Wellbeing at Work: From Concept to Practice

An evidence-based framework for understanding, structuring, and sustaining employee wellbeing in organisations

Dr. Georgi Toma | Director, HeartBrain Works | Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland

Introduction

Employee wellbeing is a term that appears everywhere — in strategy documents, leadership conversations, and job advertisements — and yet it remains surprisingly difficult to define, let alone implement in a meaningful way. For some, it conjures fruit bowls and yoga classes. For others, it is shorthand for engagement scores and retention metrics. The reality, as research has consistently shown, is considerably more substantive than either of these framings suggests.

This article is drawn from a professional development webinar delivered as part of HeartBrain Works' monthly series. It covers what employee wellbeing actually means from an evidence-based perspective, how it relates to psychosocial risk, who carries responsibility for it within an organisation, and how to translate conceptual understanding into a practical, structured wellbeing strategy. It also addresses a question that generates a surprising amount of debate: is there a legitimate place for fruit bowls and yoga classes?

Defining Employee Wellbeing: What the Research Says

Researchers have been studying employee wellbeing for decades, and while definitions have evolved, several consistent themes emerge across the literature.

One of the earliest and most comprehensive frameworks identified ten antecedents to work-related wellbeing, including opportunity for control over one's work and time, the ability to use and develop skills, variety in tasks, interpersonal connection, clarity around role and position, fair compensation, physical safety, and feeling valued. What is striking about this list — developed long before contemporary psychosocial risk legislation existed — is how directly it maps onto what regulators now require organisations to assess and manage. The research has been pointing in this direction for a long time.

A more recent and influential definition comes from Bakker and Demerouti, the researchers behind the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model — a framework that has significantly shaped the way psychosocial risk legislation is constructed across Australia and New Zealand. For Bakker and Demerouti, employee wellbeing is characterised by low burnout and stress alongside high levels of work engagement, and it is a function of the balance between the demands of work and the resources available to meet those demands.

Synthesising across the body of research, three dimensions of employee wellbeing consistently emerge. The first is the subjective experience of the employee: their satisfaction, engagement, and sense that their work is stimulating and meaningful. This is the dimension that employee engagement surveys have traditionally attempted to capture. The second dimension relates to health — both physical and psychological — and encompasses the presence or absence of stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and the hazards that give rise to them. The third dimension concerns relationships: the quality of connections with colleagues and managers, which research identifies as one of the most significant predictors of sustained wellbeing at work.

Taking a view that integrates these dimensions, wellbeing at work emerges when there is, over time, a reasonable balance between job demands and job resources — and when psychosocial hazards are either eliminated or sufficiently mitigated by protective factors in the work environment.

The Role of Imbalance and Psychosocial Hazards

It is worth saying clearly that imbalance between demands and resources is not inherently harmful. It is part of working life, and in many cases it is the engine of growth. When someone takes on a new challenge and discovers that their existing skills and knowledge are not quite sufficient to meet it, they are in a state of imbalance — but one that, with the right support and opportunity to develop, will resolve into greater capability and confidence. This kind of stretch is part of what makes work meaningful.

The problem arises when the imbalance is persistent, severe, or frequent — when an individual faces demands that consistently exceed their resources, over a long enough period that those resources cannot be replenished or developed. This is where psychosocial hazards become psychosocial risks, and where the potential for genuine psychological and physical harm becomes real.

Psychosocial hazards are aspects of work that carry the potential for psychological harm: high workload, role ambiguity, poor work relationships, high cognitive load, exposure to traumatic events, inadequate support from managers, and many others. Whether any given hazard constitutes a genuine risk depends on a further set of factors — most importantly, the presence or absence of protective factors in the work environment.

Protective factors are aspects of work that buffer the harmful impact of hazards. The research evidence is clear that certain protective factors are particularly powerful. A positive relationship with one's direct manager is among the strongest: where this relationship is good, people are able to sustain significant workloads without psychological injury. Organisational cultures characterised by fairness, inclusivity, and respect also provide strong protection. Autonomy — having meaningful control over how one's work is done — is consistently identified as protective, as are role clarity, opportunities for professional development, and high levels of organisational trust.

