Ellen Petry Leanse is a Silicon Valley veteran, Stanford instructor, bestselling author, and Chief People Officer at Lucidworks. On Reimagining Company Culture, she joined us to talk about what it means to build a workplace that genuinely cares for the humans inside it, and why so many wellbeing programs fail to move the needle.
Her framing draws from neuroscience and four decades of work across early Apple, Google, and dozens of tech companies. The conversation kept circling back to one practical idea. Care is a strategic capability, not a wellness perk, and the companies that treat it that way build healthier teams and stronger businesses at the same time.
Why Wellbeing Programs Often Miss the Mark
The data on workplace wellbeing keeps getting worse despite years of investment. According to SHRM research, 44 percent of U.S. employees feel burned out at work, and 51 percent feel used up at the end of the workday. The gap between investment in wellness apps and lived employee experience is wide and growing.
Ellen pointed out that most wellbeing programs sit on top of broken systems rather than fixing them. A meditation app cannot fix an unrealistic workload. An EAP cannot replace a manager who refuses to acknowledge that someone is struggling. The employee engagement numbers will not improve until the underlying conditions improve.
Her suggestion is to start with what neuroscience tells us about safety, threat, and connection. Brains under chronic stress make worse decisions, retain less information, and disengage faster. That is not a soft observation. It is a productivity problem that companies pay for whether they acknowledge it or not.
What lands when leaders take this view seriously is a quieter version of HR work. Less choreography, more listening. Less programming, more presence. Companies that get there end up with workforces that absorb shocks better, recover faster, and report higher trust on every measurable axis.
How Do You Build a Real Culture of Care?
What does care look like in practice on a modern team?
Ellen described care as the small, consistent behaviors that signal a person is seen as a person rather than a unit of output. That includes asking how someone actually is before diving into the agenda, naming hard moments out loud, and giving people permission to step back when they need to. Harvard Business Review research on psychological safety supports this. Teams that feel safe to speak up perform better and retain more people.
How do you keep care from becoming performative?
Performative care is what happens when leaders post about mental health on LinkedIn and then schedule meetings at 6pm on Friday. Ellen's test is simple. Look at how decisions get made when no one is watching. Are deadlines negotiable when someone is in crisis? Are caregiving responsibilities respected? The answers reveal the culture far more clearly than any town hall.
What Actually Works When Building Cultures of Care
Train managers to recognize what they are seeing
Most managers are not trained to spot the early signs of burnout, disengagement, or workplace bullying. Investing in basic recognition skills pays back faster than almost any other people program because it intercepts problems before they require formal intervention.
Make boundaries visible and enforceable
Care is not just about what leaders say. It is about what leaders model. When a CEO replies to email at 11pm, the entire organization learns that boundaries are a suggestion. When a CEO publicly logs off and protects vacation, the message lands differently. Visibility matters more than policy here.
Build feedback loops that actually inform decisions
Ellen pushed back on annual surveys as the primary listening tool. Real care requires shorter loops. Weekly pulse checks, manager check-ins with structured prompts, and exit conversations that surface what really happened. Then those signals have to actually move budgets and policies, not just live in a deck.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Cultures of care break down where employee relations starts. A complaint about a manager, a report of harassment, or a concern about retaliation all test whether a company means what it says about caring for people. AllVoices builds HR infrastructure and a speak-up hotline that give every employee a clear, trusted way to surface concerns and get a real response.
How does ER software fit alongside care-focused culture work?
ER software is the operational layer underneath care commitments. It captures concerns consistently, routes them to the right people quickly, and produces the trend data that lets HR see whether the care work is landing. Without that layer, care becomes a slogan that crumbles the first time something hard happens.
Frequently Asked Questions About Commitment to Care at Work
What does commitment to care mean in a work context?
It means treating employees as whole people whose wellbeing affects the business. It includes physical safety, mental health support, manageable workloads, and genuine respect for boundaries outside of work.
Why do most wellbeing programs fail?
They focus on individual coping skills while ignoring the working conditions that create the stress. Apps and yoga classes do not undo a toxic manager or unrealistic deadlines.
How do you measure whether care is working?
Track retention by manager, sick day usage trends, the volume and tone of pulse survey responses, and whether people feel safe taking time off. Compare those numbers to industry benchmarks.
What role do managers play in a culture of care?
Managers are the largest single variable. Employees experience the company through their manager. Training, feedback, and accountability for managers move care metrics more than any centralized program.
How do you avoid burnout in HR teams that lead this work?
Care-focused HR teams burn out faster than most because they absorb the emotional load of the organization. Rotating high-empathy work, capping caseloads, and giving HR its own peer support are practical safeguards.
What workplace conditions matter most for wellbeing?
Workload realism, manager skill, autonomy over time, and a clear sense of why the work matters. Those four conditions account for most of the variance in wellbeing scores across teams, and they show up in almost every credible study of workplace mental health.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Ellen's view of work is grounded in what we know about how human brains operate, not what we wish were true. People do their best thinking when they feel safe, seen, and supported. The companies that take that seriously do not need to choose between care and performance. They get both.
The leaders who build cultures of care share a posture. They listen more than they pronounce. They protect time and attention as much as budgets. They model the behaviors they want to see, especially when no one is watching. That is the work, and the people who do it well end up with workforces that stick around through the hard quarters.
Care done right is also a hiring advantage. Candidates can tell within two interviews whether a company means it. References get returned faster. Glassdoor reviews tilt toward specifics rather than complaints. Those small signals add up to a real talent moat in markets where the best people have options.
The flip side is just as important. When companies talk about care without backing it up, employees notice within a quarter, and the gap becomes a liability rather than an asset. The credibility cost of broken care promises is much higher than the cost of having said nothing at all.
See how AllVoices helps people teams build cultures of care that scale.
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