13 ms·

Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

219 points by powderpig 5y ago

mronetwo 5y ago
There is an interesting discussion here about responsibility. An employee is obviously responsible for his own well being but it seems that companies aren't putting in much work. A good example is working from home: now it's the employees responsibility to find a good environment for working. The company now has several responsibilities less... I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Hopefully working from home will become and option and never a mandatory thing. Anyways there is more and more responsibilities on the employees and less on the employers (at least it feels like it).
- krzrak 5y ago
  > I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Lucky you :) Seems you didn't work on uncomfortable chair or on the kitchen table with kids running and screaming around. For me such basic stuff is very high on the list of priorities regarding work environment.
  - mronetwo 5y ago
    Well what I'm trying to say is: there is more to it. Chair and desk is just a tip of the iceberg. Could phrase it in a better way.
varispeed 5y ago
This is so true. If a company has any wellbeing programs or even "free lunch" or "pizza Fridays" it's a big red flag. It basically means they don't pay enough for you to afford a pizza or lunch, not to mention a private therapy if stress gets onto you. Probably some managers are feeling guilty they pay so little, so they come up with these virtue signalling schemes. It doesn't bother them that they take private jets for a quarterly getaway in Caribbean, while employees spend extra hour before work to make sandwiches, because they can't afford going out at their lunch break.
- fastasucan 5y ago
  I battled with a previous employer with this. I don't care about the yearly weekend getaways, bi-monthly restaurant dinners, takeaway etc you buy us, I know best what makes me happy and its not that. Just give me what I need to do my work, be a good manager, give me good pay and let me enjoy my life outside of work in peace.
  - pmg102 5y ago
    Right but this suggests those things might be for your benefit when it looks to me like they're for team cohesion ie for the employers benefit. There's nothing wrong with that unless they're trying to portray those things as being for your benefit!
    - pc86 5y ago
      Exactly, pre-COVID we would go out for a group lunch maybe once every month or two. 7 or 8 people total. Everyone paid their own way so it wasn't seen as a benefit but everyone did acknowledge it as a good bit of team building/cohesion around something everyone was going to do anyway (eat) so it was much better than trying to do something after hours or on a weekend when we have better things to do, or during the work day when the company has better things for us to do.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Yes, a multi-day team (weekday) offsite every now and then is fine (and probably beneficial). But, in general, weekend getaways and things like that are bad practices. Normally I travel a lot so nights and at least parts of weekends away are pretty routine for me. But companies should attempt to minimize it to the degree possible.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I realize this is a forum that caters to tech folks who might be accustomed to these kinds of perquisites, but I’m pretty sure you’re describing the default state of employment for the vast majority of people. No free food. No restaurant lunches everyday. No attention paid to employee mental health/wellbeing.
craig_asp 5y ago
Every time someone (usually someone from HR) tries to point out how great a company is because of its great perks like awesome couching sessions (not actual training), great team-building events, the best coffee machine ever, table tennis, etc. and how these somehow compensate for a subpar salary offer, I tell them: you just pay me well, give me more time off, and I'll handle all that myself.
- mathattack 5y ago
  It’s amazing how many people don’t realize that the Beyoncé concert in the office comes from the same pool of money as compensation. (The company only does it because it’s cheaper than bonuses) And everyone showers Instagram with photos of the show.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Was that a real thing or was the Beyonce concert hyperbole?
    - gmueckl 5y ago
      Don't know about Beyonce, but it's pretty common for big companies to organize private concerts with big names for their employees. I guess it's a case of just spending enough money to make this happen.
      - corty 5y ago
        It is pretty commmon in departments such as sales, trading or marketing as incentive to e.g. invite $singer upon hitting the years sales target. Or organize a short holiday, visit to a sports event, fancy dinner, something. Seems to spill over to engineering or the whole company in some places.
        xtracto 5y ago
        As a previous engineer manager this sucks . While sales people get all kinds of bonuses for doing their job. The Engineering team gets a pat in the back because nothing broke down.
JackPoach 5y ago
Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years? Or are people just becoming more entitled? I agree with the premise that workplace wellbeing is a bunch of BS (and just a small part of much large corporate BS universe), but is 2021 much different from 2001? I understand blue collar complaints and unfortunate situation workers found themselves in after union busting or outsourcing. But what's gotten worse in the white collar world, really? Benefits? They weren't that great 20 years ago, it's hard to find a place with good benefits now or then. Long hours? Not a recent invention. Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy. This outcome is much more likely than fantasizing about changing the whole organization you work for.
- minipci1321 5y ago
