If your managers are exhausted, spans of control are widening and retention costs are climbing, this issue is already on your balance sheet. It’s a workplace benefits engagement strategy problem hiding in plain sight, particularly for men at work.
Men represent roughly half the workforce and the majority of senior leadership roles in most industries. Yet they are among the least likely to use the very support systems companies invest millions to provide.
That’s a performance risk.
Gallup estimates global disengagement costs the economy $8.8 trillion annually. At the same time, research from the American Psychological Association shows men are significantly less likely than women to seek mental health support, even when experiencing comparable stress levels. When disengagement turns into turnover, the cost compounds quickly — beyond salary replacement — through stalled initiatives, disrupted momentum, and lost institutional knowledge.
The issue isn’t whether men are struggling. It’s whether our systems are designed in a way that they will actually be used.
That was the framing Janna Meyrowitz Turner set when she invited me to contribute to Antenna Up’s Healthier Men at Work summit, the first corporate gathering explicitly connecting male worker health to business outcomes.
Companies invest millions in benefits. Every CHRO and CEO I speak with acknowledges the same tension: the majority of the workforce doesn’t meaningfully engage until it’s too late, if at all.
We often blame employees for that. But what if it’s not reluctance? What if it’s a design?
Corporate wellness programs were never meant to be shelfware. Yet across industries, leaders face an uncomfortable truth: benefits designed for “everyone” are being meaningfully used by very few.
This is not simply a wellness conversation. It’s a management architecture problem. And the need for fresh, practical thinking has never been greater.
When Emotional Capacity Drops, Workplace Performance Follows
In organizations undergoing transformation — which is most of them — the first thing to erode is emotional capacity. When leaders, especially men socialized to carry pressure quietly, cannot process stress, teams don’t just feel it; they experience it. They operate in it.
You see it every day:
- Calendar bloat without clear decisions
- People agree publicly and vent privately.
- Problems are raised only after they’ve become expensive
- Feedback shared in side conversations instead of in the room
- Leaders tighten control instead of empowering ownership
Over time, this becomes operational drag: missed signals, avoidable attrition, brittle execution.
Emotional capacity is a performance infrastructure.
Gallup has found that managers account for up to 70% of the variance in team engagement. Research from Google’s Project Aristotle and Harvard Business School has shown that psychological safety — often modeled by leadership behavior — predicts team performance and innovation.
When leaders metabolize stress rather than transmit it, execution stabilizes. When they don’t, pressure cascades.
Compensation Gets Attention. Belonging Gets Tenure.
Compensation dominates C-suite and board conversations. But what determines whether someone stays is whether they feel effective and supported inside the system.
For men in high-pressure roles, belonging looks like:
- Being trusted with consequential decisions
- Having bosses and peers who understand the stakes
- Knowing disagreement won’t damage credibility
- Having somewhere to process pressure before it spills into the team
When that support erodes, men don’t announce it. They withdraw. They overcontrol. They underperform. Or they leave.
Retention isn’t just about what you pay. It’s about whether your leadership system allows people to take on responsibility without having to carry it alone.
Why Most Benefits Miss The Mark For Men And Women
Most corporate benefits are built for availability, not adoption. Organizations offer EAPs, therapy coverage, coaching, and wellbeing platforms. On paper, the menu is impressive. In reality, utilization remains uneven and predictably so.
Workplace research consistently shows men are less likely than women to use formal mental health supports, even when reporting comparable stress levels. Concerns about stigma, confidentiality, and career impact suppress engagement before it begins.
But this isn’t only a stigma problem. It’s also a systems problem.
When support requires employees to step outside the flow of work, identify themselves as “needing help,” and navigate a separate portal, uptake drops. Behavioral research shows that people engage more readily when support is framed as skill-building and performance-enhancing rather than remedial.
That’s where many benefits fail. They are available, but not integrated.
