Do Corporate Wellness Programs Really Work?

Chances are that if you are working at an Indian or global organisation of a certain size, scale or ambition, you may have already participated in some kind of wellness program.

Perhaps you have participated in a steps in a day challenge/ or a health BMI challenge. Perhaps your organisation has gone a step further and included programs that include yoga, mindfulness practice.

You may even have a mental health counsellor you can reach out to if you feel the need to speak to someone.

Over the years, and specially since Covid, corporate wellness programs have become more and more comprehensive. HR leaders I interviewed last year spoke about introducing financial wellness and social wellness programs as well.

Personally I think this shift in the conversation towards wellness and mental health is a very good thing.

For the longest time, organisations have undervalued time spent on wellness and health. Employees in turn have worn long hours at work as a badge of honour that symbolised their single minded devotion to their employer.

So I was a bit sad to see the outcomes of recent study that was covered in the New York Times just this week.

In a very large cross-sectional study (Over 45k participants) in the UK, the researchers found that most wellness initiatives had very little impact on people's subjective feelings of wellness in the workplace.

The only initiative that was found to have a significant positive impact was--Volunteering. How interesting!

The Relationship Between Volunteerism and Wellness

Study after study has pointed to the consistent link between volunteerism and a number of outcomes that matter. Productivity, engagement, attrition, and individual wellness are each impacted by participation in an employee volunteer program.

By now, there is enough data that suggests that employees thrive when they get to volunteer in ways that they are interested in. For any organisation considering adding volunteerism to their basket of programs, it is important to understand the kinds of volunteerism that their people actually care about.

Far more people want to participate in volunteering projects than they are able to. Often these constraints come because of dates or distance or work responsibilities.

Well designed volunteer programs will need to work around these. This is a big opportunity for business and HR leadership to consider.

Can Time Away From Facebook Increase Your Wellness?

How intriguing is this premise--that time spent on social media interferes with out subjective wellness!

In a recent experiment at Stanford, researchers nudged 2000 participants to stay away from Facebook for a month. They received $100 to do so.

"When the researchers checked back in with the participants about their well-being and their time use after a month, the results were striking: There were significant improvements in well-being, in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety, among the deactivators."

This pretty amazing when you think about it.

Could something as simple as staying away from Social media make you healthier? The answer seems to be Yes.

You can read details about this study here:

For me what was interesting was that the simple de-activation of Facebook encouraged people to spend more time with friends and family or even watching TV. It freed up about an hour of time.

A month after the study ended, 80% of the those who has participated wanted to limit their time on Facebook, having discovered other ways to connect and get their news. And this was positive.

Back To the Basics. Why Are Wellness Programs Not Working

The answer boils down to this.

By not making changes in 'the way work happens' or the 'corporate culture', or the 'content of jobs'; the fundamental stressors do not go away. And despite meditation or resilience programs, people's subjective well being around the workplace does not significantly change.

As someone, who at a personal level is a big believer in wellness, this is a rather disappointing finding.

While it is obvious that the 'real work' around increasing wellness will come from building better organisations with better managers and better jobs, I had hoped that there would at least be a small effect from the different wellness programs.

And some studies have indeed found small improvements, but in a large cross sectional study like this, these did not show up.

Which brings us back to the main conclusion.

Often corporate wellness programs make it the individual employees responsibility to manage their mental wellbeing through a variety of interventions. However, most (at least so far) have not taken on the far more potentially impactful, but also much much harder jobs of building better organisations, managers or designing better jobs.

The biggest share of stressors for employees come from the workplace. The real opportunity to increase wellness also comes from the workplace.

This is not going to be easy.

Building organisations that have fewer needless stressors or are more nurturing or more fulfilling is a pretty tall task. And one, I am not sure many organisations have (at least as yet) the appetite for.

And this is where the real challenge to employee wellness comes from.

-Unqbe , and my partner Papiya Banerjee , work with leadership teams to identify competencies that are specifically oriented to a fast changing world.

DM us if you would like to find out more.

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(About me: I lead Unqbe, a think-tank and advisory firm around building future organisations, and building future careers. We track change through commissioned and primary research. We help leadership teams build the new workplace through a culture that supports change and people practices for the future.)