  Over here, yes, it has gotten worse since 2001 -- asian shops press much harder now, cheap remote labor really easily available ... competition vent through the roof. Longer hours, guilt feels stronger, sloppier work, inter-team communication destroyed (all-email in some language foreign to everyone), and -- still more lost deals. This is for everyone, workers and management. True, people maybe feel more entitled. But I think we also are getting introduced to a phenomenon new since 2001 -- having a solid "living wage" (which Trubune says noting else replaces), but burning out repeatedly, hating the job but being unable to quit, as providing for family takes more now than it used to in 2001, too.
  - JackPoach 5y ago
    Yeah, but how much of that is your current employer fault? Let's take housing costs. Absolutely insane in California, Canada and some other places. Education/student loans - modern day slavery for many. Healthcare costs - seem to grow much faster than inflation or wage increase. The end result - destruction of the middle class as we know it. Or 'shrinking middle class' to put it less dramatically. So, I take it you live in Canada and this is the type of experience you describe. Is there a list of Canadian corporations that are to blame for this? Or is this more of a government fault? Or is this the problem that's not limited to Canada but is a general trend for most western countries because the neoliberal economic model is broken and it's silly to pretend that it's not? Personally, I am hesitant to blame some specific corporation for general economic misery.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
b0rsuk 5y ago
> The real problem with workplace wellness initiatives, according to Katie—beyond being inconvenient and vapid—is their obvious attempt to make up for the company’s poor employee benefits. ‘ The real problem is, wellness seminars are an attempt to push the issue on the employees. Just like "plastic recycling" initiatives push the guilt and the effort onto the consumer. It's a redirection strategy.
- lepton 5y ago
  I think my wellness is inherently my issue, and I'd prefer that my employer stayed out of it.
  - fnord123 5y ago
    This is a limited view akin to thinking you're doing your part for addressing climate change by staying off the grid. I agree with b0surk that this is redirection and fundamental changes to society need to take place. Like an end to wage slavery.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    We’re all responsible for our own wellness but we’re also responsible for the wellness of those with whom we interact. The “wellest” person in the world could only tolerate a toxic environment for so long before they’d become unwell, through no fault of their own.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  It's also a cash grab by the "Mindful Mediation" consultancies. I am surprised by the number of corporations with Mindful Meditation programs, and how much they pay for these ineffectual band-aids. The fact that mediation consultancies have significant traction in today's "Human Resources" world is just nonsense and corporate doublespeak that pushes blame reasoning on the employee for 360 degree poor management. (FWIW, I'm a person that started mediating decades ago (due to being a youthful Beatles fan.))
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
kumarvvr 5y ago
Workplace wellbeing Wholesome workplace Workplace is a family and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cropped up to support the efforts of managements to keep workforces in control and deflect resentment (people don't leave companies, they leave managers ! and other crap) The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes down the drain. No, my company is not my family. I may have good friends and great co-workers, but, at the end of the day, I only have the amount of loyalty to the company, as much as it has towards me. Perhaps its time the internet comes up with training sessions that promote the real face of large corporations.
- mtberatwork 5y ago
  > Workplace is a family This one is the biggest eye roll for me. Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat.
  - throwamon 5y ago
    > Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat Oh, but society sure is hard at work moving towards this. Edit: I'm short of time, but as someone asked me to elaborate, I'll briefly give a few examples: - "Networking" replacing genuine friendships; related things such as "cut out friends who don't let you grow" which may be valid but usually translates to "replace them with someone who will lead you to material success" (that is, "networking") - Parents micromanaging their children's lives, measuring their performance on various tasks and rewarding/punishing them accordingly, often without regard to possible underlying issues (e.g. mental illness) - Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18 - "Tinderification" of relationships, followers as social currency, etc. My point is basically that family and friends are being replaced by the individual and advertising oneself.
    - chasd00 5y ago
      > Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18 i have two boys, if they're >= 18 and doing nothing but laying on the couch i don't see asking for rent being unreasonable at all! Coddling young adults as if they're still children does so harm to everyone.
jp555 5y ago
"one of the biggest causes of stress in the workplace is a lack of decision-making power among workers." You know what's also more stressful? Having to make more decisions in domains outside my circle of competence. Give me total autonomy in my area, while also not burdening me with having to contribute to EVERY decision.
- hnarn 5y ago
  Or the in-between variant: constant meetings and initiatives to create the illusion of worker influence on major decisions when there is in reality none at all. A complete waste of time to check a box somewhere about "horizontal hierarchy", and at the end of the day the decisions are being made "in the sauna" as it were anyway.
  - banannaise 5y ago
    One of the best things for my mental health at work was learning to say (and believe) "I recommend we do X. If the VP decides to do Y instead, that will make the delivery date later, but that's his decision and ultimately his problem, not mine."
