In too many organisations, wellbeing has become a checkbox: a meditation app, an annual workshop, or a Slack channel with mental health tips. But at Paydock, we see well-being as infrastructure. As someone who has worked in both culture and operations, I don’t believe in initiatives that sound good on a slide deck but fail to drive performance.
Wellbeing isn’t fluff. It’s a strategic risk mitigator and performance driver. Especially in high-growth companies where burnout can quietly erode output long before it shows up in attrition data or Glassdoor reviews.
Burnout Isn’t Personal, it’s Structural
Burnout isn’t a badge of honour or an individual failure. It’s what happens when a system optimises for delivery without accounting for human sustainability. You can’t deliver high performance if your teams are chronically exhausted, misaligned, or disengaged.
That’s why well-being must be viewed as an operational concern, not a wellness initiative. At its core, it’s about how organisations are designed to help people do their best work and recover from it.
A Framework: Self-Determination Theory in Practice
At Paydock, we anchor our wellbeing approach in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which identifies three universal psychological needs:
- Autonomy – People perform better when they have control over how they work.
- Competence – They need to feel effective and capable.
- Relatedness – They must feel safe, connected, and supported.
If these needs are unmet, you’ll see symptoms: high churn, low trust, presenteeism, and ultimately, burnout. When they are met, you create a resilient, high-performing culture even during periods of rapid change.
Turning Wellbeing into Operational Metrics
To make wellbeing measurable, we embed it into the same rhythm as performance reviews, goal setting, and forecasting. Here are the metrics we use and recommend others consider:
Foundational Wellbeing Metrics:
- Annual Leave Utilisation Rate
% of leave taken vs. entitled leave per employee. Low utilisation signals unhealthy workloads or fear-based cultures. - Manager Support Score (via pulse survey)
How supported employees feel in managing stress and priorities. - Role Clarity Score
Derived from engagement or pulse surveys, measures how clearly employees understand expectations. - Workload Balance Index
Ask: “I can manage my workload within normal working hours.” Trends highlight overwork patterns across teams. - Burnout Risk Proxy
Combine absenteeism, late-night messaging frequency (in Slack or Teams), and low engagement score trends.
Strategic Performance-Wellbeing Metrics:
- Time to Burnout
Track tenure until disengagement indicators (e.g. increased sick leave, drop in delivery). Helps refine onboarding and recovery practices. - Team Stability Ratio
% of team retained after 12 months post-peak delivery period. Indicates long-term sustainability of team dynamics. - Manager Intervention Lag
Time between flagged wellbeing concern and manager check-in. Affects recovery outcomes.
Startups vs Corporates: What Changes?
Startups
Startups operate with agility but constrained resources. You won’t always have an in-house wellbeing team but you can:
- Empower managers to act early (micro-coaching, EQ training).
- Embed wellbeing into sprint planning and retros (e.g. check energy levels weekly).
- Use lean surveys (2–3 questions monthly) instead of full diagnostics.
Startups can’t afford long-term burnout, especially when every headcount matters. You need people to be creative, decisive, and energised, and that only happens when autonomy and recovery are baked into the operating model.
Corporates
Larger organisations may offer expansive benefit packages but suffer from bureaucratic lag. Well-being often becomes diluted across layers. Corporates can:
- Use People Analytics teams to link wellbeing to turnover, absenteeism, and productivity.
- Build manager dashboards to track team energy and engagement in real-time.
- Audit Annual Leave use by department, manager, and quarter to uncover red flags before burnout escalates.
The advantage corporates have is scale. But they must ensure their wellbeing approach is localised, not one-size-fits-all, especially across regions and demographics.
From Lip Service to Leadership Imperative
We don’t measure wellbeing to tick a box. We do it to safeguard performance. High-functioning cultures are not the ones where no one ever struggles, they’re the ones where recovery is systemic, not reactive.
Leaders need to stop asking “What’s the ROI of wellbeing?” and start asking “What’s the cost of ignoring it?”
Because if performance is your engine, well-being is the oil. You can push harder, for longer, if the system is lubricated with trust, rest, and clarity.
Final Word
In a world where burnout has become a silent pandemic, the companies that will lead are those that reframe wellbeing as operational excellence. Not as perks. Not as noise. But as a performance advantage.
And the best part? It’s measurable if you’re brave enough to look.
