Beyond the Wellness Box-Ticking Exercise

We have never had more conversations about workplace wellbeing. Organisations are investing in wellness programmes, hosting wellbeing days, bringing in speakers and offering employees everything from fitness initiatives to mindfulness sessions and that is a positive thing.

But there is a question worth asking: are we actually creating healthier organisations, or are we simply adding more wellness activities to the calendar? Ultimately, workplace wellbeing is about much more than health in isolation, it is about quality of life. For many people, work represents a significant part of their lives, and the environment in which they work can have a real influence on how they feel, function and connect with others.

Having worked with more than 600 organisations across different sectors, I have seen a huge variety in how organisations approach health and wellbeing. Some have genuinely embedded it into their culture. Others, despite having excellent individual initiatives, can struggle to connect those activities to the everyday experience of their employees.

This is where the idea of “wellness washing” becomes interesting.

Wellness washing is essentially the idea that an organisation can appear to prioritise employee wellbeing without addressing some of the underlying factors that influence it. A lunchtime yoga class is great, so is a wellbeing webinar but if employees feel unable to take a break, managers are not equipped to have conversations about wellbeing, workloads are consistently unrealistic, or people don’t feel psychologically safe speaking up, the occasional wellness initiative can only go so far.

Wellbeing cannot simply sit on the side of the business, it has to become part of how the business operates, That starts at the top. Leadership plays an important role in establishing the message that health and wellbeing genuinely matter but leadership alone isn’t enough. The strongest wellbeing cultures I have seen are those where employees have a voice in shaping what is offered.

It is the difference between saying, “Here is our wellbeing programme” and asking, “What does wellbeing actually look like for you?”

That distinction matters.

An organisation might invest heavily in physical activity because it is highly visible and easy to promote, while employees might be telling them that their biggest challenges are stress, workload, sleep, social connection, financial pressure or simply finding enough time to look after themselves.

Good wellbeing programmes therefore need to be both top-down and bottom-up. Leadership needs to provide commitment, resources and direction, while employees need to help shape the priorities and solutions and this doesn’t have to mean having a huge wellbeing budget. Particularly for smaller businesses, some of the most meaningful interventions can be relatively simple: creating a culture where people can take a proper break, encouraging connection, checking in with employees, supporting flexibility or simply asking people what they need. Wellbeing is not necessarily about doing more; sometimes it is about doing things differently.

Technology also has an increasingly important role to play. AI, digital health tools and wellbeing platforms can help organisations understand engagement, identify trends and measure outcomes, moving wellbeing beyond simply counting how many people attended an initiative. Used appropriately, data can help organisations ask better questions about what is actually making a difference.

There is also a growing recognition that health cannot be divided neatly into separate boxes. Physical health, mental health, social connection, nutrition, oral health and healthy behaviours all interact. Something as simple as an oral health assessment, for example, can become an opportunity to identify wider health behaviours and encourage people to think about prevention more broadly.

The same principle applies to wellbeing as a whole: look at the person, not just the programme.

Perhaps the biggest shift we need to make is from thinking about wellbeing as an event to thinking about it as an environment. A wellbeing week can create awareness. A webinar can provide useful information. A health check can prompt someone to take action but culture is created in the 364 days in between. It is created by how managers lead, how teams communicate, how people are recognised, whether employees feel connected, whether taking time off is genuinely encouraged and whether health is treated as something that supports performance rather than competes with it.

There is also an important role for prevention. Giving people the knowledge, confidence and opportunity to take action before a health issue becomes a bigger problem is one of the most valuable things an organisation can do. Sometimes it is the small intervention, a conversation, an assessment, a signpost to support, that becomes the catalyst for change.

Ultimately, the most successful workplace wellbeing strategies are not necessarily the ones with the most initiatives. They are the ones where wellbeing becomes part of the organisational DNA because employees can tell the difference between an organisation that offers wellbeing and one that genuinely values wellbeing and perhaps that is the real challenge for organisations now: moving beyond wellness as something we do and towards wellbeing as something we are.