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If your managers are exhausted, spans of control are widening, and retention costs are climbing, you’re already seeing the financial impact of a deeper problem: your workplace benefits engagement strategy. And for men, in particular, this issue is often hiding in plain sight.
Men make up roughly half the workforce and dominate senior leadership roles across industries, yet they are among the least likely to use the support systems companies spend millions to provide. The result? A performance risk that shows up in missed deadlines, disengaged teams, and high turnover.
Gallup estimates that global disengagement costs the economy $8.8 trillion annually. Meanwhile, research from the American Psychological Association finds men are significantly less likely than women to seek mental health support—even when under comparable stress. When disengagement turns into turnover, the cost multiplies: stalled initiatives, disrupted momentum, and lost institutional knowledge all hit the bottom line.
The Problem Isn’t Whether Men Struggle — It’s How Support Is Designed
At Antenna Up’s Healthier Men at Work summit, Janna Meyrowitz Turner framed the challenge perfectly: companies spend millions on benefits, yet most employees don’t meaningfully engage until it’s too late. Too often, the blame falls on employees—but what if the real issue is design?
Most corporate wellness programs were never intended to sit on the shelf. Yet in practice, benefits built “for everyone” are actually used by very few. And this isn’t just a wellness issue—it’s a management architecture problem.
When Emotional Capacity Drops, Performance Follows
Organizations undergoing transformation—which is most of them—see emotional capacity erode first. Leaders, especially men socialized to quietly carry pressure, transmit stress through their teams whether they realize it or not.
The consequences are familiar:
Calendar bloat without clear decisions
Problems are raised only after they’ve become expensive
Feedback shared in side conversations instead of in the room
Leaders are tightening control rather than empowering ownership
Gallup research shows managers account for up to 70% of team engagement variance. Studies from Google’s Project Aristotle and Harvard Business School demonstrate that psychological safety, often modeled by leadership behavior, predicts team performance and innovation. Leaders who process stress rather than transmit it stabilize execution; those who don’t create operational drag.
Compensation Isn’t Enough — Belonging Drives Retention
C-suites focus on pay, but what keeps employees is feeling effective and supported. For men in high-pressure roles, belonging means:
Being trusted with consequential decisions
Having bosses and peers who understand the stakes
Knowing disagreement won’t damage credibility
Having a safe space to process pressure before it spills into the team
When this support erodes, men withdraw, overcontrol, underperform, or leave. Retention isn’t just about salary—it’s about whether the leadership system allows people to shoulder responsibility without carrying it alone.
Why Benefits Often Miss the Mark
Most corporate benefits—EAPs, therapy coverage, coaching platforms—are built for availability, not adoption. Men are consistently less likely than women to use mental health supports, even when stressed. Stigma, confidentiality concerns, and career implications suppress engagement—but it’s not just about reluctance. It’s about design.
When support requires employees to step outside the workflow, identify themselves as “needing help,” and navigate a separate portal, adoption drops. Behavioral research shows engagement rises when support is framed as skill-building and performance-enhancing rather than remedial.
The solution? Integrate support into how work happens:
Embed into leadership cadence, check-ins, and retrospectives
Frame around effectiveness and career longevity
Normalize usage through peer and leader modeling
Deliver in structured, activity-based formats
Facilitate through managers or coaches rather than leaving it entirely self-initiated
When accessing support feels like sharpening leadership skills, participation rises. When it feels like confessing weakness, it drops.
Five Structural Shifts to Make Benefits Work for Men
Redesign Manager Check-Ins
Track strain, not just status. Ask consistently: “What’s getting in the way of execution, and what would make this easier?” Treat capacity data like performance data.Upgrade Project Retrospectives
Ask: Where did the pressure spike? Where did communication break down? Where did we stretch people too thin? Convert patterns into process improvements.Update Promotion Readiness Criteria
Evaluate not just results but how they’re achieved. Assess emotional steadiness under pressure, decision quality, ability to maintain psychological safety, and team sustainability.Rebuild Leadership Onboarding
Train new managers to handle conflict, tension, and ambiguity. Pair them in peer cohorts for real-time problem solving during the first 90 days. Leadership failure often comes from isolation under strain, not incompetence.Model from the Top
Culture follows executive behavior. When senior leaders invest in coaching, structured reflection, and recovery after high-pressure cycles, employees see support as real, not symbolic.
The Business Case
Organizations today are flatter, spans of control are wider, and pressure is constant. Companies that outperform won’t have the largest benefits catalog—they’ll be the ones that help leaders process pressure individually and collectively without passing costs downstream.
The right workplace benefits strategy for men isn’t about more offerings—it’s about embedding leadership capacity into the operating system. It’s not just wellness. It’s modern management architecture. Organizations that get this right don’t just retain men—they build stronger leaders, period.