By Sue Ramauthar
Employees are expected to move more, eat better, manage stress, prioritise their mental health and take greater responsibility for their wellbeing. But there is a fundamental question we need to ask: Are their leaders doing the same?
A healthy workplace culture cannot be built from the bottom up. It starts at the top.
Employees watch what leaders do far more closely than they listen to what wellness policies tell them to do. When leaders prioritise movement, healthy habits, recovery and balance, they send the message that wellbeing is part of how we work and not an optional extra.
Consider the leader who takes walking meetings, chooses the stairs, steps away during their lunch break or participates in a workplace wellness initiative. These small actions create something far more powerful than a policy ever could: permission.
Permission for employees to move, to pause, to prioritise their health without feeling that doing so compromises their performance or commitment. The opposite is equally true.
When leaders work through lunch, spend entire days behind a desk, celebrate excessive hours and wear exhaustion as a badge of commitment, employees quickly understand what the organisation truly values.
Culture is caught, not taught
For wellness to move beyond an annual wellness day or once-off health screening, it has to become part of the everyday culture of an organisation. That means leadership needs to move from promoting wellness to modelling wellness behaviours.
This is particularly relevant in a world where sedentary work has become the norm. Movement should not be treated solely as an employee responsibility. Organisations can design work differently—through walking meetings, movement breaks, active spaces and a culture that makes stepping away from the desk acceptable.
But the most powerful intervention may simply be seeing the CEO, executive or manager do it first. Leaders who move more encourage, and ultimately expect, their people to move more too.
The organisations that will make the greatest progress are those that stop treating wellness as a programme sitting alongside the business and start integrating it into the way the business operates.
Wellness becomes sustainable when healthy behaviours are visible, supported and normalised, not when employees are simply encouraged to participate in sporadic events.
It is about creating an environment where movement, recovery, connection and healthy choices are part of the working day. Because employees don’t necessarily need another poster telling them to take the stairs. They need to see their leaders taking them.
Leadership sets the tone and culture reinforces it. Employees ultimately reflect what an organisation consistently demonstrates. When leadership moves, culture moves. And when culture moves, people follow.
Sue Ramauthar is Founder of SUEDE Wellness