Engagement increases when benefits and support are:
- Embedded into leadership cadence ,such as manager check-ins, retrospectives, and coaching practices
- Framed around effectiveness and longevity
- Normalized by peers and modeled by leaders
- Delivered in structured, activity-based formats
- Facilitated through managers or coaches rather than left entirely self-initiated
If accessing support feels like signaling weakness or filing a confession, engagement drops. If it feels like sharpening your leadership edge, engagement rises.
This is also where the conversation can get distorted.
Inclusive design means recognizing how different groups engage differently and reducing friction accordingly. Organizations have rightly invested in supporting women, caregivers, and underrepresented talent. That work remains essential. But inclusion fails if it ignores half the workforce.
Designing benefits that men at work will use strengthens a more profound commitment to building inclusive leadership at scale.
When support is integrated into how work happens — normalized, performance-linked, and leadership-modeled — everyone benefits. Inclusive design is an operational discipline.
Adoption follows design. Language shapes participation. Structure determines behavior.
A Workplace Benefits Engagement Strategy For Men At Work
If organizations want men, and everyone else, to use support systems before a crisis hits, they have to rewire operating rhythms.
Here are five structural shifts that move benefits from decoration to infrastructure.
1. Redesign Manager Check-Ins
Most check-ins track status updates. Few track strain.
- Upgrade the script to normalize workload and energy conversations. Add one consistent question: “What’s getting in the way of execution right now and what would make this easier?”
- Track themes quarterly. Treat capacity data like performance data.
2. Upgrade Project Retrospectives
Post-mortems often focus on process gaps. They rarely examine pressure.
Add three questions to your After-Action Reviews:
- Where did pressure spike?
- Where did communication break down?
- Where did we stretch people thin without realizing it?
Then convert patterns into process improvements. Pressure should surface in review, not only in resignation letters.
3. Update Promotion Readiness And Talent Review Criteria
Stop evaluating only output. Start evaluating how results are produced.
In talent reviews, assess leadership range under pressure:
- How does this leader respond when challenged publicly?
- Do they escalate tension or absorb and clarify it?
- Do people bring risks to them early, or only after problems surface??
- When deadlines tighten, do they centralize control or distribute ownership?
- Does their team sustain performance over time, or burn hot and turn over?
Make emotional steadiness — behavioral consistency under strain — part of leadership criteria.
Promotion criteria should reflect:
- Decision quality under pressure
- Ability to create psychological safety without lowering standards
- Capacity to handle disagreement productively
- Sustainability of team performance over time
Leaders who strengthen their teams while delivering results are scalable assets. Those who degrade them are not.
4. Rebuild Leadership Onboarding
Most new managers are trained on policy, systems, and compliance. Few are trained on pressure, tension, conflict, and ambiguity.
Modern onboarding should include:
- Practicing difficult conversations before they’re live
- Learning to spot early signs of overload
- Managing conflict in real time
- Resetting a team after a failed launch or challenging client negotiation
- Delivering performance feedback when the stakes are high and emotions are running hot
- Escalating issues without over-escalating anxiety
Pair new managers in peer cohorts for their first 90 days to discuss real situations: hiring missteps, workload imbalances, underperformance, stakeholder friction.
Leadership failure often isn’t incompetence. It’s isolation under strain.
5. Model From The Top
Culture follows visible executive behavior. If senior leaders invest in coaching, schedule recovery after major project delivery cycles, and normalize structured reflection, utilization rises.
If they don’t, employees assume the benefits are symbolic.
Modeling doesn’t require vulnerability theater. It requires consistency.
Why This Workplace Benefits Framework For Men At Work Matters Now
Organizations are flatter. Pressure is constant. Spans of control are wider than ever.
The companies that outperform won’t be those with the largest benefits catalog. They’ll be the ones that help leaders process pressure — individually and collectively — without passing the cost downstream. Those who stop asking: “What benefits do we offer?” And start asking: “What kind of leadership capacity are we structurally building?”
A strong workplace benefits engagement strategy for men at work is not about unquestioningly expanding offerings. It’s about building leadership capacity into the operating system.
That’s a wellness initiative and modern management architecture. The organizations that get this right won’t just retain men. They’ll build stronger leaders — period.