Your wellbeing plans don’t work

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I spent the weekend with my father: he is excellent company (and reads the FT ). I am aware of our good fortune: many friends have parents living with dementia, and those families spend years navigating broken health and care systems.

Has anyone done a study of how much this unfit-for-purpose elder care is costing in terms of people leaving the workforce altogether — as well as lost working time for millions of mid-life staff? I’m amazed it’s not being talked about more. Let me know if you have statistics or solutions: isabel.berwick@ft.com

*Hear my colleagues Miranda Green and Claer Barrett talk about the burden of “sadmin” that comes after a parent’s death on the FT Money Clinic podcast.

Read on for why most wellbeing initiatives are useless, and in Office Therapy we advise someone with an offhand — but effective — team member.

Are you a ‘fragile thriver’ at work?

Wellbeing is a nebulous term, but that’s not surprising: it reflects the fact that most organisations have a confused and disjointed approach to supporting employees’ mental and physical health. (Yoga! Wellness apps! Dog petting !)

Cumulatively, all these measures add up to a corporate spend of $18.4bn — in the US alone — on employee wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, 96 per cent of chief executives think they are “doing enough” for their employees’ mental health. They are certainly spending enough to signal that they care about their staff. It’s just not doing much good: one study in 2019 found that 78 out of 80 wellbeing measures in a big US company had no impact at all .

Those startling figures come from a new report from Mindgym, a consultancy that uses behavioural science to back its advice. The research highlights problems with the current corporate approach to wellness — and offers some ideas for doing it better.

The main recommendation? To be effective, managers need to work out what each individual needs — and keep all interventions work-focused. As Mindgym founder and chief executive Octavius Black told me: “On things that are about our life outside work, we don’t listen to our employer — and frankly that’s probably a good thing.” But (and it’s a big but): if the work part of our lives doesn’t feel right, it impacts everything else. “And that’s the thing that employers can change.”

Mindgym identifies six stages of employee wellbeing (and what it calls “ill-being” . . . which I rather like). These include people who are “boring out” (aka the types who are disengaged and quiet quitting) and those who are doing well: the “flourishing” .

But the most intriguing category — and, I suspect, where many readers of this newsletter will see themselves — is the “fragile thriving”. Octavius described this group (which Mindgym suggests makes up 15 per cent of staff) as being “really high on wellbeing and also quite high on ill-being — you know that line ‘if you want something done, give it to a busy person?’ Well, the busy person is a fragile thriver.”

Oh hello . Colleagues think these people “are amazing and dynamic and extremely committed — and underneath they are at risk of falling into struggling or crisis”. They might even burn out and leave.

The solution — for fragile thrivers, at least? “Give them slightly longer timelines and slightly more resources — this will help them with coping and flourishing.” (Doing that for the “boring out” group will make them even more bored and disengaged.)

What do workplace wellbeing experts make of this analysis? I asked Ryan Hopkins, chief impact officer at JAAQ, an online mental health platform. Ryan suggests that the future of wellbeing will indeed move away from the current “one size fits all” remedies. “It is not an organisation’s responsibility to improve happiness, but it is their responsibility not to worsen it. When we flip that switch we will move away from [offering] bikes, bananas* and one-off events to creating workplaces where individuals can prioritise what they need to be their best selves.”

How to achieve this? Ryan says: “More flexibility, autonomy, space, time, trust. What would you prefer? Another webinar telling you not to be stressed — or a better meeting culture, for example by cutting each meeting by 5/10 minutes? When we shift our focus from improving happiness/wellbeing to not worsening it, the outcome is improved happiness and wellbeing.”

*Note to my employers at the FT: please don’t ditch the free bananas .

Have you done something brilliant (or just . . . effective) to improve workers’ wellbeing? Why is so much money being spent on useless schemes? All ideas and rants welcome: isabel.berwick@ft.com

This week on the Working It podcast

How did LinkedIn get cool? Something has definitely changed over there. Since you-know-who took over the social media site X, I’ve seen high-profile people migrating to LinkedIn, plus it’s become the messaging vehicle of choice for a lot of “authentic” CEO types.

This week on the Working It podcast we get stuck into the professional platform’s booming popularity — and how it’s morphing into a place where we bring more than just our work selves. We hear from LinkedInfluencer (it’s a thing!) and founder of Gen Z VCs, Meagan Loyst, and from the FT’s Hannah Murphy, who first diagnosed the LinkedIn vibeshift. Do listen — and learn how to grow your network, reach and .

