Wellbeing, even when it's sincere, is a top-down effort - as in way up the tree-tops - and usually raining down diagonally from a different org.<p>Meanwhile, down on the leaves of the org tree, you have delivery pressure from users, peers, and so on. If the pressure is high, no amount of messaging about wellbeing will make any difference. Taking time off, whether it's some kind of leave or for some wellbeing meetings of some kind, just takes time out of your workday, resulting in increased pressure because now you're even further behind.<p>It's quite hard not to become cynical about the disconnect between aspirational messaging and these pressures.<p>There are answers, but they require cultural and managerial enforcement. Heroism needs to be discouraged. Delivery slippage and failure to make dates need to be seen as organizational process and planning failures, and not as individual failures: feedback that schedules are too tight, expectations are unsustainably high, resourcing isn't right.<p>If your team or org has a culture of heroism - people risking burnout, working into the night, on weekends, on holidays, to make deadlines - stop it. Don't reward it. It's not sustainable, it creates peer pressure to do the same, and it is one of the most damaging things you can do to employees' wellbeing.
<p><pre><code> Workplace wellbeing
Wholesome workplace
Workplace is a family
</code></pre>
and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cropped up to support the efforts of managements to keep workforces in control and deflect resentment (people don't leave companies, they leave managers ! and other crap)<p>The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes down the drain.<p>No, my company is not my family. I may have good friends and great co-workers, but, at the end of the day, I only have the amount of loyalty to the company, as much as it has towards me.<p>Perhaps its time the internet comes up with training sessions that promote the real face of large corporations.
Every time someone (usually someone from HR) tries to point out how great a company is because of its great perks like awesome couching sessions (not actual training), great team-building events, the best coffee machine ever, table tennis, etc. and how these somehow compensate for a subpar salary offer, I tell them: you just pay me well, give me more time off, and I'll handle all that myself.
> The real problem with workplace wellness initiatives, according to Katie—beyond being inconvenient and vapid—is their obvious attempt to make up for the company’s poor employee benefits. ‘<p>The real problem is, wellness seminars are an attempt to push the issue on the employees. Just like "plastic recycling" initiatives push the guilt and the effort onto the consumer. It's a redirection strategy.
> in order for employees to actually be well, they need high wages, plenty of time off, and good healthcare<p>I feel like this is the point of the first half of the article. Obviously if you work for a generous, profitable company, and you get good remuneration, healthcare and work–life balance, then workplace wellbeing may be honest and beneficial for both employers and employees (this side doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article). If you work for a company that pays poorly, has poor benefits, and low margins, then workplace wellbeing is more of the same. That all seems pretty obvious (there are benefits which are perhaps harder to fake, like pay or vacation days or limited working hours per week.) I suppose there is also a third kind of wealthy employer which tries to pamper employees into not wanting things the employer doesn’t want (eg collective bargaining).<p>The first half of the article seems to just be a vehicle for a proposed solution to poor working conditions, which doesn’t really seem so connected to workplace wellbeing.
"one of the biggest causes of stress in the workplace is a lack of decision-making power among workers."<p>You know what's also more stressful? Having to make more decisions in domains outside my circle of competence.<p>Give me total autonomy in my area, while also not burdening me with having to contribute to EVERY decision.
In China I worked at a company which year after year was getting awards as a great place to work. But the perks meant staying after work for various events I couldn't care less about. For me the best perk I could have is to take a break from office stuff, not prolonging it after hours.<p>Meanwhile, the whole IT department had to be moved at some point in a tiny office with no windows. They were also putting a lot of pressure on employees to come work on weekend to fix bugs and get releases ready - and of course at no extra pay. But yeah, you had cake on your birthday and free pizza once a month. Such a great place to work for!
