01/17/2019

Daily Buzz: Wellness at Work Starts With Culture

Wellness perks fail if the work environment is toxic

Want to increase the wellness of your office team? You’ll need to offer more than yoga classes and healthy eating demonstrations. What every workplace needs to create a healthy environment is a culture of trust.

“Are we really doing ourselves a favor pursuing mindfulness training in the evening while continuing to endure constant daily stress at work?” Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor of leadership and organizational change at INSEAD, and Katharina Balazs, an associate professor of management at ESCP Europe, ask in a new op-ed for INSEAD’s Knowledge blog. “Unfortunately, too many organizations are permeated by fear and paranoia. When this happens, creativity disappears by the wayside—and so does wellness.”

Instead, the team argues that true wellness is a state of mind that must be infused in company culture and day-to-day tasks. More specifically, workplace cultures need trust, a trait that promotes mutual respect, integrity, and fairness.

“Their point is not that every wellness perk is wasteful, but that these kinds of programs will do little to counter the negative effects of a fundamentally toxic work culture,” says Lila MacLellan in a post on Quartz at Work. “What if, when it comes to wellness, the only thing workers need from their employers is a work culture that allows them to lead balanced, healthy lives in the first place?”

Please select this link to read the original article from Associations Now.