An exhausted founder is a committed one. That’s one of the non-negotiable rules of startup culture. Elon Musk slept on the Tesla factory floor. Marissa Mayer pulled 130-hour weeks during her time at Google. I worked 18 hours a day, skipping meals and sleep to squeeze in a few more “ productive ” hours. So if you’re getting eight hours of sleep, eating lunch away from your laptop, and your company still hasn’t made the unicorn list...well, you’re clearly the problem. Hustle culture didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Thomas Edison called sleep a “criminal waste of time.” Maybe the light bulb was his contribution to crime prevention. You can launch a company on fumes and get it surprisingly far. Thousands of founders do it. I did it. The trouble starts when you try to stretch that temporary sprint across years. Today, my company, BetterMe, has grown into an all-in-one well-being ecosystem with 800+ people on our team. I’m still ambitious. I still believe there are moments when building a company requires working hard. But I no longer believe commitment has to go hand-in-hand with exhaustion. There’s a way to build a successful business without keeping everyone permanently in survival mode. When well-being becomes a business issue Workplace wellness is nothing new under the energy-efficient LED office light. Most companies, big or small, offer something by now. But in our work with corporate clients, we still see the same disconnect. Business goals are over here. Well-being benefits are over there, usually in the form of a gym membership, meditation app, or maybe an annual wellness day. All useful, but not quite aligned with how people spend their time at work. One of the biggest shifts for us internally was acknowledging that we couldn’t separate how people were doing from how the business was doing. There’s a pretty human explanation behind a lot of everyday business issues: Exhausted people make worse decisions and miss things Low energy leaves less room for good ideas When you’re tired, patience gets shorter and collaboration gets harder Plenty of data on workplace performance backs up what we were seeing inside the company. For example, McKinsey has linked better employee health and well-being with 10% to 21% higher productivity. Oxford research points in the same direction, finding that happier employees tend to be 13% more productive. And the benefits go beyond productivity: Gallup reports that thriving employees take 53% fewer sick days and are 32% less likely to actively be looking for another job. So when you think about your corporate approach to employee wellness, forget about the wellness perk you can give people, and start asking, “How do we create an environment that helps people have the energy to do great work consistently?” How we made well-being part of the workday We tackled that question by looking at the workday itself. One of the most obvious and simplest changes was making movement easier to fit in. Our offices have walking paths for meetings, employees have access to online and in-person workouts, and team activities are more likely to happen at a running club, on a padel court, or outdoors. We’ve also tried to make the definition of “healthy” broad enough that people can find something they enjoy. Not everyone wants an intensive workout. A walk, Pilates, mobility work, or 15 minutes of stretching all count. None of this is groundbreaking, but that’s the point. If staying healthy requires people to find another hour at the end of an already packed day, you know how that story ends. We’ve also learned that people are more likely to stick with something when they aren’t doing it alone. So we introduced wellness challenges internally. These also give us a natural testing ground: We get to see how people use new features and hear what’s working in the workplace. One recent example was a Pilates challenge. People followed the same challenge, compared progress, and talked about it with colleagues. One of the winners was particularly active in sharing ideas and feedback on the new app features. Seeing that play out with our own team helped shape how we approached challenges within BetterMe Business. We saw firsthand that a shared goal, simple daily actions, and a little friendly competition can give people a reason to keep showing up and build healthy habits together. 3 things for other leaders If you’re trying to make well-being more of how your team works, I’d start with three things. 1. Do it together. A gym membership gives people access, but a social event gives them a reason to show up. We regularly do group workouts together, and I occasionally lead yoga sessions at company gatherings. Habits are easier to keep when someone else is doing them with you. 2. Go first. Your team pays attention to what you do, not what you put in the employee handbook. Sport is a big part of my daily routine. I train regularly and share that side of my life openly with the team and on social media. 3. Measure well-being, too. We track almost everything in business, but just expect to know when people are doing well. Add health and engagement indicators alongside your business KPIs. Our HR team regularly checks in with employees through surveys, for example. The bottom line: Save some fuel for tomorrow Building a successful company is a marathon, not a series of sprints. You’ve read that analogy a thousand times, but it gets repeated for a reason. Your team needs to know when to push through an intense stretch and when to recover. If everyone is always running at full speed, eventually someone runs out of road. That’s really what the three principles come down to for me. Do things together so people have support. Go first so they know recovery is allowed. Measure well-being so you notice when a tough week is turning into a tough six months. Victoria Repa is founder and CEO of BetterMe.
Fast Company
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