The issue with these workplace wellness themes to me is that they violate normal personal and adult boundaries as if to try to access the psyche of employees, and this dismantling of personal boundaries is precisely what creates the psychotic and abusive relationships that appear in business environments. It is the lack of personal boundaries, and not the presence of them that creates harmful interactions and relationships.<p>The worst possible way to create a 'safe' environment is to infantalize people and direct them like emotionally dependent children because by treating people as non-adults, it removes their basic dignity. Without this, people act out without normal boundaries, and think personal observations and other bizarrely inapproapriate behavior is acceptable or warranted. Corporate yoga and pseudo religious mindfullness probably often has the opposite effect. "Asking" people to submit to religious activities like meditation, smudging ceremonies, ancenstral acknowledgements, mindfulness, hypnosis, yoga, and others is not relating as normal adults.
Sometimes I wonder what the conversations on an HN for HR people would look like.<p>The most successful wellness programs I have seen came in the form of a self-improvement/hobbies bonus, and the 10%-20% open research/dev projects in some tech companies.
There is an interesting discussion here about responsibility. An employee is obviously responsible for his own well being but it seems that companies aren't putting in much work.<p>A good example is working from home: now it's the employees responsibility to find a good environment for working. The company now has several responsibilities less... I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Hopefully working from home will become and option and never a mandatory thing.<p>Anyways there is more and more responsibilities on the employees and less on the employers (at least it feels like it).
Core to all of this is that anything provided by an employer could be used against you. Even if I wanted therapy sessions I’m not going to share my work related issues with an employer provided coach, hell no.<p>One thing I’d like to see is independent co-operatives which a group of tech workers (across different companies!) chip in to pay for. They could include veterans for mentorship, agents to help with negotiations/job-hopping advice and possibly even representing you during negotiations, lawyers to help cross out stupid post-working-hours IP clauses etc<p>Something like a union but minus the grossest parts like mandating actual pay, employment terms, and benefits. More of an easily accessed professional services group. I’m sure this exists in other industries.
Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years? Or are people just becoming more entitled? I agree with the premise that workplace wellbeing is a bunch of BS (and just a small part of much large corporate BS universe), but is 2021 much different from 2001? I understand blue collar complaints and unfortunate situation workers found themselves in after union busting or outsourcing. But what's gotten worse in the white collar world, really? Benefits? They weren't that great 20 years ago, it's hard to find a place with good benefits now or then. Long hours? Not a recent invention. Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy. This outcome is much more likely than fantasizing about changing the whole organization you work for.
I feel this is one of those areas where it pays off if you are a bit darker and a more cynical individual. If you ask any random Eastern European (a group to which I belong) I can bet my neck that likely 90% of them will tell you "workplace well-being is a feel-good signal for the people on top and nothing else".<p>I have had people fiercely contesting this with me during a table conversation, only for them to eventually begrudgingly admit in the end: "Yeah, I see your point, maybe preaching yoga to very stressed people who already almost don't have free time in their day isn't the best way to go about this...". And I am like -- oh, you think, dude?<p>There are a number of things that can be done but I found many organizations to not care about enforcing policies like "no Slack messages after 19:00" or "minimize emails religiously" or "is this meeting <i>actually</i> useful for anyone except me who is in a chatty mood?" etc. Not to mention have people who police the meetings to keep them on topic and brief. And somebody paying attention if you are loaded with responsibilities outside of your job description? That's science fiction.<p>Start from these: multi-tasking and having too many responsibilities. Reduce these two factors for each person as much as possible -- or, if the person likes the extra load, maybe consider a pay bump plus reducing a smaller chunk of their stress.<p>Before something else outside of empty virtue signalling is done, the problem will persist. Companies just refuse to see the huge problems that even a single employee possessing a lot of institutional knowledge leaving will entail, so I guess they'll just keep suffering and pretending that some extremely half-done measures will fix the problem.<p>They will not. Nobody cares about your luxury coffee at the office. Nobody cares about the funny furniture. Nobody has their life sustainably improved by a free neck massage for 15 minutes a week (although it does help somewhat).<p>If any manager or business owner is here, take this single piece of advice: aim for measures that solve problems long-term.
I don't think "It's a scam" - just every implementation of it I've seen.<p>Similar to 'self-guided learning' - Sure it's nice being able to get cash to pay for any online course I like, but it doesn't give me the "week in a room just focussing on a topic" that a more formal course would provide. It's the time given, not the course provided that was more valuable.<p>It can work though if initiatives are related, ranked clearly and measured.