One important caution: these factors are not always protective. Supervisor support is a protective factor in a healthy team, but low or negative supervisor support — an undermining, absent, or abusive manager — becomes a significant hazard. The same applies to organisational culture, relationships, and other factors that might appear on a standard list of protective elements. Whether they are operating positively or negatively in a given organisation is an empirical question, not one that can be assumed. It must be measured.

Who Is Responsible for Employee Wellbeing?

The answer, which most practitioners arrive at quickly, is everyone — but that answer requires unpacking if it is to be actionable.

Responsibility for employee wellbeing is distributed across the organisation, and each level of the hierarchy carries a distinct and important role.

Executive leadership sets the conditions in which wellbeing can or cannot flourish. They do this not primarily through wellbeing policies — though these matter — but through their own practices and the resource decisions they make. An organisation that espouses work-life balance while chronically under-resourcing teams is not offering a wellbeing initiative; it is offering a contradiction. Executive leaders model behaviour and they control the levers that determine whether the organisational environment is genuinely supportive.

HR and WHS professionals are the architects of the systems and processes that make wellbeing manageable at scale. When HR and WHS work together — whether in a shared function, a people team, or through close collaboration — the impact is considerably stronger than when they operate in parallel. The integration of health, safety, and wellbeing into a single strategic function is a trend that reflects both good practice and the direction of legislation.

Line managers are arguably the most important single factor in the day-to-day experience of wellbeing for their teams. Research consistently shows that the quality of the relationship between an employee and their direct manager is one of the strongest predictors of psychological health and engagement. Yet managers are also, as a group, at particularly elevated risk of burnout themselves. Caught between the demands of their own workload and the responsibility to support their teams — often without sufficient time allocated to the latter — middle managers frequently experience the most acute stress in an organisation. Their wellbeing is not a secondary concern; it is a strategic one.

Staff also carry individual responsibility for their own wellbeing, though this responsibility operates within the limits of what the organisation makes possible. Wellbeing policies that are well designed but poorly communicated leave workers without the understanding they need to exercise that responsibility effectively. Individual awareness — recognising signs of chronic stress activation, maintaining boundaries around working hours, seeking support when needed — is part of the picture, but only part.

A Framework for Wellbeing in Practice

Several guidance documents provide useful structure for organisations developing or reviewing their wellbeing strategy. ISO 45003, the international standard on psychological health and safety at work, offers a practical framework for thinking about types of intervention. Safe Work Australia's Model Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards provides concrete examples of hazard identification and control. The Queensland Government's work health and wellbeing policy template — freely available online — offers a practical starting point for organisations that need to formalise their approach.

Drawing from ISO 45003 in particular, wellbeing interventions can be organised into three categories that map closely onto the hierarchy of controls for psychosocial risk.

Primary Interventions: Address Work Factors

Primary interventions target the conditions of work itself. Their aim is to eliminate or reduce the sources of harm — not to help workers cope better with a harmful environment, but to change the environment. Conducting a psychosocial risk assessment, updating the risk register, redesigning roles or workflows, addressing chronic understaffing, clarifying responsibilities across teams — these are primary interventions. They operate at the top of the hierarchy of controls, and they are the most effective because they prevent harm rather than treating it after the fact.

A wellbeing strategy without a strong primary intervention layer is, at best, incomplete. It may provide temporary relief, but it will not address the conditions that are causing harm.

Secondary Interventions: Build Resilience

Secondary interventions aim to equip workers with the resources to better manage the demands they face. Training programs fall into this category, as do initiatives that deliberately strengthen identified protective factors. If a psychosocial risk assessment shows that a sense of community at work is a protective factor — present in most of the organisation but not all — targeted action to build that sense of community in the areas where it is weaker is a legitimate secondary intervention.

The important distinction here is between boosting a protective factor and using resilience-building as a substitute for addressing hazards. A team building activity will not resolve the harm caused by chronic understaffing. A mindfulness program will not undo the damage of sustained bullying. Secondary interventions have genuine value, but they are secondary — they belong alongside primary interventions, not in place of them.

Tertiary Interventions: Provide Support

Tertiary interventions respond to harm that has already occurred. Return-to-work programs, rehabilitation support, employee assistance services, and trauma-informed complaints processes all fall into this category. They are necessary — organisations will always need to respond to psychological injury, just as they respond to physical injury — but their necessity is a signal that primary and secondary interventions have not been sufficient.

