Just scroll through your Instagram feed for a couple minutes, and you’ll find more proof than ever that “wellness”–at least, as a trendy and perhaps oversaturated buzzword–is hot right now. In fact, “wellness” as a global industry is valued at around $1.5 trillion, according to McKinsey & Co., and it runs the gamut from skin-care products to exercise to diets. But when we talk about wellness in the workplace, how does this idea that’s fueling so much commercial investment translate into policies that could help our teams build meaningful careers?

Ask some of today’s top leaders, and they see a difference between “wellness” in the mass-market sense and “well-being” as a factor that can have a significant impact on employee satisfaction and productivity. For Michael Jones, a VP of HR at Ricoh, the most significant distinction between wellness and well-being is that the latter is multidimensional–“much more of an ecosystem than one specific issue,” he said.

Ivory Harris, global chief HR officer at AGCO, which manufactures farm equipment, said, “wellness sometimes connects to illness, and it feels like it’s your personal ownership, whereas well-being is more inclusive.” Jones and Harris were among the expert speakers on a panel about making health and well-being a core value in the workplace, part of From Day One’s Atlanta conference.

Recent research from Gallup looked at what is generally considered the five key areas of well-being: career, social, financial, physical, and community. Taken all together, these equate to “living one’s best life.” But no one facet of well-being is enough to do all the work.

To that end, Gallup found that, compared to the respondents who reported positive status in all five areas, those who were doing well only physically missed 68% more work due to health problems and were five times more likely to look for a new job next year.

Unequivocally, a large facet of employee well-being is the ability to thrive by having enough time to relax and do non-work-related-things for fun without worrying, while earning enough money not to feel the need to work more than one job or commit massive amounts of overtime.

To ensure that his team’s financial well-being is covered more comprehensively, Jones cited Ricoh’s robust employee assistance program (EAP), which helps employees proactively with resources that go beyond the typical salary and benefits. “We traditionally have said, ‘Hey, we have a great benefits package; here you are.’ Or, ‘Michael's walking out of the door; how can we stop him? Let's give him some more money.’ And I'm not dismissing any of those things. But we’re collectively bringing all of that to the table and saying, ‘Hey, this is the value we as an organization are bringing to you. These other components will make you feel great about the investments we as an organization are pouring into you.”

This includes soliciting employee feedback about what challenges they’re currently facing and what they’re saving and investing in, like building a tuition fund for their kid or taking care of an elderly family member. “We’re building curriculums around that,” he said.

In October last year, Harvard Business Review published the results of a deep dive into the benefits of investing in employees’ work-life balance and overall satisfaction–both monetarily and in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their review of more than 800 U.S. companies across 30 years found that organizations offering substantial family-leave time, flexibility, and support for those raising kids “increased sales by 7% and labor productivity by 5%.” These companies also saw a significant increase in Black, Hispanic and Asian American managers, as well as white women managers.

Feedback is critical to figuring out if your initiatives and programs are working, as Ted Kezios, VP of HR global benefits at Cisco Systems, can attest. At Cisco, they conduct a quarterly survey called “The Real Deal Survey,” which gets promoted widely across the company. It includes questions ranging from whether you’re getting enough sleep and whether you can ask for help to how happy you feel about the company mission and whether you feel your work is recognized.

Then the results get crunched by Cisco’s data scientists to connect the well-being results with things like engagement and retention. “You’re taking the data and driving it into business value,” he said. With the data, “We’re able to set expectations with leaders on how they can better connect with their team, how you can better connect to the company strategy.”

Well-being also needs to emanate from the top down, because if your CEO is sending you emails at 1 a.m., there’s a good chance an employee might feel pressure to be on all the time, too. Karen Fikse, senior director of HR at Cummins, the engine manufacturer, said the idea of leaders practicing what they preach formed the basis of her company's “It’s Okay” campaign, which provides managers with resources to process whatever they’re going through–be it anxiety, stress, pressure or hardship.

“Managers are faced with some heavy issues, and they don’t [always] know how to deal with them. So, we have this website that they can go to and access these resources to help them navigate some of these very difficult waters,” she said.

Setting boundaries with clients is also crucial. Ivory Harris of AGCO, a company that works with farmers–whose work for the most part never stops–said that the company engages several different strategies to prove that excellent customer service and caring for one’s employees do not need to be mutually exclusive.

For one thing, she said, they proactively plan around the busier times of year that they can anticipate–like planting and harvest seasons–and then focus on making the times between those high-volume periods a time to reboot. AGCO also leverages the great global connector of technology, so in those off hours, “a farmer in Kentucky can get on the phone off-hours with an expert in Germany to talk about what’s happening and get some support to troubleshoot any type of challenges that they’re having,” she said.

In other words, perhaps the future will entail setting up tools to help us when we can’t help ourselves. David Malmborg, VP of marketing and community at the mental-health platform Nivati, said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to that point where life boundaries are not only set by legislation, but also technologies like where your CIO can just put on a button and say, ‘Dump all the emails that get sent during off hours or over the weekend. There’s some exciting stuff that could come down from a technology standpoint to enforce boundaries because we humans cannot do it ourselves.”

From a legislative perspective, of course, we may have some catching up to do here in the U.S. In 2022, European countries like Belgium and Portugal officially banned federally employed managers from contacting their reports outside working hours, citing the “right to disconnect.”

Alexis Hauk is an Atlanta-based  journalist and communications director whose work has appear in TIME, the Atlantic, Washington City Paper, Atlanta magazine, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others. In addition to her freelance writing, she works full-time as communications director for Emory Heart & Vascular Center.