The wellness budget got spent back in March. A meditation app subscription nobody activated, one lunch and learn on resilience, custom stress balls with the logo on them sitting on every desk in the building.
Then the fourth quarter showed up. And the person who organized all of it has been answering Slack messages at 11pm for three weeks straight.
Something has shifted in who carries the weight at work, and most companies are still aiming their support at the wrong layer of the org chart.
Why are managers more stressed than the people they manage?
Managers now report worse days than their direct reports across nearly every emotional measure. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found leaders reporting daily stress seven points higher than individual contributors, along with anger twelve points higher, sadness eleven points higher, and loneliness ten points higher.
That is a reversal. Managers used to show what Gallup called an engagement premium, a consistent gap where the people running teams were more engaged than the people on them. That gap has largely closed.
Manager engagement dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent in a single year between 2024 and 2025, and it has fallen nine points since 2022.
The reasons are structural. Middle managers absorb pressure from above and below at the same time. They deliver decisions they did not make to people they cannot always compensate fairly. Layoffs, return to office mandates, and flattened org charts have widened spans of control, so the same person is now running twelve reports instead of six with no additional time.
Loneliness deserves particular attention on that list. Managers frequently lose peer relationships when they get promoted, and they cannot vent to their own team.
What is manager stress costing your company?
The cost shows up as disengagement that spreads downward, because a manager’s state sets the emotional weather for everyone reporting to them.
Global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, the lowest reading Gallup has recorded since 2020. The estimated productivity loss tied to that low engagement runs around $10 trillion worldwide, roughly nine percent of global GDP.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Employees working under ineffective management practices are substantially more likely to report high stress than employees under effective management. When you exhaust the manager, you degrade the experience of everyone in that reporting line.
Turnover follows. Replacing a mid-level manager typically costs somewhere between six months and two years of that role’s salary once you count recruiting, lost institutional knowledge, and the ramp time for whoever takes over.
Britain’s Health and Safety Executive counted 964,000 workers with work-related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2024/25, up from 776,000 the year before. That is a 24 percent jump in twelve months.
Do small workplace gestures actually do anything?
Small things work when they interrupt a stress response in the moment, and they fail when they are offered as a substitute for fixing workload.
Tactile objects fall into the first category more often than cynics assume. Squeezing something engages your hands and gives a brief physical outlet during a moment where you cannot leave the room. Nobody should oversell this. A foam ball does not resolve a 60 hour week. What it does is give someone a two second circuit breaker between a hostile email and their reply to it, and there is real value in a pause at that exact point.
The same logic applies to a handful of other cheap interventions:
- A five minute walk between back to back meetings
- Meeting-free blocks protected on the calendar
- Standing up during phone calls
- Turning off notification badges after a set hour
These earn their keep as prompts. The object on the desk reminds someone the pause exists.
Where companies get into trouble is treating the gesture as the program. Handing out wellness swag while approving a hiring freeze and adding four reports to every manager sends a message employees decode immediately.
What should you change if you are serious about it?
Start with span of control, because it is the variable most directly under your control and it drives everything else.
A manager with fifteen direct reports cannot hold meaningful one on ones, cannot notice early warning signs, and cannot develop anyone. Six to eight is where most people can actually manage rather than administrate.
Other changes worth the effort:
- Give managers real decision authority over the things they are held accountable for
- Build peer groups so managers have somewhere to talk that is not up or down their reporting line
- Audit how many hours per week go to reporting and status updates that nobody reads
- Train new managers before promotion instead of six months after
Recognition matters too, and it costs almost nothing compared to the alternatives. People who feel their work registers with someone report meaningfully lower stress. That can be a note, a mention in a company meeting, or a small physical thing that shows up on their desk with their name attached to it.
The physical version has one advantage over an email. It stays visible. A card and a small gift on a desk keeps working for months, while a Slack message in a busy channel is gone by lunch.
How do you tell ordinary stress from burnout?
Stress tends to come with too much, and burnout tends to come with nothing left. Someone stressed is overwhelmed and still engaged. Someone burned out has gone flat.
Warning signs worth watching for in your managers:
- Cynicism about work they used to care about
- Withdrawal from meetings they used to drive
- Missed deadlines from someone reliable
- A noticeable drop in the quality of their attention
If someone is showing several of these, the conversation to have is about workload and support, and possibly a referral to whatever employee assistance resources you offer. A gift basket is the wrong response to that situation.
Building a recognition program that reaches your managers as well as your front line? Browse promotional options at 1001 Stress Balls or email sales@bpopromos.com and we can talk through what fits your headcount and budget.