(Hypothetically) A company might provide bonuses to management for the profitability of projects. Simultaneously, it might wish to discourage weekend working - people quit and quality suffers.
With those two goals disconnected, you can guess what happens.<p>If you link them - say internally bill for hours worked and double for weekends, rather just time-elapsed, then suddenly weekend work mainly vanishes - and projects are better resourced at the outset.<p>To loop back to the "Wellness" you could implement it with commitment to resources, metrics, stated goals and I think it would work fine.<p>Why are we promoting wellness? How are we going to measure it? What resources are you providing I didn't already have? etc.
I thought not much about this corporate wellbeing stuff until Corona. Then decisions my employer made started directly affecting my chances for survival. My employer was surprisingly proactive and protective very unlike the one of my wife.<p>This wellness spam is virtue signaling. Whether it is truly based on values becomes only visible when the boundaries are tested.
Oh well in the US they actively abolished their right to organize and have a democratically formed representation against the autocratic corporate hierarchy. Ceos could not care less about the company or its employees. What is the worst case scenario for them? A golden parachute on top of platinum compensation that is 100’s of times higher than their average employee. The employees and the local community will have to eat the s** from the management decisions. There is no social accountability for mismanaging companies, despite its wide social repercussions.
>but no amount of self-care can substitute for a living wage, manageable hours and secure employment.<p>The motivation behind not providing these things is so that employees are too burned out to look for another job: <a href="https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html" rel="nofollow">https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html</a>
on the subject of pointless employee "benefits": I recently started working as a courier for a big food delivery platform. the agency through which I'm "employed" emailed me the other day about the benefits they provide, which consist of a link through which I can _buy for $15_ a phone app which gets me a small discount at a selection of participating retailers.
I work for a Huge healthcare corporation; they own 23 hospitals and employ over 60,000 people. Yet lunch breaks are 30 minutes long--an Adult can not eat a healthy meal in 30 minutes, a 6 year probably could though, they require far less food than a grown man.<p>They also constantly promote walking as a real form of exercise---which is a joke. You have to workout to be healthy: working out, in case you don't know, is painful and it makes you smell bad; but there is No substitute.
In case it wasn't apparent, it's useful to keep in mind that Tribune is very explicitly [0] a socialist magazine. That isn't to undermine the article's point -- which I largely agree with -- it's just critical to keep in mind the author's intent.<p>[0] <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/about" rel="nofollow">https://tribunemag.co.uk/about</a>
As a somewhat outside observer (socially liberal/democrat country, in SWE but outside of VC/Silicon Valley/FAANG - for now!), I wonder if the community think the rise in "F** you, pay me"[1][2] sentiment will be mediated in any way? I can definitely see the rise of this feeling with record profits, sky high stock prices, big Venture Funding rounds paired with rising income inequality it makes sense. If a group of workers are core to a companies profits, as Software Engineers are for tech companies, demanding a larger share of said profits also makes sense and should be encouraged. However if this new mercenary attitude is to just move at will because you can[3], I don't know how that endgame plays out. Is this a feature of the winner takes all/gold rush era we're in at the moment, does it fizzle out, is there a crash? Just thinking out loud as how this progresses...I dunno I just find it interesting.<p>I'm sure the response will come something about the company do not care about you, however now I've started to see people here regard anyone just one "level" above them as part of the global capitalist elite.[4] All seems a bit unsustainable to me.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714</a>
[3] <a href="https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731</a>
[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464</a>
Outsourcing is the new slavery. I've been working in call centers for the last 3 years, and on top of that, I live in a third world country...yeah...I'm fucked.
This is so true. If a company has any wellbeing programs or even "free lunch" or "pizza Fridays" it's a big red flag.
It basically means they don't pay enough for you to afford a pizza or lunch, not to mention a private therapy if stress gets onto you.
Probably some managers are feeling guilty they pay so little, so they come up with these virtue signalling schemes. It doesn't bother them that they take private jets for a quarterly getaway in Caribbean, while employees spend extra hour before work to make sandwiches, because they can't afford going out at their lunch break.