What if the real workplace wellbeing problem is not whether people can cope, but what we are asking them to cope with?
Workplace wellbeing has become one of the defining organisational concerns of the past decade. It now appears in corporate strategies, leadership priorities, employee surveys, management training and increasingly substantial investments in mental health support, flexible working, employee assistance programmes and wellbeing platforms. This represents genuine progress. The idea that the psychological and social experience of work matters is no longer particularly controversial, and few serious organisations would now argue that employee wellbeing sits entirely outside their responsibilities. Yet the increasing sophistication of the wellbeing agenda creates a more difficult question: have we become better at creating workplaces in which people can thrive, or simply better at helping people survive the workplaces we have already created?
The distinction is more significant than it initially appears. Survival and thriving are not necessarily visible as different states to an employer. Someone can be productive, reliable, engaged and apparently successful while expending an extraordinary amount of cognitive and emotional energy simply to sustain that performance. They may continue delivering against objectives, participating constructively in meetings and responding positively to colleagues while privately working longer hours, suppressing exhaustion, sacrificing recovery time or developing increasingly elaborate strategies to manage the demands placed upon them. From the perspective of the organisation, this person may appear to be performing exceptionally well. From the perspective of the individual, maintaining that performance may be becoming progressively less sustainable.
The Flourishing Gap
This is why the Great Place To Work research on employee wellbeing is particularly interesting. Its work with Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School moved beyond a narrow conception of wellbeing and considered five dimensions: mental and emotional support, sense of purpose, personal support, financial health and meaningful connections. The resulting picture was considerably less reassuring than the expansion of corporate wellbeing initiatives might suggest. In its global research, Great Place To Work reported that only 17% of employees were in a high state of wellbeing, described as flourishing. Its US analysis produced a similarly striking figure of 16%. By contrast, 58% of employees working within the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For were reported as flourishing.
The significance of those numbers is not simply that many employees are unhappy. Flourishing is a much richer concept than happiness, and reducing the issue to employee satisfaction would miss the point. What the findings invite us to consider is whether contemporary organisations have paid sufficient attention to the conditions that allow people to experience work as sustainable, meaningful and socially connected. Nearly half of respondents in the US study reported that they did not find meaning in their work, 39% felt their work did not make a difference, 35% reported lacking a sense of belonging and one quarter experienced loneliness at work. These are not easily solved through conventional wellbeing benefits because they speak to the architecture of work itself: how people experience purpose, relationships, contribution and belonging within organisations.
The commercial implications are equally important. Great Place To Work found that employees experiencing high wellbeing were three times more likely to intend to remain with their employer and three times more likely to recommend that employer to others. Wellbeing, viewed through this lens, is therefore not peripheral to organisational performance. It is intimately connected with retention, advocacy, engagement and ultimately the sustainability of organisational capability.
Performance Is Not the Same as Flourishing
Perhaps one of the most important conclusions we can draw from this research is that organisations should be cautious about treating performance as evidence of wellbeing. The two can coexist, but one does not necessarily demonstrate the other. Human beings are remarkably adaptive, and capable employees often develop sophisticated mechanisms for continuing to perform in environments that place substantial demands upon them. They work longer hours, prepare excessively, check and recheck their work, absorb additional responsibilities, monitor how they present themselves, respond to messages outside working hours and sacrifice periods that might otherwise have provided recovery. These behaviours can preserve organisational performance for a considerable period while concealing the increasing personal cost of producing it.
There is an uncomfortable organisational paradox here. Human adaptability can protect poorly functioning systems from the consequences that might otherwise force those systems to change. When a process is inefficient, conscientious employees frequently compensate for it. When teams are under-resourced, people redistribute work and increase their effort. When technology is fragmented, employees create manual workarounds. When priorities are unclear, experienced staff use their judgement to interpret what matters. When organisational structures generate unnecessary complexity, people develop informal relationships and processes that allow work to continue. What appears on a performance dashboard as organisational effectiveness may therefore contain a considerable amount of invisible human compensation.
This matters because organisations can easily misinterpret successful compensation as evidence that the system itself is working. A team that repeatedly delivers despite insufficient capacity can inadvertently demonstrate that the reduced capacity is sufficient. An employee who continues accepting additional responsibilities may unintentionally communicate that their workload remains manageable. A manager who absorbs organisational dysfunction to protect their team can make the dysfunction invisible to those above them. In each case, people compensate for structural weaknesses, and their competence paradoxically reduces the pressure upon the organisation to address those weaknesses.
The Hidden Cost of Looking Fine
The problem becomes even more significant when we consider employees whose experience of work may already require additional adaptation. Neurodivergent employees, disabled employees, carers and people whose circumstances sit outside traditional assumptions about the ideal worker may expend considerable energy navigating environments that were not designed around how they work or live. Someone can be excellent at their job while simultaneously spending enormous amounts of cognitive effort managing sensory environments, navigating ambiguous communication, switching repeatedly between tasks, rehearsing social interactions, masking difficulties or recovering privately from apparently ordinary working days.
