Workplace Wellbeing Under Pressure: How AI Coaching Can Help Protect Capacity and Performance

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Workplace wellbeing has been on the organisational agenda for years, yet the pressure employees are carrying appears to be getting harder to contain.

The findings from Gallagher’s 2026 Workforce Trends Report: Workplace Wellbeing Index are difficult to dismiss. Based on more than 3,500 respondents across Australia and New Zealand, the report found that 63% of employees are financially unwell, 37% say financial stress is affecting their sleep, 32% are working while unwell because they cannot afford not to, and more than one in four are experiencing burnout. One in three employees now has a secondary source of income, with nearly half of those people relying on it to manage cost-of-living pressures or debt.

For organisations, these figures raise a more complex question than whether enough wellbeing benefits are available. They point to the amount of cognitive and emotional capacity people can actually bring to work. An employee may still attend meetings, make decisions, manage people and serve clients while carrying significant financial pressure, fatigue or anxiety. Their capability has not necessarily disappeared. Their access to that capability can become less reliable.

For senior People, Talent and transformation leaders, this matters because many of the behaviours organisations depend on most — thoughtful judgement, empathy, curiosity, perspective-taking and considered decision-making — become harder to access precisely when pressure is highest.

Pressure travels into work

Financial strain does not remain neatly outside the workplace.

The behavioural science behind this is well established, although the relationship is nuanced. The influential study by Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao, published in Science, found that financial concerns could consume mental resources and reduce cognitive performance among people experiencing scarcity. A more recent 2024 meta-analysis of financial scarcity and cognitive performance, covering 256 effect sizes across 29 datasets and more than 111,000 participants, also found an overall detrimental relationship between scarcity and cognitive functioning. A newly published 2026 review in Nature Reviews Psychology continues to examine how persistent economic concerns can occupy attention and influence cognition.

That does not mean an employee experiencing financial pressure suddenly becomes incapable. It means that some of the cognitive resources ordinarily available for planning, inhibiting an immediate response, considering alternatives or solving complex problems may already be occupied.

Gallagher reaches a similar conclusion from an organisational perspective. Its report links financial stress with decision-making, productivity, safety and risk behaviour, and notes that employees balancing multiple income streams may also experience greater fatigue and reduced cognitive capacity. These effects become particularly important in roles requiring sustained judgement, interpersonal sensitivity or safety-critical decisions.

Leadership roles contain many of exactly these demands.

Wellbeing can affect leadership long before someone takes leave

Organisations often see wellbeing through lagging indicators: burnout, absence, turnover, psychological injury claims or engagement scores. Yet the consequences can begin earlier and appear in much smaller interactions.

A manager enters a performance conversation already exhausted and becomes more abrupt than intended. A leader under financial or personal pressure avoids a difficult discussion because they have little remaining capacity for conflict. A senior executive navigating a transformation reacts defensively to challenge in a meeting. Someone who would usually listen carefully moves quickly to a familiar solution because careful consideration requires more mental effort than they can access in that moment.

None of these behaviours necessarily reflects a lack of leadership knowledge.

Research on stress and decision-making suggests stress can influence the neural systems involved in learning, valuation and risk-taking, and can increase reliance on habitual responses. Other reviews of decision-making under pressure describe a greater tendency toward fast, intuitive processing when cognitive resources are constrained. The precise effect varies between people and situations, but the organisational implication is important: the quality of judgement available to someone in a calm development setting may differ from the judgement they can access during a difficult working day.

This is one reason wellbeing and leadership performance should not sit in completely separate organisational conversations. The conditions affecting a person’s capacity also influence how they lead.

The organisational response has to address the source of pressure

There is a risk in any conversation about resilience or coaching that responsibility quietly shifts back onto the individual. That would miss an important part of the wellbeing challenge.

The World Health Organization’s guidance on mental health at work identifies excessive workloads, low job control, job insecurity, inadequate pay, poor organisational culture and limited support as psychosocial risks. Its recommendations include organisational interventions that change working conditions, as well as manager development and individual support.

The same principle appears in CIPD guidance on managing workplace stress. Managers have an important role in recognising and responding to stress, yet their behaviour operates within a wider organisational system of workload, resources, priorities and working practices.

For organisations responding to Gallagher’s findings, this means wellbeing requires a portfolio of responses. Pay and financial wellbeing interventions matter. Job design matters. Workload and staffing matter. EAPs, benefits, flexibility and access to appropriate professional support matter.

There is also a less visible layer worth addressing: what happens in the moment when a person is already carrying pressure and still needs to make a consequential choice.

That is where coaching can add something different.

