Wellbeing Programmes Cannot Fix an Unhealthy Work Culture

There is a particular kind of discomfort that happens when a company offers wellbeing, but the culture around it quietly punishes people for using it.

On paper, the initiative sounds thoughtful. A yoga instructor comes into the office once a week. People are encouraged to take part. The language around it is familiar: mental health, wellbeing, balance, looking after yourself. All the things workplaces have learned to say when they want to show that they care about the humans inside the business, not only the output they produce.

And sometimes, the thing itself is genuinely good.

I liked the yoga. I really did. At that point, I was living far from the office, and my commute was around two hours each way. I left home early. I came home late. My day already had a kind of exhaustion built into it before the actual work even began. So having a small pocket of time in the week where I could move my body, breathe properly, and not be in delivery mode for a moment felt meaningful.

That is what makes this kind of situation complicated. The wellbeing programme was not fake because yoga is fake. Yoga was useful. The pause was useful. The problem was everything that happened around it.

You could feel the atmosphere shift when people stepped away from their desks. There were comments from managers. Looks from colleagues. The kind of stare that does not need a full sentence because your brain fills it in for you: how dare you take this time and not work?

No one had to formally say, “This is not productive.” They did not need to. The judgement lived in the room. It sat in the silence when someone returned. It appeared in the small comments, the glances, the mood change. The company could say wellbeing mattered, but the daily culture still treated visible rest as suspicious.

That contradiction does something to you.

You go to the session because it was offered, because you were told it was there for your wellbeing, because your body probably needs it. Then you spend part of the time feeling guilty for accepting the thing you were invited to use. You are lying on a yoga mat trying to relax while some part of your brain is already back at your desk, calculating whether people think less of you for being there.

It is hard to feel restored by a benefit that makes you feel watched.

There was another layer too. Alongside the health initiative, there was an expectation that everyone would take part in the lunchtime gathering. People ate together, then went for a walk together. Again, in theory, nothing terrible. Eating together can be lovely. A walk in the middle of the day can be good. Shared rituals can help a team feel connected.

But when a ritual stops being an invitation and becomes a test of belonging, it changes shape.

If you ate at your desk, you were judged. If you said no to the walk, you were judged. If you participated in yoga, you were judged for stepping away from work. If you did not participate in the communal wellbeing activities, you were judged for not joining in. There was no real agency in it. Only different ways to get it wrong.

That is the part I think about now.

Wellbeing at work cannot just be a programme. It cannot be a poster, a yoga class, a lunchtime walk, or a sentence in a culture deck. Those things might help, but only if the environment around them allows people to use them without penalty. Otherwise, they become theatre. Nice-looking theatre, perhaps. Well-lit theatre with breathable fabrics and a polite calendar invite. But still theatre.

A healthy workplace is not one where everyone is forced into the same version of wellness. It is not one where people have to perform balance in public while privately worrying about how that performance is being interpreted. It is not one where rest is marketed as a value, but treated as laziness the moment it becomes visible.

The older I get, the more sceptical I have become of wellbeing initiatives that arrive without any change to the environment that made people unwell in the first place.

That does not mean every programme is cynical. Some are offered with real care. Some are led by people who genuinely want to make work more humane. But I have learned to look past the offering itself and ask different questions.

Can people actually use this without guilt?

Can they say no without being judged?

Can they rest in a way that suits them, or only in the company-approved format?

Are workloads changing, or are people simply being asked to stretch, breathe, and return to the same pressure with a better attitude?

Is the organisation trying to improve wellbeing, or trying to be seen as an organisation that improves wellbeing?

Those are very different things.

What stayed with me from that experience was not the yoga class itself. It was the feeling of being offered care with one hand while the culture took it back with the other. It was the discomfort of doing something healthy in an environment that still made health feel inconvenient.

Wellbeing cannot camouflage harm. It cannot soften a culture that still runs on guilt, judgement, and performance. If people are exhausted, watched, pressured, or punished socially for having needs, then the programme is not the culture. The culture is what happens when someone actually tries to use it.

And sometimes the most honest measure of a workplace’s wellbeing is not what it offers.

It is whether people feel free to accept it.