The people setting the pressure are running out.

The manager is the variable

Only 31% of US employees were engaged at work in 2025, unchanged from the year before and down from 36% in 2020, by Gallup's count. Worldwide, manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022.

The American Psychological Association's 2025 Work in America survey asked more than two thousand workers about their manager. Of those satisfied with that relationship, 10% described their workplace as toxic. Of those who were not, 55% did. Good or excellent mental health: 81% against 54%.

That is an association, not proof of cause, and APA says so. It points the same way as Gallup's long-standing estimate that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement between teams. Strain is not evenly spread. It concentrates under particular people.

What the usual budget actually buys

An app for the person under the pressure, and nothing for the person generating it.

Employee assistance programmes are the default response, and their use is typically below 10% of employees. The US Surgeon General's 2022 framework calls them significantly underutilized. Resilience training, meditation apps and stress webinars share the same flaw: all of them work on the person receiving the pressure, and none of them go near the room where it starts.

No regulation will do this for you

There is no specific federal OSHA standard for psychosocial hazards. What exists is guidance. ISO 45003, published in 2021, sets out how to manage psychosocial risk inside a health and safety system. The US Surgeon General's Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, released in October 2022, names five essentials, among them Protection from Harm and Mattering at Work, and says leaders and supervisors can have a powerful impact on wellbeing by setting organizational culture.

Guidance tells you where the hazard is. It cannot change the person generating it. When the risk assessment says “leadership behaviour”, you have reached the end of what a process can do, and the beginning of what has to happen in a room.

The cost sits highest where the strain starts

A 2025 model in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated what burnout costs a US employer each year: about $4,000 for an hourly employee, $10,824 for a manager and $20,683 for an executive. For a company of a thousand people, roughly $5 million a year.

In 2015, researchers from Stanford and Harvard Business School estimated that more than 120,000 deaths a year, and 5% to 8% of annual healthcare costs, are associated with and may be attributable to how US companies manage their workforces.

What we are not

We are not a compliance product, and we are not therapy.

We work with leaders on the nervous system underneath their behaviour: how much pressure they can carry, how they recover, and what they pass to the people below them. We facilitate. We do not diagnose or treat. Participation is voluntary, confidentiality is agreed in writing before day one, and a registered psychologist is named in every contract. The safeguards, in full.