Work feels very different when you have a manager who listens.
Someone who notices when you’re overwhelmed. Someone who communicates clearly. Someone who makes difficult weeks feel supported instead of isolating.
And the opposite is true too.
A difficult manager can affect someone’s wellbeing far more than most organisations realise – no matter how good the benefits package looks on paper.
That’s why one finding from Stribe’s Big HR Check-in Report 2025–2026 feels so important:
The biggest driver of wellbeing at work isn’t perks or policies. It’s the relationship employees have with their manager.
When HR professionals were asked what has the biggest impact on employee wellbeing at work, the top answer was:
This ranked significantly higher than:
This is one of the most revealing findings in the report, because it challenges how many organisations still think about wellbeing.
Many organisations still approach wellbeing as something that sits around work:
Those things can absolutely help. But the data suggests they are not what shapes someone’s day-to-day experience most.
Instead, wellbeing is being influenced by something much closer to employees:
In other words, wellbeing is built through everyday interactions, not occasional initiatives.
Managers shape the emotional experience of work more than most organisations realise. They influence:
A supportive manager can make a difficult role feel manageable. An unsupported or reactive manager can make even good benefits feel meaningless.
This helps explain why organisations sometimes invest heavily in wellbeing programmes while employees still feel exhausted or disengaged.
The findings suggest that improving wellbeing is less about adding more “wellbeing activity” and more about improving the quality of everyday working relationships.
A few things make a particularly big difference:
Managers need support too, especially around communication, feedback and emotional intelligence.
Many wellbeing problems become visible in employee feedback long before burnout fully surfaces. This is where regular pulse surveys and anonymous feedback tools, like Stribe, become valuable.
They help HR identify patterns early instead of relying on issues escalating first.
Constant firefighting creates stress across entire teams, not just within HR.
Managers spend more time responding to problems than preventing them, employees feel issues are only addressed once they escalate, and long-term culture work gets pushed aside by immediate demands.
Over time, this creates an environment where people are constantly “getting through the week” rather than feeling stable, supported and able to do their best work.
One of the clearest connections across the entire report is this: Workplace wellbeing improves when organisations listen consistently and act visibly.
Employees don’t expect perfection from managers. But they do notice when:
That’s why employee listening matters so much.
The biggest insight from this research is simple: Wellbeing is far more relational than operational.
It’s shaped less by what organisations offer employees, and more by how employees experience work every day.
That’s why the strongest wellbeing strategies heading into 2026 will likely focus less on adding more perks, and more on:
Because when relationships at work improve, wellbeing usually follows.
If you’d like to explore more findings from the research, you can read Stribe’s Big HR Check-in Report 2025–2026, where we explore wellbeing, burnout, leadership support and employee engagement in more depth.
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
