Every company worth its weight in coffee is shouting this from the rooftops:

“We prioritize employee wellness!”

I want to be clear right at the start — I don’t believe this is a bad thing. I’m not a monster. I want people to be well. I want people to be happy. And I want companies to care about the wellness and happiness of their employees.

But here’s the part I can’t compute:

At this very moment, companies are spending more on wellness than at any other point in history — but we’re not getting any happier. In fact, we’re getting unhappier.

👉 You can’t fix your employees’ lives. And you shouldn’t try.

👉 Instead, fix the culture problems inside the business that you can actually control.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

Over the past 50 years, self-reported happiness in the U.S. has declined. Not a ton — just a tad. But over that same period, workplace wellness programs have grown from a negligible concept to a nearly $20 billion-dollar industry. 👇

What the hell?

Ok… so there’s an argument to be made that happiness is impossible to quantify, therefore this data is useless. That might be a fair point, but let’s assume for now that self-reported happiness = actual happiness.

And there’s also an argument that happiness is impacted by all kinds of stuff that isn’t work related. Sure. But given that 40% of our waking adult lives are spent at work, it’s safe to assume there’s at least a partial correlation between what people do at work all day, and their overall happiness.

So we’re left questioning… why?

Mental health seems to be the focal point around which every conversation about workplace wellness orbits. Not only are we spending more cash on wellness than ever before, we’re talking about wellness more than ever before. Gone are the stigmas of privately struggling with things like burnout, bullies, and boundaries. 

Now those topics have their own damn Slack channels. 

Based on all this openness, and all these resources to address these issues at work, we should all be happier than pigs in mud. But we’re not. Why?

Well… I have a few theories.

First, workplace wellness programs simply don’t address the biggest elephant in the conference room:

Misalignment.

Decades of research consistently shows that happiness is driven by things like social connection, autonomy, meaning, and security — not by access to wellness services.

And as we’ve already established, we’re spending a shit-ton on wellness services.

This all suggests that if we have a happiness problem, that problem isn’t caused by a lack of wellness interventions, but a misalignment between the values that make people feel good, and what they actually experience at work.

My pal Simone Stolzoff (author of one of my favorite business books ever, with a new one coming out in May) said it beautifully:

“Working on the wrong thing,” as Simone puts it, is not a problem that a free meditation app or corporate retreat could ever attempt to solve.

And honestly? Companies shouldn’t make themselves responsible for solving it. In most cases, the pursuit of happiness should fall squarely on the shoulders of the employee (ya know, an autonomous human adult with full agency). It’s up to them to recognize their misalignment, and make a change. To ask for what they need. Or to move on.

Companies should inspire workers to take charge of their own happiness instead of playing a relentless and expensive guessing game. Because no one else knows what alignment feels like for an individual — except that individual.

But we currently exist in a culture where employers are sticking money-colored bandaids on their miserable employees' heads, and claiming wellness victory. 

And the only winner is the company who makes the money-colored bandaids.

A few years ago, I was mentoring a 23-year-old through some career dissatisfaction. She had only been in New York for 18 months, and had already cycled through three finance jobs.

To top it all off — she was young and beautiful and dating. On Tinder. 

Our conversations would begin with her work woes, but somehow always migrated to her dating life. And I couldn’t help but notice a constant parallel between the two:

The possibility of shiny new options amplified the (often small) dissatisfactions she had with what was right in front of her. It was the “grass is always greener” paradox.

She would get home from a date and immediately begin thumbing through the infinite handsome hunks on Tinder, and spend her weekends browsing LinkedIn for other jobs.

Was this an inherently bad thing?

At 23… probably not. Carouseling through jobs and boyfriends at that age seems like a perfectly normal, if not healthy, phase of self-discovery. 

But there was a problem: she was goddamn miserable.

She wasn’t telling a chauvinistic boss to shove it, and waltzing out of the office, proud to discover her own voice. She wasn’t assessing the qualities in her romantic partners that made her feel valued vs disposable, and using those assessments to guide her future dating decisions.

Instead, she was consuming an entire pharmacy’s worth of antidepressants and playing the “what if” game on repeat — ever envious of the version of herself that she could visualize as these “options” fluttered across her iPhone screen, just out of reach.

Now — I’m not saying that people should settle for a work situation that makes them unhappy. But I do question whether that unhappiness stems from their work situation, or from being constantly blasted with other, seemingly more appealing, options.

I have one more (tad controversial) personal theory about why happiness is declining, while attention and spending on mental health and wellness is going up.

Please don’t cancel me.

Oh god.

Here goes.

As workplaces become more open to accommodating the needs of unhappy or mentally unwell employees, trying to solve those highly personal problems with wellness initiatives, happy employees have to put up with a lot more shit.

Everyone is, of course, entitled to some bad days. Or even some bad seasons. It’s important for teams to establish trust and support one another during those times.

But now, the disengaged… the lazy… the narcissistic… the people who truly don’t fit in… are simply assigned an archetype by whatever personality test their company adheres to, and everyone is given training on how to best interact with that archetype.

The happy, productive, aligned people are forced to make accommodations for the unhappy people.

All in the name of “bringing your whole self to work”.

Because that’s what happens when workplaces try to solve people’s personal problems. The line is blurred, or disappears entirely, and all of a sudden “the full moon drained all my energy” is just as valid a reason to slack off at work as “my mother died”.

This sounds harsh, but I’m not (completely) talking out of my ass here. I’ve experienced this problem first hand. I was once a happy, aligned, and mentally well employee who simply wanted to do my job. 

But you know what drained all my energy? Making accommodations for colleagues who thought their happiness was the company’s responsibility (therefore my responsibility). Because the company had made it our responsibility.

A workplace culture that so proudly prioritized wellness turned me from a happy employee into a sad one. And while this was just my personal experience, I suspect I’m not the only one.

Should companies ignore employee wellness? Absolutely not.

It’s just that the stuff they’re doing now seems pretty darn useless. These programs are all signal, with no substance. And the signal they’re throwing is “bring us all your personal problems and we’ll fix them,” which is a dangerous idea.

So what does an effective employee wellness program actually look like?

In my unqualified opinion, it should incorporate two key elements:

Businesses have seasons. Life has seasons. They’re not going to ebb and flow in tandem, and collisions are to be expected. Alignment isn’t possible 100% of the time. 

So employers and employees need to be honest with each other about their needs, and those conversations should be rooted in tangible outcomes and timeframes. Listening is imperative — on both sides.

The shit that’s inducing ulcers, causing sleepless nights, and throwing employees into fits of anxiety, isn’t lack of lunchtime yoga classes. It’s “my boss is out to get me” or “my colleague dropped the ball”.

Wellness programs assume that if an employee could just breathe better, sleep better, or think more positively, the stress would melt away. But the best extinguisher of stress is to be surrounded by people you trust. 

Hell, being part of a trustworthy cohort can even make stressful situations fun — because conquering high-stakes conditions bonds people together, creates deep relationships, and seeds loyalty.

—

Despite the negative tone of today’s issue, I’m still an optimist. Do I think misguided wellness programs are silly and wasteful? Yes.

But I also view their existence as a positive sign that employers actually give a shit.

And if I rubbed you the wrong way today, I’ll try to rub you the right way next time. Just don’t report me to HR. 😉

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin