What does workplace wellbeing actually feel like and can employee benefits ever compensate for a culture people don’t trust?

In this episode of Wellbeing Talk, I sat down with Sara Silvonen, Senior Consultant and Wellbeing Lead at Great Place To Work UK about what millions of employee experiences reveal about trust, leadership and healthy workplace culture.

Drawing on Great Place To Work’s Wellbeing at Work 2026 research and the GPTW Effect, they examine the difference between providing wellbeing support and creating a genuine culture of wellbeing.

This conversation explores how everyday leadership behaviours shape employee experience, why colleagues within the same organisation can experience two very different workplaces, and what happens when trust begins to deteriorate.

We discuss the evidence connecting workplace wellbeing with employee retention, productivity and performance.

Alongside where the research shows a meaningful association, where claims of causation require caution, and whether pressure to demonstrate ROI risks reducing wellbeing to another business metric.

An evidence-led conversation for HR leaders, people professionals and managers seeking to understand what effective workplace wellbeing looks and feels like beyond policies, benefits and survey scores.

⏱️ Chapters

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0:00 - Introduction

1:47 - Sara Silvonen’s Path Into Workplace Wellbeing

3:54 - What Makes a Healthy Workplace?

6:30 - What Great Place to Work Measures

8:27 - Wellbeing Support vs a Wellbeing Culture

10:35 - Surprising Employee Experience Findings

13:23 - How Trust Drives Workplace Performance

16:34 - The Nine High-Trust Leadership Behaviours

19:00 - Early Warning Signs of Low Trust

21:00 - The Workplace Wellbeing Consistency Gap

24:52 - How Organisations Improve Employee Experience

28:25 - Wellbeing, Retention and Productivity

32:27 - Workplace Wellbeing: Correlation vs Causation

35:12 - The Risk of Reducing Wellbeing to ROI

37:30 - Why Wellbeing Initiatives Struggle for Sign-Off

40:55 - What to Assess Before Adding Another Initiative

44:05 - What Good Workplace Wellbeing Feels Like

45:42 - Outro

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🔔 If you’re interested in how trust, leadership and workplace culture shape employee wellbeing, don’t forget to subscribe to the @letsgowellbeing YouTube channel.