It is worth noting that workers' compensation claims with a psychological injury component are, on average, significantly more costly and take substantially longer to resolve than claims related to physical injury alone. The cost argument for prevention is not merely a matter of values; it is a matter of organisational economics.

The Fruit Bowl Question

In recent years, a genre of commentary has emerged — particularly in professional networks — that treats fruit bowls, yoga classes, and similar initiatives as emblematic of everything wrong with corporate wellbeing: performative, superficial, and a distraction from the systemic changes that actually matter. This critique contains real truth. Using individual-level perks as a substitute for addressing the conditions of work is not a wellbeing strategy. It is, at best, a reputational one.

But the critique goes too far when it dismisses these initiatives altogether.

Fruit bowls and yoga classes, understood correctly, belong at the tertiary end of the intervention spectrum — they are tools for building individual resilience and, perhaps more significantly, for strengthening protective factors. A shared meal or a workplace yoga session is not just a health intervention; it is a social one. It creates opportunities for connection, for employees to get to know one another in contexts other than task completion, and for the organisation to signal — through action, not just policy — that it cares about the people who work there.

A fruit basket that introduces a worker to a new food through a conversation with a colleague is a small thing. But it is the kind of small thing that builds the social fabric of a team. A subsidised lunch service that gives employees access to healthy food at least once a day is not going to eliminate chronic stress — but it may contribute, meaningfully, to the physical health that underpins psychological resilience. These things have their place. The error lies not in offering them, but in treating them as primary interventions when they are not.

Putting It Together: A Practical Wellbeing Strategy

A wellbeing strategy that is coherent and defensible can be structured simply by mapping planned activities against the three intervention categories. What are we doing this year at the primary level — what risk assessments, risk register reviews, and systemic changes to work design are planned? What secondary interventions are we implementing — what training, what targeted actions to strengthen protective factors? What tertiary support structures are in place — how effective are our return-to-work processes, our EAP, our complaints systems? Are they accessible, known to staff, and trauma-informed?

This mapping exercise makes visible both what is being done and what is missing. Most organisations, when they undertake it honestly, find that their investment is heavily skewed toward tertiary and secondary interventions — and that the primary intervention layer, which is the most effective, is the most underdeveloped. Addressing that imbalance is where the greatest gains are to be found.

Conclusion: Balance as Both Concept and Practice

Wellbeing at work is not a mood or a perk. It is a measurable, manageable outcome of the conditions in which people work — conditions that organisations have both the capacity and the legal obligation to shape. The framework is clear: understand the demands workers face, identify the hazards that make those demands harmful, strengthen the protective factors that buffer their impact, and intervene systematically at the level of work itself.

Everything else — the yoga classes, the fruit baskets, the team lunches — has its place in that picture. But it is a supporting role, not a starring one. The organisations that do wellbeing well are the ones that understand the difference, and invest accordingly.

If you would like support developing or reviewing your organisation's approach to psychosocial risk and employee wellbeing, we would welcome the conversation. Get in touch with us! 

References

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The job demands-resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.

International Organisation for Standardisation. (2021). ISO 45003: Occupational health and safety management — Psychological health and safety at work. ISO.

Safe Work Australia. (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work. Safe Work Australia.

Queensland Government. (2023). Work health and wellbeing policy template. Queensland Government.

Toma, G. (2026). Psychosocial Risk Management for a Healthier Workplace: A Practical Implementation Guide. Routledge.

About the Author 

Dr. Georgi Toma is the Director of HeartBrain Works and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. With over a decade of experience in psychosocial risk, occupational stress, and culture interventions, Georgi has supported high-profile clients including Myer, RMIT University, Uber, Hitachi Energy, Clough Group, MEC Mining, and Environment Canterbury to create mentally healthy workplaces. HeartBrain Works offers validated psychosocial risk audits, training for leaders and staff, and the scientifically validated Wellbeing Protocol. 

About the Healthy Work Community of Practice 

The Healthy Work Community of Practice is a professional community for health and safety professionals. Members access quarterly knowledge-sharing sessions, a psychosocial risk controls library, real-world case studies, regulatory alerts, practical toolkits, a job board, research summaries, and ongoing training and workshops. Intake opens three times per year. To learn more, visit https://www.heartbrainworks.org/Healthy-Work-CoP