Your team needs a supportive manager, not yoga and meditation

You might remember ZenBooths—Amazon’s contribution to corporate well-being. These were booths installed in the middle of warehouses, equipped with a fan, a potted plant, and a monitor playing meditation videos. The company called them mindful practice rooms. Employees called them despair chambers. The internet called them coffins for workers—workers who, incidentally, didn’t even have time to use the bathroom because of crushing productivity demands.

ZenBooths are, I think, a fitting metaphor for modern corporate wellness. According to Gallup, employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025—the lowest it’s been since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Companies are pouring money into all kinds of initiatives, convinced they’re building attractive workplaces, while their employees quietly disengage. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it? Here are a few observations from my own experience.

STRESS AS A SYMPTOM OF POOR MANAGEMENT

University of Oxford researchers analyzed data from more than 46,000 employees, comparing those who used corporate wellness programs with those who didn’t. None of the practices produced any meaningful improvement in employee well-being.

Wellness programs rest on a simple assumption: if someone is stressed, give them a tool to relax. The problem is that this approach treats symptoms while ignoring the conditions that cause the stress in the first place. Those conditions—surprise—tend to be unrealistic workloads, micromanagement, a lack of feedback, and messages landing in inboxes after hours. Employees feel all of this through their daily interactions with their manager: how tasks get assigned, how they measure performance, and whether working hours are respected.

In a separate study, Gallup found that employees who view their team’s management practices as ineffective are roughly 60% more likely to report high levels of stress.

If your team has is less proactive and burning out faster, the problem almost certainly isn’t a shortage of wellness programs. Moments like these are a signal for managers to take a hard look at their own decisions first.

A SUPPORTIVE MANAGER IS THE KEY TO TEAM WELL-BEING

I manage a team of 90 people. Until 2022, we worked out of an office in the Ukrainian city of Kherson and were firm believers in in-person collaboration. Our health check surveys consistently show the sense of connection we built over 10 years of working side by side motived people most.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced us to scatter across different cities and countries, and we moved to fully remote working. I had to introduce new online formats to keep people engaged: regular one-to-ones with team leads, short team syncs focused on priorities and blockers, and open Q&A sessions where the team could ask about decisions and changes in the way we work.

We can’t hold in-person events right now, but we’ve still managed to preserve a healthy atmosphere despite the distance and the limited opportunities for team building.

Here are the five approaches I’ve found most effective.

1. Cover the basics. A reasonable workload, a flexible schedule, and fair pay aren’t perks—they’re the foundation. If a person can’t take sick leave without it costing them, no wellness tool will relieve the pressure. In our case, the most basic need after the war began was physical safety. I understood that no one could be productive while they or their loved ones were under bombardment. So, until every member of the team had settled somewhere safe, I redistributed work, flexed our processes, and personally helped people with relocation. Our clients didn’t notice.

2. Be a coach, not a controller. Delegate the task and the right to choose how it gets done. That kind of autonomy makes people feel they’re shaping the outcome, not just following instructions—and that has a direct impact on engagement. A couple of years back, I had a complex technical problem on my hands. My first instinct was to pick the solution myself, but I handed it to my development team instead. They chose their own approach and delivered a stunning result.

3. Lead by example. If you send emails at midnight and never take vacation or sick days, your team reads that as the norm. Talking about work-life balance is worthless when the manager’s actions say the opposite. When leaders model healthy habits, it defines the culture for everyone else.

4. Be interested in people, not just tasks. We run check-in meetings where team members can share how they’re doing in general, and watercooler meetings where we talk about anything except work. It helps a manager stay in touch with the team and catch things before they become problems. Even in first interviews, I personally ask candidates more questions about their lives than about their work.

5. Don’t be afraid to hear the truth about yourself. Most managers never get honest feedback on their work—not because everything is perfect, but because there’s no real channel for it. People won’t air their concerns in all-hands meetings. That’s why I hold regular one-to-ones and actively seek input from the team. Whatever doesn’t come up in those conversations, we surface through anonymous surveys and team health checks.

Companies that take employee well-being seriously start with an honest question: Are our managers creating an environment where people want to work? The best wellness program is a working environment you don’t constantly need to recover from.

Illia Smoliienko is the chief software officer at Waites.

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