Leaders influence how pressure is experienced by everyone around them

The wellbeing of an organisation is shaped partly through systems and partly through thousands of everyday interactions.

A workload issue can become considerably harder when a manager responds dismissively to someone raising it. Organisational uncertainty can feel more threatening when leaders communicate inconsistently. A restructuring can create additional strain when people do not feel able to ask questions. Conversely, a leader who notices pressure early, listens carefully, clarifies what is within the team’s control and adjusts expectations where possible can change how that same organisational environment is experienced.

Evidence on psychosocial safety reinforces the significance of managerial behaviour. A longitudinal study of a manager-led psychosocial risk intervention found improvements in psychosocial safety climate, management support and several working conditions when managers and employees were equipped to identify and address psychosocial risks.

This creates a significant challenge for leadership development. Organisations can teach leaders how to communicate through change, conduct a supportive conversation, manage conflict or recognise signs of pressure. The harder problem is making that learning available when the leader themselves is tired, stressed, rushed or emotionally activated.

The knowing remains. Access to it is what becomes unreliable.

AI coaching can create a small amount of space at the point of choice

This is where AI coaching has an emerging role within a broader workplace wellbeing strategy.

A leader rarely needs another two-hour resilience workshop immediately before a difficult conversation. They may benefit more from three minutes to notice their own state, clarify what is happening, examine the assumptions shaping their response and decide how they want to enter the conversation.

That is the territory in which momentLeader’s AI coach operates. Its purpose is to bring structured reflection closer to the moment of behavioural choice. A leader facing a challenging meeting can pause before responding. Someone frustrated with a colleague can explore what may be influencing their interpretation. A manager supporting a distressed team member can think through how they want to show up before entering the conversation.

The intervention is deliberately small because the leadership moments it is designed to support are often small as well. Yet these interactions accumulate. They influence whether people feel heard, whether conflict escalates, whether decisions are considered carefully and whether pressure is transferred through a team or managed constructively.

This approach also builds on a broader principle within momentLeader’s work on extending leadership development into everyday work. Formal programs build capability. Real work continually tests whether leaders can retrieve and apply that capability under conditions that are far less controlled than the learning environment. AI coaching provides another layer of support between workshops, executive coaching sessions and manager conversations.

The evidence for AI coaching calls for thoughtful application

AI coaching is an emerging field, and organisations should resist getting ahead of the evidence.

Research on workplace coaching more broadly is encouraging. A 2023 meta-analysis of workplace coaching found positive organisational outcomes across the existing research base, while a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials found significant effects across leadership and personal outcomes.

The research specifically examining AI coaching is more mixed, which makes the design and intended use of the technology particularly important. A 2022 study found promising results for AI coaching in the narrower domain of goal attainment, and a 2026 career-coaching chatbot trial found reductions in negative affect associated with greater career goal clarity. However, a separate 2026 randomised trial comparing human and AI chatbot coaching found substantial improvements across diverse coaching outcomes only in the human-coaching condition.

Those findings strengthen the case for precision in how organisations use AI coaching. Human coaches bring relational depth, co-regulation, sophisticated challenge and contextual understanding. Mental health professionals provide forms of support that sit well beyond the remit of coaching technology.

AI coaching can occupy another part of the system: frequent, accessible, low-friction opportunities for reflection and behavioural preparation while work is happening.

For workplace wellbeing, that distinction matters.

From wellbeing benefits to everyday capacity

Gallagher’s 2026 data describes a workforce in which a significant proportion of people are continuing to perform while carrying financial pressure, poor sleep, additional work and signs of burnout. Organisations cannot remove all of those pressures, and technology cannot compensate for unhealthy organisational conditions.

They can, however, become more deliberate about protecting people’s capacity to think and lead within those conditions.

That means addressing psychosocial risks at a systemic level while developing managers who can recognise pressure and respond constructively. It means maintaining access to human support where deeper intervention is required. It also means reconsidering when leadership support is available.

Leadership development has traditionally concentrated support into defined events: workshops, coaching sessions, 360 feedback conversations and wellbeing initiatives. The working day is far less orderly. Pressure appears immediately before a difficult meeting, after an unexpected email, halfway through a restructuring conversation or at the point when a manager notices their patience disappearing.

These are small moments, but they are where organisational wellbeing becomes behavioural.

For momentLeader, the opportunity for AI coaching lies there. By helping leaders pause, regain perspective and reconnect with the judgement they already possess, AI coaching can become one practical layer in a much larger organisational wellbeing system.

For organisations facing the conditions highlighted by Gallagher, increasing access to those better moments may prove just as important as increasing access to more information.