Leaders wanting data-driven, credible insights that can help them build healthier, higher-performing organisations can turn to the second edition of the GIBS October Health Workplace Well-Being Report.
For two years, GIBS and mental well-being app October Health have partnered to create the scientifically validated Workplace Wellbeing Index. The 2025 report reveals that well-being in the South African workforce has improved to 75%, up from 69% in 2024. Mental (76%), physical (75%), emotional (77%), and social (78%) well-being ratings all increased when compared with the previous year's figures. However, employees expressed concern about the office environment, with fewer people using the top metric of “very healthy” to describe their workplace.
The search for meaning
During discussion with attendees at the 2024 launch, the message was that an essential component of well-being had been missed: spirituality. Many readers identified
its absence as a significant gap, noting that spiritual wellbeing plays a vital role in their
lives and overall welfare. There has been a rise in people across the globe deeply reflecting on life and its meaning since the COVID-19 pandemic confronted humanity with uncertainty, isolation, life threats, and significant changes in daily life on a scale that exceeded any previous individual or community crisis. The response to this feedback was actioned and spiritual well-being has been included in the latest report.
Workplace spirituality (WPS) is understood as employees' experience of meaningful work within a value-driven organisational setting that nurtures their inner growth and emotional well-being. Research identifies three dimensions of workplace spirituality as key drivers of engagement: meaningful work, sense of community, and value alignment. According to the Spiritual Formation Inventory (SFI), spiritual formation and workplace engagement can be studied and cultivated, entirely outside a religious frame.
Rather than being tied to religion, WPS involves the pursuit of purpose, ethical behaviour, and connection with others at work. Working in an environment that supports employees’ right to openly express their beliefs helps them have better working relationships with colleagues, feel safer, and be more engaged in their work. Permission and space, not organisational religious identity, is the operative variable. Studies have demonstrated the positive impact of spirituality on physical health, mental health, and other positive health outcomes such as subjective well-being, health-related quality of life, and coping skills.
Spirituality-based programmes in the workplace have been shown to produce numerous benefits for employees and organisations, including increased creativity and productivity, higher performance, reduced absenteeism, and improved job satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. Now that it's been introduced into our well-being domains, future reports will indicate the flux of spiritual well-being in South African workplaces.
Money matters
The financial well-being framework by Netemeyer et al (2018) defines perceived financial well-being as “one’s ability to manage financial resources in support of the life one wants to live now and in the near and more distant future”. This framework reflects the inherently self-reported and evaluative nature of financial well-being.
It can be understood through two distinct constructs: current money management stress, which captures how one is doing today, and expected future financial security which captures how one expects to be doing in the future. These dimensions reflect subjective evaluations of current and future financial circumstances; not objective financial conditions. The distinction is essential because, while financial well-being recorded an increase of 8%, this does not necessarily mean respondents had more money. It means they perceived their financial situation as improved; even as it remains the lowest-ranked of all the domains at 64%.
There is strong macroeconomic support for this more positive perception across the 2024–2025 study period. South Africa’s average take-home pay increased by 12% year-on-year in 2024, the strongest growth since the Covid-19 pandemic. It rose from R15 367 in December 2023 to R17 202 in December 2024, driven by positive developments including the suspension of load-shedding, ongoing business recovery, and moderating inflation, and a series of successive interest rate cuts.
Post-pandemic existential reflection, which the GIBS October Health studies document, may also have played a role. Research on values reassessment suggests that people who have reflected deeply on what matters are more likely to consciously deprioritise conspicuous consumption — a behavioural shift that registers as improved financial well-being under the Netemeyer financial well-being definition.
The +8 spike, in this reading, reflects a genuine improvement in perceived financial stress and anticipated future security, driven by a confluence of real wage growth, interest rate relief, easing inflation, load-shedding reduction, and behavioural adaptation. It does however occur from a low base against structural conditions that continue to constrain financial well-being significantly below other dimensions.
Addressing Resource Realities
These five employer strategies address both current money management stress and expected future financial security.
Strategy: Financial literacy and education programmes
Financial dimension addressed: Current stress and future security
Behaviour-shifting financial education should address budgeting, saving, investing, debt management, and retirement planning. It can be delivered through a variety of channels including on-demand resources, group workshops, and one-on-one financial coaching or counselling.
