Goldman Sachs builds wellness support to sustain performance and resilience

Goldman Sachs is treating wellness as part of the job, not a side benefit. For a firm with more than 46,000 people worldwide, that means mindfulness trainings, guided meditations, coaching and mental health first aid are being built into the machinery of performance, right alongside the pressure to deliver.

Wellness as an operating tool

Goldman says it has a team of wellness professionals who provide a suite of resilience offerings, including mindfulness trainings, guided meditations, a personalized resilience platform and one-on-one coaching. That is a meaningful signal in a workplace where analysts, associates and VPs are often measured by speed, stamina and judgment under strain. The message is not that the work gets easier. It is that mental endurance is now being treated as part of professional output.

The firm’s own framing is revealing. Goldman says these wellness and resilience resources are designed to support both work performance and wellbeing, which places them squarely inside the firm’s productivity agenda. That can be helpful for employees when workloads spike, travel becomes relentless, or personal stress starts to bleed into the workday. It also raises the harder question: whether the support changes the daily reality of a hard-charging culture, or simply helps people absorb more of it.

The mental health first aid layer

Goldman’s Mental Health First Aid program adds a more practical support system. The firm says trained Mental Health First Aiders can support colleagues at every level and every division, creating a network that is meant to connect people to help before problems escalate. Goldman launched the program in 2019, then expanded it through Europe, Asia and the United States.

By September 19, 2023, Goldman said 500 colleagues globally had been certified as MHFAiders. That is a notable scale for a bank where the social cost of asking for help can be high, especially in front of teams that prize toughness and composure. In 2024, Goldman said it launched new manager training to help leaders support team members facing mental health challenges, with the rollout extending to newly promoted managers. That matters because the front line for burnout is often not a policy page but a direct manager who decides whether a weekend, a deadline or a difficult assignment can move.

What the benefits package actually covers

The wellness message does not stop at mindfulness. Goldman says its benefits include counseling and referral services through its Employee Assistance Program, global medical, security and travel assistance, and a workplace ergonomics program. In some offices, the firm also offers on-site health centers and fitness centers, which turns wellness from a slogan into infrastructure.

Goldman also says many resilience resources are available in every region, including two digital resilience and mindfulness platforms, plus firm-sponsored and on-site counseling in all regions. That broad coverage matters for a global bank where stress does not stay in one market, one office or one time zone. If the aim is to support performance, then the real test is whether a banker in London, Hong Kong or New York can access the same help without friction when pressure hits.

The vacation policy is part of that same design. Goldman says employees are expected to use at least three weeks of vacation each year. In a culture known for long hours, that is not just a perk statement. It is a statement about recovery as a business input, though the real value depends on whether teams actually make room for people to take that time without penalty or guilt.

Human capital, productivity and the culture behind the policy

Goldman describes its Human Capital Management function as a strategic group that provides expertise and resources to help colleagues thrive in their careers and lives outside work. Its corporate workplace team says its job is to maximize efficiency and productivity while keeping workplaces safe and professionally run. Read together, those lines show how the firm thinks about wellness: not as a soft extra, but as one more lever in keeping a large, high-pressure workforce functioning.

That framing fits Goldman’s broader culture language. The firm says it is driven by partnership, client service, integrity and excellence, and its careers pages emphasize an apprenticeship culture built around on-the-job coaching and access to experienced leaders. In practice, that means resilience support is being layered onto a model that already depends heavily on learning by proximity, scrutiny from senior bankers and constant feedback. Wellness can help in that environment, but it does not replace the intensity baked into the model.

Why Goldman is making wellness part of the public story

Goldman has also pushed this message into external thought leadership. It held a Talks at GS conversation with Jay Shetty, Calm’s chief purpose officer, published on May 15, 2024 and recorded on February 26, 2024. It also hosted a May 6, 2024 conversation with Calm CEO David Ko about recharging and sustaining high performance. Those appearances are not random branding exercises. They place resilience, mindfulness and recovery in the same conversation as ambition and output, which is exactly where Goldman wants the topic to live.

For employees, the practical question is simple: does this support reach them before burnout, or only after it? The answer depends less on the existence of the programs than on whether managers normalize using them, whether teams protect vacation, and whether people can ask for help without worrying about how it will be read in compensation discussions, staffing decisions or promotion reviews. Goldman has built a real support architecture. The open question is whether the pace of the firm allows that architecture to do more than cushion the blow.