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Organisations don’t have the right to talk about wellbeing and I refuse every single conversation around it unless it is about fixing the environment.
What kind of wellbeing and work-life balance are we even discussing when the official workweek is still 40-48 hours (and that's just the official not reality)? Let’s be honest, there’s no balance or even life when people have just 2–3 hours of free time before going to bed. Work-life balance means that people have time to do other things. But do they? Do you?
Study after study after study shows that the optimal workweek for productivity, wellbeing, and actual balance is 32–35 hours. Yet, instead of addressing the real issue, we keep pushing the same outdated work schedules while gaslighting employees with wellbeing initiatives.
“Most employees aren't working for the majority of the time at work, according to a study of over 2,000 full-time office workers. In an 8-hour workday, the average worker is productive for around three hours a day.” Read here and ask the question, why do we keep people at work unnecessarily when we know that, beyond a certain point, productivity drops (especially for white-collar workers)?
In these videos, I’ll guide you through a series of essential questions to consider about corporate wellbeing. Trust me, it’s worth your time.
Back to the article:
We cannot preach wellbeing while expecting people to work 40+ hours and ignore all the studies out there. Once you factor in commuting, many are left with barely two hours a day to enjoy life. That’s not balance, not even burnout - that's losing the will to live.
The good news? Companies can reduce working hours. Labor laws typically set the maximum, not the required minimum. Until organizations take that step, the workforce can’t take Brenda’s wellbeing speeches and initiatives seriously. No, Brenda, the workforce don’t need another workshop on how to "maximise" the tiny scraps of free time they get and how to be happy with it. They need companies to actually change the way we work. As long as companies are trying to fix people so they can make themselves functional in a dysfunctional environment they don't care about wellbeing; they care about virtue signaling.
Employee wellbeing depends on the system and environment they work in. If the workplace itself is the problem, stop wasting money on wellbeing initiatives, and definitely stop talking about work-life balance. Fix the environment first.
Here is another very important thing somebody raised yesterday about the BS wellbeing awards. We must stop handing out these rewards for the wrong things like ‘wellbeing workshops’, ‘health & wellbeing days’, ‘happiness sessions’, ‘wellness application implementation’ and all the things that have ZERO impact. As long as we reward these behaviours and activities with no results, we are passing on the message that these are the things that need to be done. It also gives the illusion that we are doing something when it fact, all we do is keeping HR busy with nonsense. The question remains; how much of what you do makes a difference?
Companies and HR, your wellbeing initiatives are laughed at by the workforce. All those awards, you know the participation trophies you love collecting, are ridiculed and worth nothing. Yet, you continue doing them while everything remains the same. You still have the same turnover rate, your productivity rate (if you measure it) hasn’t moved for over a decade, and your Glassdoor reviews look like they are written about a Victorian era factory. Yet, you choose to continue doing the nonsense, get upset by anybody who raises these issues or just blank ignore them.
Do you know what companies that want to win do when their nonsense is being pointed out? They work with those, just like Chick-fil-A did when Vani Hari published a rather provoking article about their food. Instead of getting defensive they partnered up with her and changed their menus, used it as a marketing campaign and their profit soared. Kellogg’s on the other hand, refused to meet them when they wanted to hand over the 400.000 signatures petition to remove carcinogens from their cereal. The result? Kellogg’s is struggling with sales.
Maybe it is time for organisations to listen to experts instead of the gurus that are just making money out of them.
PS: I don’t mind companies asking people to work even 60 hours a week, but I do mind when they do it while talking about wellbeing and work-life balance. Hypocrisy is not great!
More HR and corporate stuff to ponder on in my book The Blind Leading the Disengaged and The Corporate Kindergarten.
The Blind Leading the Disengaged
The Corporate Kindergarten
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