April 7 marks World Health Day, the World Health Organization’s annual observance drawing attention to a critical global health issue. In years past, the WHO highlighted the worsening mental health crisis, focusing on reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek help. The 2026 theme, “Together for health. Stand with science,” celebrates the scientific achievements protecting every aspect of our health and underscores the collaboration needed across sectors – institutions, employers, healthcare partners, and the public – to ensure continued support for science-backed health solutions.
Journey is one of those partners providing health solutions backed by science. And as science shows, our overall wellbeing emerges from several dimensions of health: physical, mental, and social. Each is shaped by our context, from our culture to our environment, to our access to care. When we account for the full context of an individual and support all dimensions of their wellbeing, we facilitate whole-person health, leading to the best possible outcomes.
Because people spend nearly half their waking hours at work, employers and the cultures they create have a powerful influence on employees’ health. Organizations that proactively promote whole-person health help prevent serious challenges in every dimension while creating more resilient and productive workforces. Science shows this too.
This article explores what it means for employers to support whole-person health and why employees need work cultures and care that reflect the full complexity of their lives.
What is whole-person health?
According to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whole-person health is an approach to healthcare that “considers multiple dimensions of the patient and their context, including biological, psychological, social, and possibly spiritual and ecological factors, and addresses these in an integrated fashion that keeps sight of the whole.”
It acknowledges that health is more than just the absence of disease or responding to issues that arise, but rather it’s the cultivation of holistic, ongoing wellbeing.
What the science tells us about whole-person health
Science has long shown that all aspects of our health are interconnected. For example, prolonged stress raises cortisol levels, which significantly increases the risk of heart disease. Depression can lead to unhealthy patterns and behaviors – poor sleep, poor diet, substance use, lack of exercise – which further deteriorate physical health. And loneliness has been shown to increase the risk of premature death by up to 27%, with additional studies linking it to higher risk of heart disease and stroke as well as higher rates of dementia, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, and inflammation.
Because of these connections, addressing health issues in isolation is rarely effective.
Research shows that whole-person health approaches to care consistently lead to better health outcomes, improved patient experience, and lower overall healthcare costs. These approaches also make care more accessible and engaging. A large review of 167 studies found that integrated care models improve patient satisfaction and quality of care, while increasing access to services.
The implication is clear: Treating health in isolation leads to incomplete outcomes. When we support people across the full spectrum of their health, outcomes improve, costs decrease, and wellbeing becomes more sustainable.
Why it matters for employers
The case for whole-person health isn’t just about care. It’s also about how people function day to day. Mental, physical, and social health challenges tend to show up at work as reduced focus, lower energy, and difficulty staying engaged. The Cigna Healthcare 2024 Vitality Study found that only 16% of people globally report high levels of vitality, reflecting widespread challenges with energy, resilience, and purpose.
Over time, the impact of lower vitality compounds across teams and organizations. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity. Much of this impact isn’t immediately visible, and therefore often goes unaddressed. Presenteeism – when employees are physically present but mentally or emotionally struggling – can carry a surprising cost, because employees may still be working, but with reduced capacity to think clearly, collaborate effectively, or sustain momentum.
Whole-person health addresses this at the root. When employees have support across mental, physical, and social dimensions, they are better able to regulate stress and maintain energy within their work. That translates into stronger engagement, improved retention, and more consistent performance over time.
How employers can support whole-person health
At Journey, we’ve long understood that creating the conditions for whole-person health to flourish requires employers to have a proactive mental health culture – one where wellbeing is woven into the fabric of daily work, where care reaches people before they’re in crisis, and where physical, mental, and social health are treated with equal importance.
Here are 6 ways employers can do this in practice:
- Design for prevention, not response: Most benefits programs still focus on providing care only after someone’s entered a crisis. But prevention is the best medicine. To support employees today, employers need proactive operating systems that reach out first, engage employees consistently, reduce barriers to care, and catch issues before they escalate.
- Embed support into the flow of work, not outside of it: Support shouldn’t live in a separate portal employees only access in dire moments. Promoting whole-person health means embedding support where employees are every day – in Slack, Teams, Zoom, calendars, and physical spaces. For example, Journey offers a calendar integration where employees can schedule recurring mental health resets and mindfulness breaks throughout the day and week. And Journey’s refreshed Zoom integration surfaces quick, relevant content to reduce meeting fatigue. In both cases, employees have the option to connect to confidential care instantly with one click. Integrations like these reduce stigma, lowers friction, and makes support feel like a normal part of the workday rather than something to hide or delay.
- Make wellbeing visible through leadership behavior: Cultural and policy shifts make a meaningful difference in employees’ lives and health, but they must be backed up by action and example. When leaders model healthy work-life boundaries and open up conversations about mental health, it shows employees that their wellbeing is genuinely valued – and encourages them to prioritize it as well.
- Make programs inclusive and culturally relevant for all employees: Whole-person health recognizes that people’s backgrounds, cultures, and contexts profoundly shape their health outcomes and experiences. Employers should ensure their programs and service providers reflect the populations they serve, in the languages they speak, so that everyone can access care that feels relevant and safe. The digital content within Journey is fully available in 36 languages, with over 25 additional languages launching in 2026.
- Encourage connection: Social connection fuels our health. Intentionally creating opportunities for team-wide social events, mentoring, cross-team collaboration, peer support groups, and community engagement can help employees feel a sense of belonging and link their work to a broader sense of purpose. This is especially important for fully remote and hybrid teams, where casual connection is less possible.
- Provide care across the full spectrum of employee health: Our health exists on a continuum – of time, type, and facet of our lives. Whole-person health requires care across the continuum, from awareness and prevention to clinical intervention and crisis response. Leading organizations are moving toward integrated models that meet employees at each of these moments, offering the right level of support based on actual need rather than defaulting to one-size-fits-all solutions. Journey is designed to support this full continuum – helping employees engage early, access the right level of care when needed, and stay supported over time.
How Journey’s full-spectrum care promotes whole-person health
- Awareness: Journey prioritizes connecting with employees early and often. Between Daily Journey emails, regular events like health fairs and Lunch & Learns, and coordinated onboarding initiatives, we engage employees consistently – ensuring their wellbeing is top of mind and making it clear how to access help when they need it.
- Preventive: Our offerings are designed to proactively support employee wellbeing and intervene early in the case of a mental health concern. This means engaging employees beyond awareness alone with live group coaching classes, voluntary daily mental health check-ins, monthly assessments, and on-demand audio, video, and written content that address all ranges of employee concerns and experiences. With our new Journey Signal™ AI intelligence engine, we can detect changes in engagement patterns and risk factors at a local level. Journey Signal™ captures the impacts of events within specific communities, allowing us to identify potential concerns earlier than any other employer health benefits programs today.
- Clinical: Targeted interventions at moments of need safeguard employee wellbeing and minimize the risk of reaching critical levels. This includes fast access to in-person and virtual therapy, 24/7 crisis support and critical incident stress management (CISM), as well as case management.
Standing with science, building healthier futures
This World Health Day reminds us that we have the knowledge and tools to create healthier workplaces. The science is clear, and the gap between what we know and how we act is narrowing: cultivating whole-person health helps employees maintain wellbeing across all areas of their lives. They bring more energy, clarity, and connection to the workplace – and become more resilient, engaged, and likely to stay.
The shift toward proactive, integrated support for whole-person health is a necessary evolution of employers’ approach to healthcare backed by decades of research. Organizations that embrace this understanding today will be the ones thriving tomorrow.
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Ready to support whole-person health in your organization?
Learn more about how Journey can help you build a culture where every dimension of employee wellbeing is valued and supported.