dan-robertson 5y ago
> in order for employees to actually be well, they need high wages, plenty of time off, and good healthcare I feel like this is the point of the first half of the article. Obviously if you work for a generous, profitable company, and you get good remuneration, healthcare and work–life balance, then workplace wellbeing may be honest and beneficial for both employers and employees (this side doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article). If you work for a company that pays poorly, has poor benefits, and low margins, then workplace wellbeing is more of the same. That all seems pretty obvious (there are benefits which are perhaps harder to fake, like pay or vacation days or limited working hours per week.) I suppose there is also a third kind of wealthy employer which tries to pamper employees into not wanting things the employer doesn’t want (eg collective bargaining). The first half of the article seems to just be a vehicle for a proposed solution to poor working conditions, which doesn’t really seem so connected to workplace wellbeing.
NoblePublius 5y ago
The only time your boss will give you a raise is when not giving you the raise would cost more money than the raise.
- chasd00 5y ago
  You could flip it around and say you will get a raise when there's a positive ROI on that raise. However, the point is the same. How could or why would you expect otherwise?
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    This never happens. Ever.
motohagiography 5y ago
The issue with these workplace wellness themes to me is that they violate normal personal and adult boundaries as if to try to access the psyche of employees, and this dismantling of personal boundaries is precisely what creates the psychotic and abusive relationships that appear in business environments. It is the lack of personal boundaries, and not the presence of them that creates harmful interactions and relationships. The worst possible way to create a 'safe' environment is to infantalize people and direct them like emotionally dependent children because by treating people as non-adults, it removes their basic dignity. Without this, people act out without normal boundaries, and think personal observations and other bizarrely inapproapriate behavior is acceptable or warranted. Corporate yoga and pseudo religious mindfullness probably often has the opposite effect. "Asking" people to submit to religious activities like meditation, smudging ceremonies, ancenstral acknowledgements, mindfulness, hypnosis, yoga, and others is not relating as normal adults. Sometimes I wonder what the conversations on an HN for HR people would look like. The most successful wellness programs I have seen came in the form of a self-improvement/hobbies bonus, and the 10%-20% open research/dev projects in some tech companies.
laurent123456 5y ago
In China I worked at a company which year after year was getting awards as a great place to work. But the perks meant staying after work for various events I couldn't care less about. For me the best perk I could have is to take a break from office stuff, not prolonging it after hours. Meanwhile, the whole IT department had to be moved at some point in a tiny office with no windows. They were also putting a lot of pressure on employees to come work on weekend to fix bugs and get releases ready - and of course at no extra pay. But yeah, you had cake on your birthday and free pizza once a month. Such a great place to work for!
- goldcd 5y ago
  I went through a stage of detesting pizza. "To thank you for your hard work, I've ordered pizza for everyone!" 'What time is it arriving?' "7pm" 'Right so you're stealing 2 hours of my time, which you're valuing as a couple of pizza slices - and imagined I'd be grateful?'
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
    "To thank _me_ for my hard work, I'm leaving at 5 to go get Chinese takeout"
twobitshifter 5y ago
It’s been shown that these programs don’t improve health outcomes, but I believe there are tax & insurance benefits for employers who offer them.
goldcd 5y ago
I don't think "It's a scam" - just every implementation of it I've seen. Similar to 'self-guided learning' - Sure it's nice being able to get cash to pay for any online course I like, but it doesn't give me the "week in a room just focussing on a topic" that a more formal course would provide. It's the time given, not the course provided that was more valuable. It can work though if initiatives are related, ranked clearly and measured. (Hypothetically) A company might provide bonuses to management for the profitability of projects. Simultaneously, it might wish to discourage weekend working - people quit and quality suffers. With those two goals disconnected, you can guess what happens. If you link them - say internally bill for hours worked and double for weekends, rather just time-elapsed, then suddenly weekend work mainly vanishes - and projects are better resourced at the outset. To loop back to the "Wellness" you could implement it with commitment to resources, metrics, stated goals and I think it would work fine. Why are we promoting wellness? How are we going to measure it? What resources are you providing I didn't already have? etc.
granshaw 5y ago
Core to all of this is that anything provided by an employer could be used against you. Even if I wanted therapy sessions I’m not going to share my work related issues with an employer provided coach, hell no. One thing I’d like to see is independent co-operatives which a group of tech workers (across different companies!) chip in to pay for. They could include veterans for mentorship, agents to help with negotiations/job-hopping advice and possibly even representing you during negotiations, lawyers to help cross out stupid post-working-hours IP clauses etc Something like a union but minus the grossest parts like mandating actual pay, employment terms, and benefits. More of an easily accessed professional services group. I’m sure this exists in other industries.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  "anything provided by an employer could be used against you". 100% this. I worked as a manager at a large company and the managers and directors were clashing. HR organized a sit down with the managers so we could express our frustrations. They listened to us, walked away for a bit leaving us some busy work, and then came back and told us that essentially the directors are our bosses and we have no right to complain and doing so is very unprofessional, essentially yelling at us for 15 minutes. I left as soon as I found another job a month later.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
