Goodbye “Workplace Wellness,” Hello WORK

A few years ago (2010), I read a book put out by Gallup called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. It outlines Gallup’s Wellbeing Finder tool, which is designed to help people assess how “well” they are in five categories: Career, Social, Financial, Physical, and Community. The book and the model underscore that these five elements aren’t independent entities, but rather intensely interwoven categories. In order to assess one’s wellbeing, each of the elements — as well as the interaction between all five of them — must be evaluated.  Hmmm…strinkingly similar to the concept of a wellfesto!

The book is straightforward…not rocket science…but it illuminated one thing for me that has really stuck with me since then and continues to influence my work.  Career — in the home, out of the home, however you define it — drives well-being.  In fact, Gallup’s data shows that people with high Career Wellbeing are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their lives overall than those who have low Career Wellbeing. This isn’t new news — a 1958 Gallup study found that while the standard retirement age for men in the 1950s was closer to 65, men who lived to be 95 or older did not retire until they were an average of 80 years old.

So what does this mean?  To me, it means that the idea of “workplace wellness” is dead.  Yes, I love working on the treadmill and eating salad in the cafeteria as much as the next person does, but what matters more is how I FEEL when I’m at work.  The well-being conversation should start with WORK — why you work, how you work, when you work, what you do, who you work with (once that’s all set, then the treadmills and salads are icing on the cake).  I’d argue that getting to a place of loving the weekdays as much as the weekends is much better for our overall health than a 3-miler on the treadmill at lunch (which of course, until we reach this utopia, doesn’t hurt).  And to be clear, I’m not talking about working all the time…I’m talking about creating an ecosystem of work that feels additive, not sucking.  One that feels whole, not fragmented.

Our society trains us to think of work as, well, work — something undesirable, something we’re forced to do, something we would avoid if we could.  In this paradigm, workplace wellness makes sense (add on the “wellness” to make up for the work).  I can’t wait until this model goes away, and we enter a world where the focus is on finding joy in the everyday, being the same person at work and outside of work, meeting on bikes and treadmills, and measuring impact instead of hours.  A world where workplace wellness doesn’t need to exist…because work itself keeps us well.

What do you think?  This is a personal quest for me, and I’d love to write a longer post/article about this topic, so if you have ideas/thoughts/examples/skepticism, please comment or send me a note!