When I hear a CHRO boast about a new mental health app rollout, I don’t hear compassion. I hear an admission that leadership has decided not to fix the job.
The empathy industry is booming
Leadership orthodoxy now demands more visible care, and vendors have flooded the market with mindfulness platforms, resilience training, and “wellbeing days.” A 2024 Oxford analysis of 46,000 workers across 233 organizations found that individual-level interventions produced no measurable improvement in wellbeing—except volunteering. Yet boards keep approving these line items because they look caring in the annual report.
I’ve sat in budget meetings where a $200K wellbeing platform was approved in the same quarter a team was denied three additional engineers. That isn’t empathy. It’s an offload: transfer the burden of an overloaded operating model onto employees, then hand them an app to cope.
Why this offload happens
Apps are fast, visible, and politically safe. Fixing workloads is slow, invisible, and requires leaders to confront their own prioritization failures. So the board chooses the app. It feels better than admitting the structure is broken.
The real work is structural
If your people are burned out, the cause is rarely a lack of meditation. It’s too many priorities, unclear decision rights, unreasonable spans of control, and leaders who won’t protect capacity. An app cannot fix that any more than a bandage can fix a broken leg.
What should leaders do instead?
- Kill the standalone wellbeing budget. Redirect it into manager capacity and workflow redesign.
- Audit spans of control and decision rights before adding another wellness module.
- Teach leaders to say no to low-value work—not just to meditate after doing it.
The takeaway
Stop congratulating yourself for buying coping tools. Fix the system that is making people need them. If you want to improve mental health, remove the overload. Everything else is avoidance dressed as empathy.