barrkel 5y ago
Wellbeing, even when it's sincere, is a top-down effort - as in way up the tree-tops - and usually raining down diagonally from a different org. Meanwhile, down on the leaves of the org tree, you have delivery pressure from users, peers, and so on. If the pressure is high, no amount of messaging about wellbeing will make any difference. Taking time off, whether it's some kind of leave or for some wellbeing meetings of some kind, just takes time out of your workday, resulting in increased pressure because now you're even further behind. It's quite hard not to become cynical about the disconnect between aspirational messaging and these pressures. There are answers, but they require cultural and managerial enforcement. Heroism needs to be discouraged. Delivery slippage and failure to make dates need to be seen as organizational process and planning failures, and not as individual failures: feedback that schedules are too tight, expectations are unsustainably high, resourcing isn't right. If your team or org has a culture of heroism - people risking burnout, working into the night, on weekends, on holidays, to make deadlines - stop it. Don't reward it. It's not sustainable, it creates peer pressure to do the same, and it is one of the most damaging things you can do to employees' wellbeing.
- granshaw 5y ago
  Let me tell you, delivery pressure exists even right at the very top. You think there’s no pressure as a CEO/COO beholden to 30% top line growth this quarter? I sometimes think about being in that position and it seems pretty scary too
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    I’ll take it with a golden parachute. Why not? Can’t lose.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Delivery pressure increases as you go higher in the management structure. The most stressful part is that as you transition from IC to manager and work your way up the org chart, you become more abstracted away from actual being able to do the work and influence the outcome yourself. More responsibility, less direct influence. Some managers struggle with this pressure and resort to trying to make their teams feel as much of the pressure as possible. Good managers learn how to set a healthy cadence, manage expectations upward, and keep a healthy but reasonable amount of delivery pressure on the team. There is no realistic scenario where teams have zero delivery pressure, but it needs to be kept in balance. Burning everyone out all the time only works if you have a constant stream of replacement employees as everyone leaves, but then you lose institutional knowledge and reputation tanks. Managers who use these tactics need to be coached or removed from the company.
svenghopeful 5y ago
As a somewhat outside observer (socially liberal/democrat country, in SWE but outside of VC/Silicon Valley/FAANG - for now!), I wonder if the community think the rise in "F** you, pay me"[1][2] sentiment will be mediated in any way? I can definitely see the rise of this feeling with record profits, sky high stock prices, big Venture Funding rounds paired with rising income inequality it makes sense. If a group of workers are core to a companies profits, as Software Engineers are for tech companies, demanding a larger share of said profits also makes sense and should be encouraged. However if this new mercenary attitude is to just move at will because you can[3], I don't know how that endgame plays out. Is this a feature of the winner takes all/gold rush era we're in at the moment, does it fizzle out, is there a crash? Just thinking out loud as how this progresses...I dunno I just find it interesting. I'm sure the response will come something about the company do not care about you, however now I've started to see people here regard anyone just one "level" above them as part of the global capitalist elite.[4] All seems a bit unsustainable to me. [1] https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592 https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714 [3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464
- fogihujy 5y ago
  I haven't been in Sweden for a while, but in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers, but based on what I've seen it's basically tech workers changing careers because they are: 1) fed up with useless benefits 2) get no possibilities for developing their skills while on the job 3) are expected to work unpaid overtime for wages that won't pay the rent in the larger cities I've no idea how it will end to be honest, but I suspect there'll be a lot of buzz about it once post-COVID hiring starts.
  - fernandotakai 5y ago
    >in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers same where i live, tons of headlines saying there's shortage, but in our case, the salaries are just horrible. not only that but when you have a job that pays well, they basically demand your life for the company. it's much better to work as a contractor for foreign companies than working at local ones.
heisenbit 5y ago
I thought not much about this corporate wellbeing stuff until Corona. Then decisions my employer made started directly affecting my chances for survival. My employer was surprisingly proactive and protective very unlike the one of my wife. This wellness spam is virtue signaling. Whether it is truly based on values becomes only visible when the boundaries are tested.
- atty 5y ago
