Startup performance wellbeing
We help founders build resilient, healthy, high-performing teams from the ground up.
For startups under 50 employees, with product-market fit, in growth stage.
30 minutes with Yaro. No pitch, no deck, no follow-up sequence. You leave with the 3 changes worth making first, whether or not you work with Pausa.
Everyone watches the tip.
what gets reported
what produces it
Company KPIs are produced by the part nobody looks at.
Cheap to set at 8 people. At 40, a reorganisation.
The employment models founders set first tend to persist · Baron et al., 1996
A work system in which
— designed, not left to chance.
Pausa helps a growing company build these conditions into ordinary operations — not into a policy nobody reads.
What changes on an ordinary Tuesday?
What do they do differently?
What does it add up to?
A leading indicator of
Financial Performance.
Research by Prof. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, University of Oxford — read in the KPIs you already report.
From a one-point rise in wellbeing at British Telecom — up to 25–30% on complex, cognitive work.
Of candidates seek wellbeing data when searching for a new job — it now shapes where talent applies.
At the highest-wellbeing companies, versus the rest — fewer regrettable exits and less rehiring cost.
Extra return from the top 100 wellbeing workplaces over two years, beating the broad market.
A 25-month participatory work redesign across 78 workplaces produced lower short-term sickness absence over a 29-month follow-up — a randomised trial, not a correlation.
Reviews of workplace interventions find the strongest results when the work changes — working time, influence, communication, support. Teaching people to cope without changing conditions performs less consistently.
These are findings from research, not promises about your company. What they establish is direction, not a guaranteed number.
Why I built this
I learned this twice, and both times after something broke.
The first time was at an Ironman 70.3. I ran the way most people run — just going, adding kilometres, assuming the body would keep up. It did not. I got injured.
It took me six months to re-learn how to run. Not to recover. To re-learn. After that I ran several marathons without a single injury, and I actually enjoyed the races. Then I opened a running school, so that people could learn the technique from the beginning instead of after the injury.
The second time was my own company. We built a bicycle courier business to forty-five couriers in two years. I was running the company the way I had been running. I did not notice until it cost me.
Most companies do the same thing with their teams. They build the structure after someone leaves.
You can do it in the other order.
See the whole system,
in one place.
Where you are, what you changed, and whether it moved. Built for a team of eight and still working at fifty.
Employer view · aggregated only · anonymous by design
Employees see only their own results. Leaders see aggregated results only, with a minimum-5 rule on every view. Escalations stay confidential. This is what makes it trusted.
Already have an HR system? We connect to it.
No HR system yet? That is normal at this size, and nothing here requires one.
Whatever HR system you use, we connect to it in a click and only ever read your team structure — nothing sensitive, and nothing leaves without your permission.
The Startup Performance Wellbeing Playbook
The six stages, the questions to ask at each one, and the operating defaults that keep a growing team out of chronic overload — written for founders under fifty people.
If nothing happened, check your browser downloads. We will not add you to a drip sequence.
What would it take for your team to move fast and stay healthy?
Free Discovery Call →30 minutes with Yaro. No pitch, no deck. You leave with the 3 changes worth making first — whether or not you work with Pausa.