Beyond Burnout: Embedding Healthy Habits and Organizational Readiness into Your Culture
This blog is a follow-up to our piece Leading Through Burnout, where we explored insights from our recent presentation at the America’s Credit Unions HR and Organizational Development Conference. In that session, we shared five key takeaways for financial institutions to consider when addressing burnout.
In this post, we’re diving deeper into takeaways 4 and 5:
- Burnout is a failure of leadership, culture, and self-accountability.
- Address the root causes—don’t just manage symptoms.
- Leaders are the linchpin in preventing and addressing burnout.
- Healthy habits drive performance and resiliency.
- Clarity, leadership buy-in, and awareness are vital to the success of every wellbeing program.
Healthy Habits - A Leadership Initiative
Healthy habits don’t have to be complicated. They can be simple steps that are practiced with consistency over time. When we work with leaders, we’ll often start with the fundamentals: sleep, nutrition & hydration, and exercise. While these three fundamentals can help mitigate stress, more importantly they drive performance. People think with more clarity, make decisions with more confidence and act with more purpose when they’ve given themselves what they need.
This is especially important for leaders, whose presence and energy have a cascading effect on their teams. Consider this insight from Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance Science at WHOOP:
“What we saw is that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that the CEO or boss had, their team members, their direct reports felt less psychologically safe.”
But healthy habits go beyond the physical. Organizations can support employees in developing internal habits that build resilience and self-leadership, such as:
- Understanding their values and strengths
- Gaining access to resources
- Asking for what they need
- Recognizing they are in choice
The Wellbeing Conversation: Is Your Organization Really Ready?
Implementing wellbeing initiatives that stick requires more than offering a program or hosting a wellness day. It starts with clarity:
- What are we trying to solve or create?
- How does this initiative support our culture and strategy?
- How will we measure success?
Equally important is assessing how your culture supports—or hinders—wellbeing. What happens when someone doesn’t take PTO? Are leaders sending emails at midnight? Is feedback a regular part of the rhythm, or something only triggered by problems?
The interesting thing about the last question is that the Pew Research found that the more feedback an employee receives, the more satisfied they are with the amount of feedback they receive. Sadly, one-in-four employees receive little feedback.
Leadership Buy-In: The Make-or-Break Factor
For any wellbeing initiative to succeed, there must be buy-in from the executive leaders of the organization. Employee wellbeing is not the domain of one department. HR or Organization Development may drive the initiative but the executives need to be part of the decisions and approach. Additionally, the initiative will not work if the actions of the leaders do not align. Leaders throughout the organization need to be role models.
Organizations need to be relentless about creating awareness and engagement for their wellbeing program. The quote below lays out the challenge:
“While more than 85% of large employers offer a wellness program, Gallup research shows that only 60% of U.S. employees are aware their company offers a wellness program — and only 40% of those who are aware of the program say they actually participate in it. Of the companies that offer wellness programs, only 24% of employees are participating”
This gap points to a lack of sustained awareness, communication, and perceived relevance.
Why This Matters for Financial Institutions
Financial institutions are people-centric organizations by design. Yet, like any workplace, they are not immune to stress, overwork, and misaligned expectations. As trusted community institutions, they have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to model better.
By focusing on root causes, supporting leadership development, and embedding wellbeing into culture and strategy, we don’t just reduce burnout, we elevate our organizations.
Burnout isn’t solved through one-off efforts. But with the right leadership mindset and organizational clarity, it is solvable, and addressing it well is a powerful act of leadership.
*Portions of this blog were edited with the assistance of AI.
