McKinsey's 2026 State of Organizations: The Case for Wellbeing as a Performance Lever.
Updated: 7 days ago
McKinsey has released the second edition of its State of Organizations report, surveying over 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries and 16 industries to understand what is reshaping how businesses operate over the next few years.
Three Forces, Nine Shifts
McKinsey frames the disruption reshaping organisations in 2026 around three forces: the rapid infusion of AI and automation into how work gets done; mounting economic and geopolitical uncertainty; and a workforce whose expectations, demographics, and working models are all shifting at once. Just over half of leaders expect positive outcomes from these changes, yet 72% admit their organisation is not fully ready to face them, a gap that proves common to all nine of the organisational shifts McKinsey tracks in the report, from how AI gets deployed to how leadership itself gets redesigned.
Among those nine shifts, AI adoption stands out: 88% of leaders say their organisation is actively deploying AI, yet fewer than 20% report a meaningful, tangible impact from it. The technology is there; the organisational readiness is not.
Where Wellbeing Comes In: "Aiming Higher with A New Performance Edge"
Of the nine shifts, the one most relevant here is what McKinsey calls finding a "new performance edge." Their argument is that the traditional productivity levers, restructuring, cost-cutting, headcount reductions, are running out of road, and that the next real gains come from investing in what they term organisational capital: culture, management quality, and employee health and wellbeing.
That is a meaningful shift in framing. Wellbeing is not positioned here as a benefit sitting alongside performance; it is treated as a direct input into performance itself, on the same footing as leadership quality and culture.
The Bigger Picture: A Workforce Health Gap
McKinsey's related Health Institute research (drawing on a global survey of over 30,000 employees) found only 57% of employees report good holistic health across mental, physical, social and financial dimensions. That means close to half the workforce is operating below where they could be, and the gaps are wider for certain groups, including women, younger employees, and those under financial strain. The same research estimates that improving workforce health globally could unlock trillions in economic value, with most of that upside coming from better productivity and less presenteeism (people showing up but not really functioning).
What This Means In Practice
Put together, the message from McKinsey's 2026 research is clear: the organisations that will get ahead over the next few years will not be the ones that adopt AI fastest. It will be the ones that pair that technological shift with real investment in the people expected to make it work, their culture, their leadership, and their health.
Where Nutrition Fits Into The Case
McKinsey treats health as one strand of organisational capital, alongside culture and management quality, but it does not address what actually drives health day-to-day. Energy, focus and resilience are not cultural outcomes, they are physiological, shaped by how people eat, sleep and recover. When that foundation is weak, the presenteeism and productivity losses McKinsey highlights are expected outcomes.
Nutrition and lifestyle habits work directly on that physiological foundation, alongside culture and leadership shifts, by determining how these shifts translate into everyday working realities. Unlike culture change, which takes organisational time, nutrition and lifestyle habits can be acted on immediately, with benefits that compound quickly.
This makes nutrition and lifestyle a practical, controllable lever within the wider structure McKinsey describes, and one of the most direct ways organisations can realise the productivity gains it highlights.
If your organisation is interested in exploring how nutrition and lifestyle support optimal performance, we would welcome that conversation.
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