  I would agree. I was pleasantly surprised with how my company handled the pandemic. I knew going into the job that they had a reputation for treating their employees well, but I saw it first-hand with how they handled work from home, letting employees be flexible with time, letting employees take home equipment, and a million other little things. (We have a huge manufacturing footprint and quite a few place-dependent workers in other areas. I’m unsure if they are as happy as most of the work-from-home crowd, to be fair. I just don’t interact with that part of the org) Because of how well they have treated us, I see the occasional advertisement for yoga classes or meditation sessions as a perk I’m not interested in, instead of as a symptom of a poor workplace environment. However, if I felt constantly overworked, under appreciated, and under-equipped, each one of those emails would definitely feel like a slap in the face.
whatever1 5y ago
Oh well in the US they actively abolished their right to organize and have a democratically formed representation against the autocratic corporate hierarchy. Ceos could not care less about the company or its employees. What is the worst case scenario for them? A golden parachute on top of platinum compensation that is 100’s of times higher than their average employee. The employees and the local community will have to eat the s** from the management decisions. There is no social accountability for mismanaging companies, despite its wide social repercussions.
jack_riminton 5y ago
At one of my previous employers they boasted about the uptake of the free counselling service, which was more of an alarm bell to me
- chasd00 5y ago
  hah yeah my employer has a legal benefit which basically just means a free divorce lawyer.
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    Wow, no thanks!
Graffur 5y ago
Agreed - it's all BS. I get no benefit from the company pushing wellness crap.
hackerbabz 5y ago
I want to be allowed to do my work and then I want to go home. I can’t be weller than that.
ultrastable 5y ago
on the subject of pointless employee "benefits": I recently started working as a courier for a big food delivery platform. the agency through which I'm "employed" emailed me the other day about the benefits they provide, which consist of a link through which I can _buy for $15_ a phone app which gets me a small discount at a selection of participating retailers.
nkohari 5y ago
In case it wasn't apparent, it's useful to keep in mind that Tribune is very explicitly [0] a socialist magazine. That isn't to undermine the article's point -- which I largely agree with -- it's just critical to keep in mind the author's intent. [0] https://tribunemag.co.uk/about https://tribunemag.co.uk/about
minikites 5y ago
>but no amount of self-care can substitute for a living wage, manageable hours and secure employment. The motivation behind not providing these things is so that employees are too burned out to look for another job: https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html
pdimitar 5y ago
I feel this is one of those areas where it pays off if you are a bit darker and a more cynical individual. If you ask any random Eastern European (a group to which I belong) I can bet my neck that likely 90% of them will tell you "workplace well-being is a feel-good signal for the people on top and nothing else". I have had people fiercely contesting this with me during a table conversation, only for them to eventually begrudgingly admit in the end: "Yeah, I see your point, maybe preaching yoga to very stressed people who already almost don't have free time in their day isn't the best way to go about this...". And I am like -- oh, you think, dude? There are a number of things that can be done but I found many organizations to not care about enforcing policies like "no Slack messages after 19:00" or "minimize emails religiously" or "is this meeting actually useful for anyone except me who is in a chatty mood?" etc. Not to mention have people who police the meetings to keep them on topic and brief. And somebody paying attention if you are loaded with responsibilities outside of your job description? That's science fiction. Start from these: multi-tasking and having too many responsibilities. Reduce these two factors for each person as much as possible -- or, if the person likes the extra load, maybe consider a pay bump plus reducing a smaller chunk of their stress. Before something else outside of empty virtue signalling is done, the problem will persist. Companies just refuse to see the huge problems that even a single employee possessing a lot of institutional knowledge leaving will entail, so I guess they'll just keep suffering and pretending that some extremely half-done measures will fix the problem. They will not. Nobody cares about your luxury coffee at the office. Nobody cares about the funny furniture. Nobody has their life sustainably improved by a free neck massage for 15 minutes a week (although it does help somewhat). If any manager or business owner is here, take this single piece of advice: aim for measures that solve problems long-term.
agumonkey 5y ago
My issues with these things is that it's selling friendliness coated in newspeak lingo to make it special.
kingsuper20 5y ago
Hang on, first sentence: >As conditions at work deteriorate, How so?
ginko 5y ago
I really dislike HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end.
- FranchuFranchu 5y ago
  HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end is horrible?
RaceWon 5y ago
I work for a Huge healthcare corporation; they own 23 hospitals and employ over 60,000 people. Yet lunch breaks are 30 minutes long--an Adult can not eat a healthy meal in 30 minutes, a 6 year probably could though, they require far less food than a grown man. They also constantly promote walking as a real form of exercise---which is a joke. You have to workout to be healthy: working out, in case you don't know, is painful and it makes you smell bad; but there is No substitute.
PCMDAVE 5y ago
Outsourcing is the new slavery. I've been working in call centers for the last 3 years, and on top of that, I live in a third world country...yeah...I'm fucked.

