Declining Employee Wellbeing Threatens UK Business Performance

Posted on 22nd July 2025

A new five-year study from Johns Hopkins University and Great Place To Work® reveals a troubling decline in employee wellbeing across the UK, with under-35s, frontline managers, and men bearing the brunt of the downturn.

The report, Fostering Wellbeing at Work in the UK, based on robust employee survey data from over 300,000 workers, reveals much of the UK workforce is still recovering from the aftershocks of the pandemic, ongoing economic uncertainty, and the rise of AI-driven restructuring.

“The pandemic proved that when leaders prioritise people, wellbeing improves. Since that time many organisations have since shifted focus – which has adversely affected the employee experience,” said Dr. Richard R. Smith, professor of practice and faculty director of the Human Capital Development Lab at Johns Hopkins.

In nearly every year, frontline managers' experience of workplace wellbeing was distinctly closer to the experience of individual contributors, rather than close to other managerial groups.

This points to the rising workplace phenomenon of a ‘squeezed middle’, where frontline management feels ‘sandwiched' between demands coming simultaneously from above and below – yet often with the least levels of empowerment and autonomy themselves.

The result: front line managers consistently report the highest levels of job-related stress every year (the only exception being in 2020, when executive leaders were the only group whose wellbeing scores declined but all other groups increased, arguably due to the working population looking to business leaders to navigate a period of unprecedented global uncertainty).

Unlike in some other sectors, tech is historically defined by a fierce war for talent and often generous employer value propositions for attracting and retaining talent – resulting in a rise in wellbeing during the pandemic. But since 2020, wellbeing for tech workers has been on a steady decline, with many firms affected by mass layoffs, restructures, and cuts to employee experience budgets – not to mention redirecting budgets to AI and digital transformation which have also taken a toll.

Economist Alex Edmans’ analysis of data from 2001-2023 found that UK’s Best Workplace organisations – where employees have consistently high levels of employee wellbeing and employee satisfaction – perform more than four times better than the FTSE All-Share Index.

In 2025, UK employers need to move beyond token gestures and embed wellbeing into the daily employee experience – from job design and leadership development to continuous listening and co-creation with employees.

“The data is clear: employee wellbeing goes hand in hand with business performance,” said Sara Silvonen, co-author and wellbeing lead at Great Place To Work UK. “When wellbeing suffers, so does productivity, trust, and retention. People leaders are uniquely positioned to drive positive change, using this report as a roadmap for building resilient, high-trust cultures where both people and business performance thrive.”

For more information visit www.greatplacetowork.co.uk.