Mental & Physical Wellbeing Is a Workforce Strategy

At this year’s Meat Institute Environment, Labor & Safety (EHS) Conference, WorkForge CMO Katie Allen was selected to speak on a topic that’s becoming harder for food manufacturers to sideline:

“Mental & Physical Wellbeing as a Workforce Strategy: What Gen Z Expects—and What Food Manufacturers Must Deliver.”

The workforce challenges are familiar—labor shortages, turnover, and safety pressure.

What this session did was connect them in a different way. Not as separate issues, but as an operational issue.

The Workforce Has Changed

She started with something everyone in the room could relate to:

“We’re trying to attract talent… and it’s getting more complex.”

That complexity isn’t just about labor availability. It’s about who is walking through the door—and what they’re carrying with them.

Gen Z isn’t arriving as a blank slate. As shared in the session, 91% report experiencing mental health challenges at least occasionally, and 61% would leave their job for one with better mental health support.

But what makes this shift more urgent is how early those expectations show up.

Mental health is now part of how employees choose where to work:

• Job postings mentioning mental health have tripled since 2020
• 72% of graduates are more likely to apply to companies known for treating employees well
• Many decide within the first 60 days whether they’ll stay—or start looking again

That compresses the timeline.

You don’t have months to get the employee experience right. You have weeks.

Safety and Mental Health Are Interconnected

One of the most important ideas from the session was how tightly connected mental and physical safety really are.

“Mental health strain increases physical injury risk. Physical injury risk increases mental health strain. They feed each other.”

In food manufacturing, that connection is amplified.

The environment itself carries more risk. Injury rates are higher than the private industry average, and turnover sits around 36% annually—higher than any other manufacturing sub-industry.

So when stress increases, the impact isn’t theoretical. It shows up quickly—in safety metrics, productivity, and retention.

The Cost Is Already Showing Up

The session didn’t leave this at a conceptual level. It tied directly to business impact.

Manufacturing absorbs an estimated $226 billion annually in mental health-related costs, with another $47.6 billion lost in productivity due to untreated mental distress.

But those numbers feel even more real on the plant floor.

Every time someone leaves, you’re not just replacing a role—you’re restarting a cycle:

• Recruiting
• Onboarding
• Slower ramp time
• Lost institutional knowledge

On average, that adds up to roughly $52,000 per frontline worker. And then it repeats.

At that point, turnover isn’t just a staffing issue. It’s an operational drain.

The Problems You Don’t See

One of the patterns Katie highlighted throughout the session is this:

If employees don’t feel safe speaking up—or aren’t asked in the right way—they won’t raise issues. They’ll leave.

That’s especially true with younger workers. Gen Z is far more likely to move on than push back. If something feels off, they don’t always escalate it—they start looking elsewhere.

That dynamic showed up clearly in one example Katie shared.

In one facility, employees were leaving—not because of pay or management—but because of defective safety boots. A ridge across the toe made it feel, as one worker described:

“like standing on a rock all day.”

It sounds small. But over the course of a shift—or a week—it became a daily frustration. The bigger issue? No one was saying anything. It wasn’t being reported. It didn’t show up in surveys. Leadership had no visibility.

Because from the employee’s perspective, there wasn’t a clear, safe, or immediate way to raise it—and no expectation that doing so would change anything. So instead, people left.

It only surfaced once there was a system in place for workers to speak up in real time—and once leaders started actively listening. The fix itself was simple. But the insight wasn’t.

Without that system, the issue would have stayed hidden—quietly driving discomfort, disengagement, and turnover.

That’s the gap many organizations are operating in today.

Not a lack of effort. Not a lack of care.

A lack of visibility into what their workforce is actually experiencing—and the systems to surface it before people walk out the door.

But what this example really points to is something deeper than visibility alone.

It’s about the environment people are operating in every day.

Because when employees feel supported, when expectations are clear, and when they’re confident in what they’re doing, they don’t stay silent. They speak up. They engage. They stay.

And when they don’t have that? Even small issues become reasons to leave.

Where Training Shapes the Environment

This is where the conversation in the session shifted.

Because creating that kind of environment—one where people feel confident, safe, and willing to speak up—doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s built.

And one of the most consistent ways to build it is through how you train and develop your workforce.

“Training done right doesn’t just drive compliance—it develops confident workers.”

That confidence is what changes the dynamic we just saw.

When workers are trained in a way that builds real understanding:

• They know what’s expected
• They feel capable in their role
• They trust that they can raise issues and be heard

Training, in that sense, isn’t just about reducing errors.

It’s about creating a culture where people feel safe operating—and safe speaking up.

The data reinforces it. Effective training can reduce turnover by 30–50%, and strong onboarding improves retention by 82%.

That’s not incremental improvement. That’s structural.

A Different Way to Think About Wellbeing

By the end of the session, the message was clear. If wellbeing is treated as a side initiative, it stays a side result.

But when it’s built into how work actually happens—through training, through systems, through how managers engage—it becomes something else:

A lever. One that affects safety, retention, productivity, and performance.

The Bottom Line

The workforce challenge in food manufacturing isn’t just about filling roles anymore.

It’s about meeting a new set of expectations—and building an environment that supports them and the business.

And the manufacturers who recognize that—and act on it—will have a clear advantage moving forward.