Office Therapy

The problem: I manage someone who is liked by the team, and they are very good at their job, but they are offhand with everyone except these close colleagues. They never look people in the eye when shaking their hands and make people feel unwelcome in our office. It might affect their career, which would be a shame. But it’s awkward — can I say/do anything?

Isabel’s advice: This issue is a common one, especially during employees’ early careers when they haven’t had much real-life experience in workplaces. And do consider that people who are neurodiverse may struggle in this way, so a potential diagnosed (or undiagnosed) condition might impact their behaviour. That’s not to say you can’t address it in a helpful way.

I turned to Jonathan Black, head of the Oxford university careers service , and author of the FT’s popular Dear Jonathan advice column. What’s his advice? Reframe this around “charm”.

Charm can be an underestimated skill, but can oil the social gears within organisations, especially in the workplace. It can open doors, defuse potential disputes, and develop natural supporters. Charm is tricky to define, one of those things that “you’ll know it when you see it”, and some people seem to have it naturally.

I think you can learn to be charming, and then enter a virtuous spiral as you see the positive effect it can have (including a positive feeling in yourself). You mention eye contact and making people feel welcome — all apparently little things but you only have one chance to make a good first impression.

I think you can say something as your colleague may be wondering why they are not achieving as much as they think the facts/arguments they present should be achieving. You can suggest some observations, that honey attracts more bees than vinegar, or some such — or that about 60 per cent of what people remember about a presentation is how you said things, not what you said.

Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Best books of 2023: Business The FT’s big end-of-year books round-up offers a heap of Christmas gift (or self-gift) ideas. Andrew Hill here picks his favourites of 2023. Other categories are being released daily on FT.com.

2. Small packages are causing big problems in the US: Who knew supply chains could be so gripping? Rana Foroohar outlines how small packages, exempt from customs checks, are bringing Chinese goods made under forced labour as well as fentanyl into the US.

3. The fraught politics of the office whipround: I’m pleased Pilita Clark tackled this topic. Now that leaving collections, baby showers etc are online — rather than in an envelope — the pressure to give large amounts has increased. The good side effect? Men now get involved.

4. Is friendship employers’ business? Some employers now require staff to declare close friendships in the workplace — as well as romantic liaisons. Emma Jacobs looks into this newest sort of transparency declaration.

5. Whitehall seeks to turbocharge recruitment from the private sector: The FT’s Whitehall editor, Lucy Fisher, talks to the people aiming to recruit a lot more senior civil servants from external organisations, to boost the reach and speed of its operations.

One more thing

I have ditched Netflix and have been going to bed early to read an exceptional book: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. This Ireland-set family saga (650 pages) is on the Booker Prize shortlist. Will it win? Probably not — I’ve usually disagreed with the judging panel’s choices in recent years. But no matter: Murray’s book, as FT reviewer John Self points out, “is generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life.”

It’s also very funny: strong recommend.

A word from the Working It community

Thank you to everyone who emailed and messaged after the last couple of newsletters in which I asked for examples of best practice for supporting staff affected by the Israel-Hamas war, and on managing internal dissent among workforces with radically different views.

Here’s Sarah Miller, chief executive of Principia Advisory, an ethics-based consultancy. She starts by challenging the common advice to leaders just to “talk things through” with divided staff. She advocates putting boundaries in place first:

“Dialogue without parameters can create even greater tension, and, to be frank, I don’t know a lot of managers that have the skills to hold that space. A foundational understanding about the particular responsibilities of each organisation — what it does, who it does it for, and the commitments it has made — can be a powerful resource to frame parameters that employees will recognise and be able to engage within.”

Adam Nuhi, a lawyer at RPC, has friends and family in Israel and Gaza. He offers a positive experience of support from colleagues and the wider organisation:

“I’ve had a nightmarish few weeks. This has, inevitably, thrust me into a period of mental ill-health. My employer’s reaction has been profoundly human. What has been particularly supportive was the checking in by my manager and HR partner, in addition to colleagues across the business letting me know they were there if I needed it. I had to set aside half an hour to reply to ‘just to let you know I’m thinking of you’ mails. It might not be for everyone, but it was for me.

“And I think that’s cultivated through the sustained practice, rather than the theory, of wellbeing at work. To your report about working while sick, it made work the reprieve I’ve needed from the misery outside its bounds.”