August is National Wellness Month, a timely opportunity for organizations to spotlight employee wellbeing and prioritize the mental, emotional, and physical health of their people. In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in the number of organizations and leaders starting to prioritize employee wellness. Despite good intentions, many wellness initiatives end up being short-term pushes and surface-level perks that don’t truly move the cultural needle of the organization or contribute to lasting, positive change in employee wellbeing.
But the need for sustained investment in employee wellness is as great as ever. Last year, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Ipsos conducted a poll of over 2,100 full-time employees and executives on workplace culture around mental health and wellness. They found that 52% of employees felt burned out in the previous year as a result of their job, and as much as 36% said their mental health suffered due to demands at work. Furthermore, a similar study from Reed, a UK-based recruitment firm, found that while 47% of workers reported having to take time off for their mental health, as much as 10% said they didn’t feel comfortable disclosing that to their employer. Yet, according to the American Psychological Association’s “2023 Work in America Survey”, 92% of workers said it’s important that their employer values and provides support for their wellbeing and mental health.
This year, organizations have an opportunity to do more for their employees’ lasting wellbeing and change these trends in real ways. By integrating accessible, proactive strategies into the organizational day-to-day, HR and leadership teams can use National Wellness Month to go beyond limited wellness “boosts” and catalyze enduring behavior change, stronger engagement, and a workplace culture rooted in sustainable care.
Here are 5 practical steps organizations can use to make this National Wellness Month a launchpad for real impact.
1. Build breaks and calendar blocks into the workday
Back-to-back meetings and the constant pull of “urgent” emails and messages at all hours are major drivers of mental exhaustion and work-induced burnout. Research from occupational health psychologists shows that even short breaks can reduce mental fatigue and improve performance. Though, in many workplaces, downtime is treated like a luxury instead of a necessity.
To turn the tide, encourage employees to take microbreaks—short, five- to ten-minute breaks every 60 to 90 minutes—throughout the day to give their brain a rest, reset their focus, and reduce stress. Send reminders encouraging breaks consistently to reinforce the practice as a cultural norm.
Go a step further and institute calendar blocks for meeting-free hours or days each week to allow employees to do deep work without having to constantly switch gears from task to meeting to task again.
Make this all last by getting leadership to promote and normalize taking breaks, too. When leaders and managers visibly step away for their own self-care, employees are more likely to follow suit.
2. Launch low-lift wellness challenges and mindfulness campaigns
Not everyone wants to journal or meditate. That’s why, when promoting healthy habits and wellness practices, it’s important to vary your recommendations and provide options. Help drive cultural change for more employees by creating inclusive, low-pressure wellness challenges that offer community, gentle accountability, and even gamification or rewards.
Here are some ideas:
- “Unplug to Recharge” Challenge – Encourage employees to log 30 minutes a day away from screens and share reflections afterward.
- Hydration or Movement Goals – Set targets for daily wellbeing measures, like water intake or steps walked, with team shoutouts in Slack or planned celebrations at the end of the month.
- Mindfulness Bingo – Gamify your approach further with a punch card including activities like taking a walk without any phones or devices, trying a breathing exercise, or watching a guided mindfulness video. Add a perk for a full bingo to incentivize people to really take their mindfulness activities seriously! Journey often helps organize wellness challenges and games for our client organizations. If you need help figuring out where to start, we’re happy to step in.
Challenges don’t need to be competitive; they just need to be consistent and tied to your larger wellbeing goals. Proactive mental wellbeing apps and platforms like Journey’s make it easy to engage employees at all levels with a variety of approaches.
3. Bring wellness into team rituals
More than short-term challenges, embedding wellbeing into the regular working rhythms of your teams helps normalize it as part of the work experience, not something purely relegated to personal time. Create this normalcy by using mental health language and instituting wellbeing exercises into the cadence of your daily or weekly team meetings.
Try starting meetings with a one-minute grounding exercise—a breath, a stretch, or a gratitude share. Offer wellness-focused prompts into your team check-ins, rotating prompts each time—for example, “What helped you recharge this week?” or “What’s causing you the most stress at the moment?” Set up short breakout sessions for team members to share self-care and wellbeing techniques in pairs or small groups.
To help the managers leading these meetings, offer manager training and/or toolkits to guide supportive conversations, recognize signs of burnout, and connect team members with resources that can help them. Managers are your cultural linchpin. Empowering them with mental health knowledge and language can shift how care shows up across your organization and give employees at all levels the comfort and knowledge of knowing who to turn to.
4. Promote self-guided mental health support
Wellbeing isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some employees thrive in scheduled group sessions and team-driven accountability; others prefer tools they can access privately and activities they can engage in on their own schedule. Leaders can support employees’ independent self-care in several ways.
Highlight on-demand wellbeing content like breathwork sessions, resilience-building courses, or stress-relief videos, accessible 24/7 through Journey’s platform. Sending notices about this content during particularly stressful periods can help remind employees about the varying kinds of support readily available and teach them healthy wellbeing practices they can use to get through the next intense period.
Create a digital “wellness hub” through your organization’s main communication system or work management platform with a list of quick links to internal and external wellness resources, including your EAP, crisis hotlines, employee resource group contacts, and digital mindfulness and mental wellbeing content like that on the Journey app.
Aside from establishing “no-meeting days” or hour blocks, consider instituting an hour a week of dedicated wellness time. Whether it’s a set, coordinated time for all employees each week, or a floating hour that employees can block off for themselves, giving workers the chance to focus on their wellbeing for an hour during the work-week ensures that they actually can proactively devote time to their wellness and underscores your organization’s real commitment to their health.
5. Bring Journey in to help.
No HR team has to do all of this alone. Use National Wellness Month to bring in guided, expert-led support through Journey and all of the services we provide. Organizations using Journey Proactive EAP or Journey Live platform (included for Proactive EAP clients) can:
- Set up live, virtual workshops with Journey mental health professionals on all ranges of topics like stress management, work-life harmony, resilience, and many more.
- Partner with Journey to create tailored strategies and campaigns—including daily outreach—unique to your employees’ needs to reduce stigma and increase engagement with your mental health programs.
- Integrate our digital mental health resources and reminders into the workflow of your organization, using Slack, Zoom, and email integrations.
We also offer interactive group wellbeing coaching and a mental health certification program to equip your employees and managers with mental health knowledge and tools to foster a supportive culture of wellbeing.
All of these options not only take the burden off your internal team, but they also give employees a chance to learn from different voices, reflect in new ways, and recharge together with the help of outside perspectives.
Make Wellness Your Culture
You can’t create lasting impact from one month’s worth of focus—National Wellness Month is just the starting point, not the finish line. Build on what you begin in August with sustainable, long-term practices, distinct wellness campaigns each month, quarterly mental health surveys, and ongoing access to Journey’s mental health platform.
The key point? Make care a habit, not a perk. When organizations embed proactive, practical support into the everyday employee experience, they lay the foundation for a healthier, more resilient workforce.
Ready to build lasting wellness into your culture? Request a demo to learn more about how we can help you deliver proactive, accessible mental health support to your employees.
