Earlier this year, I wrote in Fast Company that 2026 could be the year companies finally begin taking employee well-being seriously. I also challenged HR leaders to seize the moment and help drive the requisite cultural change within their organizations.

Many people subsequently reached out to me to argue that well-being cannot be just an HR initiative and that, to truly succeed, it requires the full buy-in and ownership of leaders at every level, including the C-suite. I found myself instantly agreeing with them.

Back in January, my goal was to inspire HR leaders to make employee well-being a foundational value in their companies and to begin laying out how it could become institutionalized. But the more I thought about what that would require, the clearer it became that HR cannot embed well-being into how a company operates on its own. Responsibility must extend far beyond HR.

For decades, companies have largely handed responsibility for the employee experience to Human Resources. It was HR that administered the engagement surveys, analyzed the results, and reported the findings. But the main drivers of employee engagement—workloads, caring and supportive leadership, flexibility, and job security—have always sat in the business itself, not HR. That’s why engagement scores rarely moved. Leaders treated the data as HR’s problem to fix, not their own. We’re at risk of making the same mistake with well-being.

Underneath that mismatch sits an untenable dual mandate: HR is expected to advocate for employees while simultaneously carrying out layoffs and job eliminations—decisions made by senior leadership, not HR.

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