219 points by powderpig 5y ago

There is an interesting discussion here about responsibility. An employee is obviously responsible for his own well being but it seems that companies aren't putting in much work. A good example is working from home: now it's the employees responsibility to find a good environment for working. The company now has several responsibilities less... I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Hopefully working from home will become and option and never a mandatory thing. Anyways there is more and more responsibilities on the employees and less on the employers (at least it feels like it).

krzrak 5y ago
> I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Lucky you :) Seems you didn't work on uncomfortable chair or on the kitchen table with kids running and screaming around. For me such basic stuff is very high on the list of priorities regarding work environment.
- mronetwo 5y ago
  Well what I'm trying to say is: there is more to it. Chair and desk is just a tip of the iceberg. Could phrase it in a better way.

varispeed 5y ago

This is so true. If a company has any wellbeing programs or even "free lunch" or "pizza Fridays" it's a big red flag. It basically means they don't pay enough for you to afford a pizza or lunch, not to mention a private therapy if stress gets onto you. Probably some managers are feeling guilty they pay so little, so they come up with these virtue signalling schemes. It doesn't bother them that they take private jets for a quarterly getaway in Caribbean, while employees spend extra hour before work to make sandwiches, because they can't afford going out at their lunch break.

fastasucan 5y ago
I battled with a previous employer with this. I don't care about the yearly weekend getaways, bi-monthly restaurant dinners, takeaway etc you buy us, I know best what makes me happy and its not that. Just give me what I need to do my work, be a good manager, give me good pay and let me enjoy my life outside of work in peace.
- pmg102 5y ago
  Right but this suggests those things might be for your benefit when it looks to me like they're for team cohesion ie for the employers benefit. There's nothing wrong with that unless they're trying to portray those things as being for your benefit!
  - pc86 5y ago
    Exactly, pre-COVID we would go out for a group lunch maybe once every month or two. 7 or 8 people total. Everyone paid their own way so it wasn't seen as a benefit but everyone did acknowledge it as a good bit of team building/cohesion around something everyone was going to do anyway (eat) so it was much better than trying to do something after hours or on a weekend when we have better things to do, or during the work day when the company has better things for us to do.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Yes, a multi-day team (weekday) offsite every now and then is fine (and probably beneficial). But, in general, weekend getaways and things like that are bad practices. Normally I travel a lot so nights and at least parts of weekends away are pretty routine for me. But companies should attempt to minimize it to the degree possible.
germinalphrase 5y ago
I realize this is a forum that caters to tech folks who might be accustomed to these kinds of perquisites, but I’m pretty sure you’re describing the default state of employment for the vast majority of people. No free food. No restaurant lunches everyday. No attention paid to employee mental health/wellbeing.

craig_asp 5y ago

Every time someone (usually someone from HR) tries to point out how great a company is because of its great perks like awesome couching sessions (not actual training), great team-building events, the best coffee machine ever, table tennis, etc. and how these somehow compensate for a subpar salary offer, I tell them: you just pay me well, give me more time off, and I'll handle all that myself.

mathattack 5y ago
It’s amazing how many people don’t realize that the Beyoncé concert in the office comes from the same pool of money as compensation. (The company only does it because it’s cheaper than bonuses) And everyone showers Instagram with photos of the show.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Was that a real thing or was the Beyonce concert hyperbole?
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Don't know about Beyonce, but it's pretty common for big companies to organize private concerts with big names for their employees. I guess it's a case of just spending enough money to make this happen.
    - corty 5y ago
      It is pretty commmon in departments such as sales, trading or marketing as incentive to e.g. invite $singer upon hitting the years sales target. Or organize a short holiday, visit to a sports event, fancy dinner, something. Seems to spill over to engineering or the whole company in some places.
      - xtracto 5y ago
        As a previous engineer manager this sucks . While sales people get all kinds of bonuses for doing their job. The Engineering team gets a pat in the back because nothing broke down.

JackPoach 5y ago

Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years? Or are people just becoming more entitled? I agree with the premise that workplace wellbeing is a bunch of BS (and just a small part of much large corporate BS universe), but is 2021 much different from 2001? I understand blue collar complaints and unfortunate situation workers found themselves in after union busting or outsourcing. But what's gotten worse in the white collar world, really? Benefits? They weren't that great 20 years ago, it's hard to find a place with good benefits now or then. Long hours? Not a recent invention. Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy. This outcome is much more likely than fantasizing about changing the whole organization you work for.

