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Last month, Spring Health brought together the most forward‑thinking HR, benefits, and people-leadership executives for an event unlike any other. Rooted 2025 was a fully virtual event designed for CHROs, benefits leaders, people ops, and decision‑makers seeking to chart a new path forward in how organizations support employee wellbeing, manage costs, and build culture.
Rooted was where mental health, leadership, innovation, and cost management converged. The goal? To help leaders move beyond traditional HR thinking to “innovate with AI responsibly, navigate burnout, and spend less on healthcare costs.”
The insights below reflect not just sessions, but signals. Signals that CHROs need to read, act on, and weave into 2026 mental health, benefits, and culture strategy.
1. The new enterprise risk isn’t burnout. It’s emotional numbness.
Spring Health CEO April Koh opened Rooted with a challenge: Stop looking for signs of employee burnout and start listening for silence.
“So many leaders tell me that their people are burning out and some are, but most are beyond burnout. They’re checked out. The danger isn’t exhaustion, it’s numbness. When feeling shuts down, care shuts down. And when care shuts down, safety shuts down. And when safety shuts down, performance follows.”
She described this as "the great disconnection" where employees aren’t quitting visibly. Instead, they’re detaching quietly. The solution? Measure and design for connection.
“Connection isn’t soft,” Koh said. “It’s operational. Care isn’t just a perk. It’s a strategy.”
CHROs must now treat emotional disengagement as a performance, safety, and innovation risk—not just a morale problem.
2. Mental health is one of your strongest (and most underused) levers on medical trend
Adam Chekroud, co-founder of Spring Health, reframed mental health from benefit to cost-control strategy:
“Employees who have depression that is not treated cost on average about 2 ½ times the average healthcare costs as their peers who have depression that is treated.”
Citing a JAMA study, he noted: “For every $100 that a company invested in mental health programs, [organizations] actually reduced their medical spend by $190.” That’s a 14% net savings in year one.
Critically, these savings compound. “These savings are actually persisting and growing, even once that member has finished treatment.”
CHROs should start treating mental health as a financial strategy: one of the few evidence-backed ways to flatten medical spend without reducing coverage.
3. Mental health leaves are a sign of a system-failure, not just an individual crisis
Spring Health’s Kelsey Witmer spotlighted a sharp rise in mental health leaves and what it signals:
“They’re a downstream signal of too many competing pressures,” said Witmer, who is VP, Total Rewards and People Operations at Spring Health. “When our systems and expectations exceed human capacity, mental health becomes an unintended casualty.”
She urged leaders to stop treating leaves as isolated events and start seeing them as data. Two key stats to take note of:
- 74% of employers report an increase in employee requests for leaves of absence or accommodations for mental health-related issues over the last year
- 22% of employers say they have changed their related accommodation or leave policies in response to this increase
Leaves aren’t just employee crises. They’re organizational feedback. When the system is working, fewer people need to exit it to recover.
4. Ethical AI in mental health has become a CHRO-level governance question
Dr. Millard Brown delivered a wake-up call in his session titled, “The Future of Care or a Risk to Trust? AI’s Role in Mental Health.” This stat stood out:
“Over 48.7% of US adults have used an LLM for psychological support in the last year.”
Your employees are turning to AI for care whether it’s clinically vetted or not.
Nina Vasan laid out the risk domains: efficacy, safety, fairness, trust, and compliance. Employers need clinical validation and escalation pathways, or they risk promoting “ineffective or even harmful solutions.”
CHROs must now own AI governance. If employees don’t trust the tools you offer, they’ll go elsewhere, and you’ll lose visibility and influence over critical wellbeing decisions.
5. Feedback culture is mental health infrastructure—not a "soft skills" initiative
In her session, best-selling author Kim Scott (“Radical Candor”) explained why feedback isn’t just a management technique. It’s a psychological safety signal.
“No matter how talented you are, relationships don’t scale,” Scott said. “However, culture does scale.” When leaders model care and candor, those values cascade.
She described feedback as "the atomic building block of collaboration." And she named the risk of getting it wrong: “We often show up at work like some kind of robot. … You can’t possibly care personally if you’re showing up like a robot.”
CHROs should stop treating feedback as a soft skill. It’s a strategic lever for culture, trust, and resilience—and the first thing that erodes in toxic environments.
Want help translating these insights into action? Let’s talk about how Spring Health can support your 2026 strategy.
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