In the early days of building your company, you knew everyone’s name. You were in the room. You were hiring. You were setting the pace and tone.
Then you scaled. Team size tripled. Layers formed. Hiring was handed off. Suddenly, engagement dropped. It wasn’t burnout, exactly. It wasn’t turnover. But the energy was different. The spark was gone.
You are not alone. According to Gallup, employee engagement across has declined steadily since 2020. In 2024, only 21 percent of employees reported being engaged at work, with active disengagement ticking upward.
Once the drop in energy and culture becomes clear, most founders do the same thing: They try to fix it fast.
Featured Video
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
You reached for wellness
You roll out new perks. Maybe a meditation app. Maybe a company-wide fitness challenge. Maybe a full wellness platform. The logic is sound. According to Aflac’s study on workplace benefits trends, 70 percent of employees who participate in workplace wellness programs report higher job satisfaction.
So you go all in.
You announce it. Brand it. Promote it. And for a moment, it works.
But within a year, the metrics are back where they started. Participation drops. Feedback fades. Engagement plateaus.
You solved for morale. But the real problem wasn’t morale. It was proximity. Not just physically (especially for remote-first teams), but emotionally, operationally, and culturally. That distance is often the real driver of disengagement.
What actually works
Wellness initiatives only drive impact when they are built into the system, not bolted on top of it.
That means:
Leadership modeling the behaviors the program promotes
Team managers being trained in how to support wellbeing
Company norms that reward recovery, not just responsiveness
Clear alignment between your operational expectations and your cultural claims
If your company celebrates hustle but punishes PTO, a mindfulness app won’t fix that. If your managers equate visibility with performance, a Zoom yoga session won’t change behavior.
At Avidon Health, we’ve successfully deployed hundreds of wellness programs inside fast-growing companies. And while the tactics vary, the outcomes don’t.
Programs that succeed share one thing in common: leadership alignment. Not just approval. Alignment. Leaders model the behaviors they want to see. Managers create space for wellbeing in how they run teams. Expectations shift in ways that are felt.
When wellness is treated as a perk, it gets ignored. When it’s embedded in how people lead, communicate, and make decisions, it becomes culture. That’s where change sticks.
Where you go from here
If culture feels disconnected from performance, don’t reach for another benefit. Go back to the foundation.
Start with a culture audit. And no, not just a pulse survey. Talk to your people. Use structured, qualitative conversations. Look at trust. Look at alignment. Pay attention to the distance between the people setting the strategy and the ones executing it.
Only then should you design a wellness approach that matches your reality.
Not the culture you had.
Not the one you wish for.
The one you’re leading right now.