Hear directly from the leaders driving workplace well-being across Australia as they share real-world strategies, insights, and lessons from their journeys to build healthier, more human workplaces.
Wellbeing at work spiked during COVID, then dropped hard once the world reopened. That’s the headline finding from Great Place To Work’s latest report with Johns Hopkins University, which tracked six years of workplace data across Australia and beyond. So we brought together three people who deal with this every day: Jenny Le, Head of HR at Talent International, Jonny Mirkin, founder of GivenWell, and Brad Krauskopf, founder of Hub Australia, to talk about what’s actually working.
Ask ten people what wellbeing means and you’ll get ten answers. That was the starting point for all three panellists. Jenny defines it as the conditions that let people do meaningful work without burning through their health and energy to get there. Jonny puts it more bluntly: everyone on a team has a different background, a different life stage, different things going on outside work, so wellbeing means something different to each of them. Brad’s take from running Hub: if people are happy at work, they’ll be well at work, and that starts with understanding what “happy” looks like for each person.
The problem, as Jonny sees it, is that most organisations still design one program for everyone. “As long as we’re trying to do a one size fits all approach, we’re just going to have limited engagement, which ultimately will be limited impact,” he said.
Jonny’s path into this work started with his own hospitalisation from burnout. Before that, his experience of workplace wellbeing had been the usual list: EAPs, health insurance, sick leave, a fruit bowl in the kitchen. What actually helped him recover was therapy, nutrition, exercise and meditation, working together.
That gap between the standard offer and what people need is what led him to start GivenWell. He found two consistent problems when he interviewed organisations: most support only kicks in once someone’s already struggling (EAP for people in crisis, insurance for people who are already sick), and utilisation on most wellbeing initiatives sits somewhere between 1% and 20%. Meaning 80% of a team often gets nothing out of the program at all.
GivenWell’s answer was to hand teams a personal wellbeing budget and let them choose how to spend it. Since launching last August, 99% of staff given an allowance have used it, on therapists and coaches, but also mole maps, ADHD coaching, surfing lessons, massage and perimenopause support. “Wellbeing for someone can be paying for their dentist because they couldn’t afford to go,” Jonny said, “whereas for someone else it’s speaking with a coach.”
Brad pushed back gently on the idea that any wellbeing program can carry a team on its own. If the manager’s bad, or the pay isn’t right, or health and safety is shaky, a wellness fund won’t fix that. “You’re not going to get to have the thing about a wellness fund,” he said.
His other point: the office itself is a wellbeing tool, if you treat it right. People aren’t coming in to sit on a spreadsheet, they can do that from home. They’re coming in for connection, learning and a reason to leave the house. Hub leans into a hospitality mindset for that reason: not a checklist of amenities, but a deliberate focus on how the space makes people feel.
Hub’s own research backs this up. Their Love Where You Work report tracked the death of the Friday night drink, and Brad says it’s not because people have stopped wanting to socialise. It’s that during lockdowns, people found connection through friends and family instead, and never fully went back to seeking it from colleagues over drinks. What they do want now is something more considered, like a team painting class rather than a round at the pub.
At Talent International, Jenny credits an annual health check program with real cultural traction, but only because leadership backed it publicly. Their CEO, Mark Nielsen, had a health check shortly before a physical event, and was in surgery for a quadruple bypass not long after. He’s spoken openly about it internally. Another staff member caught early-stage skin cancer through a proactive skin check offered as part of the same program. “If you invest in yourself, it could save your life,” Jenny said. “It has to come from the top all the way down.”
Her framework for building a wellbeing program that sticks:
Each panellist left the audience with one piece of advice for the next 30 days.
Jenny’s tip: get feedback mechanisms in place before you do anything else. Without engagement surveys, pulse checks or exit interview data, you’re guessing at what your people need.
Brad’s tip: get the data before you act, because what you assume people want and what they’ll actually tell you are often two different things.
Jonny’s tip: get out of the way. Give people a genuine say in what support looks like for them, rather than deciding on their behalf, and you’ll see engagement follow.
On the budget question that trips a lot of organisations up, Jonny’s advice was to define what impact actually means before asking for money (less absenteeism, better retention, lower churn), and to have the budget conversation early with your CFO or CEO. Brad added a simpler starting point: look at what you’re already spending on wellbeing and check people actually value it, before you ask for more.
Read the full Great Place To Work Wellbeing report, produced with Johns Hopkins University, for the complete data set behind this discussion.