This challenges one of the assumptions embedded within conventional approaches to employee experience: that if someone is producing the expected outcome, the process by which they are producing it is relatively unimportant. It is entirely possible for two employees to deliver identical outcomes while paying very different psychological prices for doing so. If organisations measure only the outcome, they may never see the difference.
The concept of thriving therefore asks us to become interested not merely in whether people can perform, but in what it costs them to perform. That is a substantially more demanding organisational question because the answer may implicate workload, management behaviour, technology, organisational design, inclusion, meeting culture, communication and leadership rather than simply individual resilience.
When Wellbeing Becomes an Individual Responsibility
This is where some approaches to workplace wellbeing become intellectually uncomfortable. Many interventions are directed towards strengthening the individual’s capacity to manage pressure: resilience training, mindfulness, stress-management programmes, wellbeing applications, exercise initiatives, sleep advice and encouragement to establish healthier boundaries. These interventions can be valuable and there is little merit in dismissing them simply because they operate at an individual level. The difficulty arises when individual adaptation becomes the principal response to organisational conditions that could themselves be changed.
If workloads are persistently unrealistic, resilience training does not alter the workload. If employees spend their days moving between consecutive meetings, mindfulness does not restore the time required for concentrated thought. If organisational priorities change continuously, a wellbeing webinar cannot create strategic clarity. If people are frightened to challenge senior colleagues, an employee assistance programme cannot manufacture psychological safety. If fragmented technology requires employees to duplicate information across multiple systems, encouraging them to take more breaks does not remove the friction consuming their time.
There is therefore a fundamental difference between helping people develop the resources to deal with the inevitable pressures of working life and expecting them to develop the resilience required to tolerate avoidable organisational dysfunction. The former is responsible organisational support. The latter risks relocating responsibility for systemic problems onto the individuals experiencing their consequences.
Resilience Should Not Become Organisational Immunity
Resilience is particularly worthy of scrutiny because it is unquestionably valuable. Organisations need people who can respond constructively to uncertainty, disappointment, change and pressure. Employees themselves benefit from developing psychological resources that allow them to navigate difficult periods. The danger arises when resilience becomes an organisational ideology through which the ability to tolerate pressure is treated as evidence of professional maturity, while questioning the source of that pressure is interpreted as weakness.
A genuinely resilient organisation should not merely contain resilient individuals. It should possess the capacity to recognise when its systems are producing unnecessary strain and adapt accordingly. Otherwise resilience becomes strangely one-directional: employees are expected to adapt continuously to the organisation while the organisation develops little corresponding obligation to adapt to them.
This distinction is important because there are pressures that organisations cannot and should not attempt to eliminate. Meaningful work can be difficult. Leadership carries responsibility. Innovation involves uncertainty. Professional development requires people to operate beyond what is already comfortable or familiar. Deadlines occasionally demand additional effort, and periods of organisational change will inevitably create ambiguity. Thriving should therefore never be confused with the elimination of challenge. The question is whether pressure is purposeful, proportionate and recoverable, or whether it has become chronic, unnecessarily complicated and embedded within normal organisational life.
Perhaps We Are Measuring the Wrong Things
The Great Place To Work findings also raise questions about how organisations assess their own health. Engagement scores, sickness absence, turnover, productivity and employee satisfaction all provide useful information, but none tells us everything about the lived experience of work. A highly engaged employee can still be exhausted. Someone can remain with an organisation because alternative employment feels risky rather than because they are flourishing. Low sickness absence can reflect a healthy workforce, but it can also coexist with presenteeism. High productivity can indicate excellent organisational design, or it can temporarily conceal unsustainable levels of human effort.
Perhaps organisations therefore need to become interested in a different category of questions. How much additional effort are employees expending to make organisational processes work? How much of the working day is consumed by coordination rather than meaningful activity? Can people genuinely say that they do not have capacity without fearing that it will alter how their commitment is perceived? Does annual leave provide recovery, or does it require people to work excessively beforehand and return to an unmanageable accumulation afterwards? Are employees able to concentrate for meaningful periods, or has the working day become an almost continuous sequence of meetings, messages, notifications and interruptions?
These questions are harder to reduce to a dashboard, but they may tell us considerably more about whether an organisation is creating the conditions for sustainable performance.
Culture Exists in the Contradictions
Organisational culture becomes particularly important because employees do not experience culture primarily through value statements, corporate strategies or leadership presentations. They experience it through repeated patterns of behaviour. Culture is revealed through what organisations reward, tolerate, celebrate and quietly expect.
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