Nine Percent: Why Doesn’t the Strategy Show Up in the Numbers?

In every meeting I’ve sat in, wellbeing gets nodded at as important, then quietly deprioritised the moment the roadmap gets tight. That’s less a values problem than a question about how the system is actually structured to respond under pressure.

Here’s the number worth sitting with: only 9% of employees say they’re managing work, life, and recovery in 2026, down from 14% last year. 36% say they’re struggling. And just 25% report having enough energy to focus on what matters most, a figure that hasn’t moved despite rising investment in wellbeing initiatives. (Leanne Spencer, State of Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026)

The usual response is a line item: a wellness app or a resilience workshop, something added on top of the system rather than a change to it. As someone who works in process and stakeholder design, I recognise that pattern. It’s easier to patch a symptom than to ask why the underlying structure produces this outcome in the first place.

Capacity isn’t a personality trait, and it isn’t a cost to be justified; it’s an output of how work is structured. When wellbeing investment keeps rising but energy availability doesn’t move, that’s not a motivation problem, it’s a performance ceiling built into the system itself. Redesigning the structure is the work; wellbeing isn’t a separate initiative bolted onto it afterwards.

What is your organisation’s structure currently optimised for, and is that still the right thing?

Three questions worth bringing into how work actually gets designed:
1. What’s upstream of this capacity gap. Is it workload, unclear ownership, or something structural in how decisions get made?
2. Who holds ongoing responsibility for this, once any single initiative ends?
3. What would we actually observe, over time, to know the system had changed?

This is the shift HAANA Business School for Human Flourishing exists to support moving from wellbeing as a program to defend, to human flourishing as a property of how organisations are designed to work.

What’s one structural change, not a program! that actually improved how your team works?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Alejandro Villazon Pineda
– Co-Founder at HAANA Business School for Human Flourishing –
– Wellbeing and Collaboration Development –