minipci1321 5y ago
Over here, yes, it has gotten worse since 2001 -- asian shops press much harder now, cheap remote labor really easily available ... competition vent through the roof. Longer hours, guilt feels stronger, sloppier work, inter-team communication destroyed (all-email in some language foreign to everyone), and -- still more lost deals. This is for everyone, workers and management. True, people maybe feel more entitled. But I think we also are getting introduced to a phenomenon new since 2001 -- having a solid "living wage" (which Trubune says noting else replaces), but burning out repeatedly, hating the job but being unable to quit, as providing for family takes more now than it used to in 2001, too.
- JackPoach 5y ago
  Yeah, but how much of that is your current employer fault? Let's take housing costs. Absolutely insane in California, Canada and some other places. Education/student loans - modern day slavery for many. Healthcare costs - seem to grow much faster than inflation or wage increase. The end result - destruction of the middle class as we know it. Or 'shrinking middle class' to put it less dramatically. So, I take it you live in Canada and this is the type of experience you describe. Is there a list of Canadian corporations that are to blame for this? Or is this more of a government fault? Or is this the problem that's not limited to Canada but is a general trend for most western countries because the neoliberal economic model is broken and it's silly to pretend that it's not? Personally, I am hesitant to blame some specific corporation for general economic misery.

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b0rsuk 5y ago

> The real problem with workplace wellness initiatives, according to Katie—beyond being inconvenient and vapid—is their obvious attempt to make up for the company’s poor employee benefits. ‘ The real problem is, wellness seminars are an attempt to push the issue on the employees. Just like "plastic recycling" initiatives push the guilt and the effort onto the consumer. It's a redirection strategy.

lepton 5y ago
I think my wellness is inherently my issue, and I'd prefer that my employer stayed out of it.
- fnord123 5y ago
  This is a limited view akin to thinking you're doing your part for addressing climate change by staying off the grid. I agree with b0surk that this is redirection and fundamental changes to society need to take place. Like an end to wage slavery.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  We’re all responsible for our own wellness but we’re also responsible for the wellness of those with whom we interact. The “wellest” person in the world could only tolerate a toxic environment for so long before they’d become unwell, through no fault of their own.
bsenftner 5y ago
It's also a cash grab by the "Mindful Mediation" consultancies. I am surprised by the number of corporations with Mindful Meditation programs, and how much they pay for these ineffectual band-aids. The fact that mediation consultancies have significant traction in today's "Human Resources" world is just nonsense and corporate doublespeak that pushes blame reasoning on the employee for 360 degree poor management. (FWIW, I'm a person that started mediating decades ago (due to being a youthful Beatles fan.))
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago

kumarvvr 5y ago

Workplace wellbeing Wholesome workplace Workplace is a family and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cropped up to support the efforts of managements to keep workforces in control and deflect resentment (people don't leave companies, they leave managers ! and other crap) The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes down the drain. No, my company is not my family. I may have good friends and great co-workers, but, at the end of the day, I only have the amount of loyalty to the company, as much as it has towards me. Perhaps its time the internet comes up with training sessions that promote the real face of large corporations.

mtberatwork 5y ago
> Workplace is a family This one is the biggest eye roll for me. Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat.
- throwamon 5y ago
  > Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat Oh, but society sure is hard at work moving towards this. Edit: I'm short of time, but as someone asked me to elaborate, I'll briefly give a few examples: - "Networking" replacing genuine friendships; related things such as "cut out friends who don't let you grow" which may be valid but usually translates to "replace them with someone who will lead you to material success" (that is, "networking") - Parents micromanaging their children's lives, measuring their performance on various tasks and rewarding/punishing them accordingly, often without regard to possible underlying issues (e.g. mental illness) - Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18 - "Tinderification" of relationships, followers as social currency, etc. My point is basically that family and friends are being replaced by the individual and advertising oneself.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    > Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18 i have two boys, if they're >= 18 and doing nothing but laying on the couch i don't see asking for rent being unreasonable at all! Coddling young adults as if they're still children does so harm to everyone.

jp555 5y ago

"one of the biggest causes of stress in the workplace is a lack of decision-making power among workers." You know what's also more stressful? Having to make more decisions in domains outside my circle of competence. Give me total autonomy in my area, while also not burdening me with having to contribute to EVERY decision.

hnarn 5y ago
Or the in-between variant: constant meetings and initiatives to create the illusion of worker influence on major decisions when there is in reality none at all. A complete waste of time to check a box somewhere about "horizontal hierarchy", and at the end of the day the decisions are being made "in the sauna" as it were anyway.
- banannaise 5y ago
  One of the best things for my mental health at work was learning to say (and believe) "I recommend we do X. If the VP decides to do Y instead, that will make the delivery date later, but that's his decision and ultimately his problem, not mine."

dan-robertson 5y ago

> in order for employees to actually be well, they need high wages, plenty of time off, and good healthcare I feel like this is the point of the first half of the article. Obviously if you work for a generous, profitable company, and you get good remuneration, healthcare and work–life balance, then workplace wellbeing may be honest and beneficial for both employers and employees (this side doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article). If you work for a company that pays poorly, has poor benefits, and low margins, then workplace wellbeing is more of the same. That all seems pretty obvious (there are benefits which are perhaps harder to fake, like pay or vacation days or limited working hours per week.) I suppose there is also a third kind of wealthy employer which tries to pamper employees into not wanting things the employer doesn’t want (eg collective bargaining). The first half of the article seems to just be a vehicle for a proposed solution to poor working conditions, which doesn’t really seem so connected to workplace wellbeing.

