Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
Workplace “wellness” initiatives—like free yoga classes, mindfulness tips, step challenges, diet advice, and other pushes for well-being now common at work—are supposed to be a win–win situation: Employees get healthier and happier while employers reap the benefits of lower health care costs. But in practice, these programs frequently miss the mark, and many employees perceive them as intrusive and out of touch.
Here’s how one person who wrote to me responded when their company announced that the topics for their monthly wellness trainings would include fitness, nutrition, meditation, body image, and “resilience”:
My boss told my team that he wants us all to attend unless we have an urgent deadline and … why? None of these topics are my company’s business! They aren’t my doctor or my therapist. I’m here to work, not to get lectured by my employer about how healthy kale is, and I really don’t want to spend any time discussing my body image with colleagues.
This reaction speaks for a lot of employees. When workplace wellness programs fail to account for the boundaries that many people prefer to have with their employers, they end up creating discomfort and resentment instead of fostering the well-being they purport to promote.
Probably nowhere is this more visible than when employers try to give out diet advice—a topic that can be loaded under the best of circumstances and where advice can’t be one-size-fits all:
When I had health insurance through my husband’s employer, we both had to do wellness questionnaires. Since I have chronic health problems, I was required to talk to a “health coach” on the phone. Her big solution for me was to make goulash so I’d have a healthy lunch available and wouldn’t have to cook during my lunch break (I work from home). Yeah, like goulash is gonna cure my lupus. To top it all off, the company’s insurance was the worst I’ve ever had. The plan had a huge deductible/huge out-of-pocket max, and they didn’t pay any expenses until the deductible had been met.
A similarly irritated worker sent me this account:
My company includes an on-site fitness center, and all the employees receive periodic emails from the fitness staff. There’s one kind of message they frequently send that bothers me a lot—talking about food and exercise in a really negative, kind of accusatory way that tends to moralize “good” vs. “bad” choices. For example, before Thanksgiving we all got an email listing exactly how many calories a serving of X food would contain, and exactly how much exercise of Y variety we would need to do to “burn it off.”
Not only do these messages annoy people who don’t come to work to be scolded about food, they can be outright harmful to anyone with a history of disordered eating. Yet workplaces continue to assume that all employees want to lose weight, and all want support from their employers in doing it:
My workplace just decided to do a casual, team-wide weight loss competition. Participation is voluntary and each participant puts money in the pot initially, plus a dollar for every pound lost. The winner wins the pot at the end. This hit me hard because I have an eating disorder, and I avoid those teammates who like to talk about their eating and diet habits all the time. But now everybody around me is talking about it all the time, and I thank god nobody has asked me if I am participating yet (everybody is doing it, not just overweight people). This is seriously triggering and upsetting for me.
Of course, it’s not just employees with eating disorders. Other people may be trying to establish a healthier relationship with dieting, or might need to maintain their weight or gain weight, or simply might not consider their diet or their weight to be any of their employer’s business and don’t want to engage with their co-workers about it.
Wellness programs also can be out of touch with the realities of workers’ lives in ways that end up alienating employees through sheer cluelessness:
I really wish employers would think more about the various wellness messaging they put out and how likely it is to backfire or grate on people’s nerves. The “Tips for good sleep!” always seem to come out the day after one of my kids was up all night with an ear infection. There’s a poster in our building with wellness tips that includes “Do relaxing activities for 2-3 hours before bed,” and I’m like, “We’re a family with two full-time working parents and two young kids. When exactly am I supposed to do the dishes or clean the house or clear out my inbox or exercise?” That overly chipper tone that makes it sound like you’re just a few easy life hacks away from living your best life comes across as so clueless about the realities of people’s lives. And it’s worse for people who have disabilities or medical conditions or major life stresses that make adhering to some of these wellness tips even more impossible.
Adding insult to injury, these programs often shift responsibility for avoiding burnout onto employees while their companies are pointedly not taking actions that would be far more helpful to people (and which are far more decidedly in their purview):
My officially logged task/ticket list just hit 200 things to do because my team of 2.25 people is understaffed by at least 2 full-time people. And the continual step-count challenges, weight loss tips, and “combat burnout by taking time to practice mindfulness” emails do nothing but raise my blood pressure and irritation levels when what we need is management to stop spending money on nutritionist consulting services and instead hire more employees. It is starting to feel like they’re pushing the responsibility for failure onto their burnt-out employees because in their eyes obviously we wouldn’t be having problems with the workload if we did all the things the emails told us to do. I’d much rather they address the chronic understaffing problems than anything else right now.”
An employer that truly wants to promote employee wellness could instead do the things that they alone are uniquely positioned to do, such as offering more time off, schedules that allow time for ample rest and exercise, salaries that pay enough to give workers breathing room, and staffing levels that allow for reasonable workloads, as well as beefing up their health insurance. But those things cost money, and workshops about the importance of nutrition and meditation—and apparently advisers who recommend “goulash”—are a whole lot cheaper.
