing from the fringes of employee benefits – discounted gym memberships or tearoom fruit baskets – into the centre of strategic governance.
Shift from grit to governance
In Australia, the tightening regulatory environment is a strong legal impetus, as directors have a responsibility to ensure psychosocial safety, just as they do physical safety.
“It’s a great thing we’ve done with this legislation to create a [more supportive] teamwork situation,” says Blackley.
She notes that corporate Australia has moved past mere awareness of mental health issues. The challenge now lies in institutional capability and reinforcement.
“The conversation is starting, however it’s focusing on the problem versus bringing it all together and saying, ‘Sure, that’s the challenge and these are things we can do’,” she says. “What’s interesting about the legislation is that it’s aligned to the mind-body physiological need that humans require to perform at their best. It’s telling you to do it.”
Industry sectors such as construction, manufacturing and mining – those used to dealing with physical risk – “may have an easier time getting behind the psychosocial risk”, she says, because psychological safety requires the same level of structured governance. Just as such boards oversee high attention to physical safety, all boards need to realise employees must be protected from chronic systemic stress.
“It’s essential to do this to allow people to do their best work,” says Blackley. “It’s not about wanting to hug everyone. It’s more about not saying, ‘this is how it’s done here’ and ‘please feel comfortable and at ease expressing your opinion’. Whatever the board is going to recommend to the executive team, the people running the business must also look at themselves. Are the regulators coming in and looking at how the board is run?”
Move beyond the EAP
The standard organisational response to burnout has been the employee assistance program (EAP). Blackley, argues it comes too late in the cycle to address the root causes of workplace exhaustion.
“The norms of success behaviour traits disallow someone recognising they might benefit from an EAP or entering the program with an open mind. It’s a scary thing for people to access. No matter what the organisation says, people feel if they go into that support area, their career nosedives. A progression would be to have a psychosocially safe environment where the EAP is unnecessary.”
Seize the wellness opportunity
By treating “return on wellness” as an operational framework, organisations can realise significant productivity dividends. Sustainable workplace practices reduce both absenteeism and presenteeism, the costly practice of employees showing up to work while mentally or physically unwell because they have exhausted their personal leave.
“This is not a burden, it’s an opportunity,” says Blackley. “Healthy people create healthy outcomes and more success. Your employees will be out on the street talking about how much they love where they work.”
Ultimately, a board’s commitment to a healthy workplace serves as a critical lever for acquisition and retention.
“It’s a lure for top talent, for energised, energetic thinkers,” says Blackley. “They’re looking at how companies invest, whether they’re sustainable in their practices, if their values align to the experience and if they respect the people coming in to do the work for the shareholders.”
This article first appeared as 'Wellness is good business' in the Aug/Sep 2026 Issue of Company Director Magazine.
Director takeaways
- Evaluate systemic workloads: Ensure corporate performance targets align with realistic capacity, recognising individual resilience initiatives don’t fix systemic workload failures.
- Demand documented actions: Look beyond corporate vision statements and quarterly morning teas. Regulators require clear evidence of identified psychosocial risks, what’s being done to mitigate them, what operational changes occurred as a result – and what difference it made to staff.
- Address the connectivity culture: Establish clear governance around organisational communication habits and abide by them. Ensure constant digital connectivity does not create an unsustainable, always-on expectation that drives burnout across all levels of the company. While this could be viewed as compliance with the “Right to Disconnect” amendment to the Fair Work Act 2009, the fact is that a mentally refreshed team will drive up productivity more than busy work ever can.
- Foster genuine feedback loops: Your organisation must offer frequent, multi-channel communication pathways to capture honest employee feedback, ensuring strategic shifts at the board and executive level are clearly, quickly and transparently translated to the entire team.
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