Strategy: Financial coaching and personalised guidance
Financial dimension addressed: Current stress
One of the highest-impact interventions is direct, personalised financial coaching. Research suggests that employees who engaged in financial coaching reported a decrease in financial stress. Reducing employee financial stress in turn increases financial well-being, reduces employer costs related to absenteeism, presenteeism, and workplace mental and physical health.
Strategy: Earned wage access
Financial dimension addressed: Current stress
Earned wage access (EWA), which allows employees to draw on wages already earned before the official payday, is emerging as one of the most practically impactful tools. Users of one South African EWA platforms reported better financial management, reduced financial stress, and felt more in control of their finances. More than 60% of EWA cash-outs were used for work-related expenses such as transport, followed by food, emergencies, and utilities.
Strategy: Emergency savings facilitation
Financial dimension addressed: Current stress and future security
Whether through payroll deductions, matched savings contributions, or group savings vehicles, employer-facilitated savings schemes lower the friction to saving and make it the default rather than the exception. In the South African context, this is particularly relevant given that the stokvels model already demonstrates cultural receptivity to collective savings structures on which employers could build.
Strategy: Debt management support
Financial dimension addressed: Current stress
Employer-supported debt counselling referrals, partnerships with registered debt counsellors, and access to debt consolidation advice represent low-cost, high-impact interventions. TransUnion South Africa’s data showed that most of the new credit issued was for consumption, not asset building; a sign that households are plugging income gaps rather than building financial well-being. This impacts the workplace directly, as employees struggle to afford transport mid-month, arrive distracted, or skip work.
Social architecture at work needs new foundations and designs
As organisations adapt, the question of how to maintain and foster meaningful social connections in a workplace divided by physical and digital spaces remains central to sustaining team cohesion and workplace culture. Social connection registered a high demand gap in the 2025 Workplace Wellbeing Index, indicating that employees hope for more social opportunities. Here are salient points for managers:
Loneliness has been formally declared a public health crisis. In a 2023 advisory, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote that “loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling – it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” The organisational consequences of chronic loneliness are severe and direct. Lonely employees miss an average of 15 more days of work per year than their non-lonely colleagues, and ironically, although lonely employees crave social interaction, they tend to distance themselves from co-workers, potentially undercutting work-group collaboration.
The problem is structural, not motivational. Casual, unplanned interactions in the workplace create an optimal environment for exchanging knowledge, building trust, and developing shared context and social support between employees. However, the decentralised and task-oriented nature of remote and hybrid work makes it more difficult for people to engage in spontaneous water-cooler connections. Social connection left to the vagaries of scheduling overlap simply does not occur reliably enough to sustain meaningful workplace relationships.
The function of the casual water-cooler encounter can be recreated through deliberate scheduling, even if the encounter itself retains a low-pressure, informal character. The key qualifier is that these interactions must be low-pressure – not mandatory team-building exercises that employees experience as performative or forced. They should be structured opportunities for informal connection that replicate what the pre-pandemic office provided naturally.
Social connection must be treated as organisational infrastructure. It should be deliberately designed and maintained, rather than a natural by-product of co-location. Remote work, while efficient, often lacks the informal interactions that build trust, spark creativity, and strengthen professional relationships. As organisations adapt, the question of how to maintain and foster meaningful social connections in a workplace divided by physical and digital spaces remains central to sustaining team cohesion and workplace culture.
About the report
The Workplace Wellbeing Index summarises the feedback from South African employees about their working life in 2025. The fieldwork timeline was 3-28 October 2025. Data comes from a national sample of 503 employees who completed an online survey. All scores were converted to a 0-100 scale. Age, personal income, gender and population group were all quota-controlled, and the data were re-weighted according to the income and demographic profiles of working South Africans using the Marketing All Product Survey (MAPS) as a benchmark.
Dr Frank Magwegwe is a permanent faculty member at GIBS. He lectures on corporate finance, employee wellness, personal mastery, resilience, and quantitative principles and widely consults in these areas. He is also a trusted financial wellness expert who is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and a frequent guest on radio and TV shows. Tune in to his show on Wednesday evenings from 20h00 to 21h00 on Radio 702.
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