Copyright Forbes
Prakriti Poddar, Global Head, Mental Health and Wellbeing at Roundglass. Headlines about employee well-being programs are easy. The real test is use and trust—whether people engage, and believe what they find. For organizations, these programs affect retention and productivity. To succeed, well-being programs can’t be just a perk—they must work as a system across the company. I saw this firsthand while working on the well-being program at Roundglass, first as a consultant, then as global head of mental health and well-being since 2021. The work connected our well-being app, enterprise training and grassroots programs in Punjab. Each piece needed to fit, or the whole failed. In my experience, the gap between announcing a program and building support follows a sequence: clear intent, clinical grounding, a product that earns return visits, culturally aware rollout and honest measurement. These five parts turn a campaign into a capability. Strategy And Operating Model The first decision is positioning. This begins with setting a clear stance that mental health is an operating capability, rather than a wellness perk. This position will permit you to design prevention-access-continuity as a companywide framework. This also aligned with recommendations from the World Health Organization that call on employers to treat well-being as part of core operations. In practice, leaders need to decide who owns the road map and how accountability travels across functions. The most effective programs start when communications, HR, clinical and product leaders sit in the same room, not to report progress, but to define what success means for all of them. Those conversations surface tensions early: Who decides what’s “in scope”? How will data be shared responsibly? What happens when a well-being goal conflicts with a business one? Once those are clarified, tool kits, escalation playbooks and leadership expectations can follow naturally. When mental health is treated as a shared operating priority rather than a delegated initiative, conversations shift. Managers stop asking whether they should participate and start asking how to improve what already exists. Clinical And Content Architecture Intent needs clarity. Before launching programs, leaders should start with discovery: What fuels stigma? Where do people stop seeking help? Which norms shape how staff define well-being? These answers determine if efforts build trust or fall flat. Next comes the clinical core. Privacy, consent and escalation must be built in. Each organization should name who ensures clinical oversight, how quality is checked and what happens if someone discloses risk. At Roundglass, we found that localized, clinically reviewed content only works when it feels familiar. Formats, tone and language must fit the culture, not copy others. Good intent alone fails. Without clinical and cultural grounding, trust erodes. With it, care earns credibility. Product Build And Pilot When designing a well-being product or platform, the first question isn’t what to build but what needs to connect. Too often, organizations design isolated tools—an app here, a webinar there—without a unifying logic. The more effective approach begins with mapping how each element (content, support channels, manager training, analytics) will work together as one experience. Leaders should then define the signals they want a pilot to measure. Instead of broad engagement metrics, focus on three indicators: Do people come back after the first use? Do they explore multiple types of support? And do escalation or referral mechanisms actually work when someone needs them? Those data points tell you whether the system is functional, not just popular. Pilots are not small-scale launches—they’re diagnostic tools. They reveal friction, clarify which teams need to collaborate next and surface whether your governance model holds up under real use. A successful pilot leaves you with a blueprint for scaling safely, not just a set of participation numbers. Global Rollout And Cultural Localization Global rollouts are often undone by local mistrust. This requires building in safeguards: jurisdiction-specific consent flows to match local privacy law, stigma-sensitive entry points in regions where seeking help carries social risk and leadership pledges that made the programs visible. Scaling a well-being system across regions is less about translation and more about trust. Leaders should begin by mapping where cultural attitudes toward mental health differ and what those differences mean for communication, privacy and access. A single global standard often fails unless it adapts to local norms. That means building parallel tracks: one for enterprise policy and another for community engagement. The enterprise layer ensures governance, consent flows and leadership accountability align with local law. The community layer builds familiarity through local language, peer advocates and region-specific content that makes support feel native rather than imported. Organizations that ignore this dual design risk creating systems that look comprehensive on paper but disconnected in practice. Global scale only succeeds when local adaptation is embedded from the start. Without it, the first barrier is not operational but cultural. Measurement And Continuous Improvement The program evolved in phases through 2025, each closing with governance reviews involving clinicians, data teams and privacy officers. Measurement wasn’t a side note—it was part of operations. Leaders should define success early and decide how to track it. Metrics must go beyond participation. Measure whether employees return to the tools, whether managers use available resources and whether escalation pathways work as designed. Numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Pair quantitative data with qualitative input from surveys, focus groups and confidential feedback channels. These reveal how people perceive trust and accessibility, which often predict sustained engagement better than usage rates. Improvement depends on what follows. Governance teams should meet often, review findings, adjust strategies and close the loop with employees. When data drives redesign instead of reports, measurement becomes part of the system, not a compliance task. The Broader Lesson For companies, treating mental health as a capability links to retention, productivity and risk reduction. Gallup’s Key Insights report estimates disengagement costs $8.9 trillion annually. Systems that reduce friction and make support routine directly improve the metrics leaders already track. For employees, the difference is trust and speed. A single app experience, manager playbooks and clear escalation shorten the distance between stress and support. That accessibility makes the difference between curiosity and care.