NoblePublius 5y ago

The only time your boss will give you a raise is when not giving you the raise would cost more money than the raise.

chasd00 5y ago
You could flip it around and say you will get a raise when there's a positive ROI on that raise. However, the point is the same. How could or why would you expect otherwise?
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  This never happens. Ever.

motohagiography 5y ago

The issue with these workplace wellness themes to me is that they violate normal personal and adult boundaries as if to try to access the psyche of employees, and this dismantling of personal boundaries is precisely what creates the psychotic and abusive relationships that appear in business environments. It is the lack of personal boundaries, and not the presence of them that creates harmful interactions and relationships. The worst possible way to create a 'safe' environment is to infantalize people and direct them like emotionally dependent children because by treating people as non-adults, it removes their basic dignity. Without this, people act out without normal boundaries, and think personal observations and other bizarrely inapproapriate behavior is acceptable or warranted. Corporate yoga and pseudo religious mindfullness probably often has the opposite effect. "Asking" people to submit to religious activities like meditation, smudging ceremonies, ancenstral acknowledgements, mindfulness, hypnosis, yoga, and others is not relating as normal adults. Sometimes I wonder what the conversations on an HN for HR people would look like. The most successful wellness programs I have seen came in the form of a self-improvement/hobbies bonus, and the 10%-20% open research/dev projects in some tech companies.

laurent123456 5y ago

In China I worked at a company which year after year was getting awards as a great place to work. But the perks meant staying after work for various events I couldn't care less about. For me the best perk I could have is to take a break from office stuff, not prolonging it after hours. Meanwhile, the whole IT department had to be moved at some point in a tiny office with no windows. They were also putting a lot of pressure on employees to come work on weekend to fix bugs and get releases ready - and of course at no extra pay. But yeah, you had cake on your birthday and free pizza once a month. Such a great place to work for!

goldcd 5y ago
I went through a stage of detesting pizza. "To thank you for your hard work, I've ordered pizza for everyone!" 'What time is it arriving?' "7pm" 'Right so you're stealing 2 hours of my time, which you're valuing as a couple of pizza slices - and imagined I'd be grateful?'
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  "To thank _me_ for my hard work, I'm leaving at 5 to go get Chinese takeout"

twobitshifter 5y ago

It’s been shown that these programs don’t improve health outcomes, but I believe there are tax & insurance benefits for employers who offer them.

goldcd 5y ago

I don't think "It's a scam" - just every implementation of it I've seen. Similar to 'self-guided learning' - Sure it's nice being able to get cash to pay for any online course I like, but it doesn't give me the "week in a room just focussing on a topic" that a more formal course would provide. It's the time given, not the course provided that was more valuable. It can work though if initiatives are related, ranked clearly and measured. (Hypothetically) A company might provide bonuses to management for the profitability of projects. Simultaneously, it might wish to discourage weekend working - people quit and quality suffers. With those two goals disconnected, you can guess what happens. If you link them - say internally bill for hours worked and double for weekends, rather just time-elapsed, then suddenly weekend work mainly vanishes - and projects are better resourced at the outset. To loop back to the "Wellness" you could implement it with commitment to resources, metrics, stated goals and I think it would work fine. Why are we promoting wellness? How are we going to measure it? What resources are you providing I didn't already have? etc.

granshaw 5y ago

Core to all of this is that anything provided by an employer could be used against you. Even if I wanted therapy sessions I’m not going to share my work related issues with an employer provided coach, hell no. One thing I’d like to see is independent co-operatives which a group of tech workers (across different companies!) chip in to pay for. They could include veterans for mentorship, agents to help with negotiations/job-hopping advice and possibly even representing you during negotiations, lawyers to help cross out stupid post-working-hours IP clauses etc Something like a union but minus the grossest parts like mandating actual pay, employment terms, and benefits. More of an easily accessed professional services group. I’m sure this exists in other industries.

wonderwonder 5y ago
"anything provided by an employer could be used against you". 100% this. I worked as a manager at a large company and the managers and directors were clashing. HR organized a sit down with the managers so we could express our frustrations. They listened to us, walked away for a bit leaving us some busy work, and then came back and told us that essentially the directors are our bosses and we have no right to complain and doing so is very unprofessional, essentially yelling at us for 15 minutes. I left as soon as I found another job a month later.
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barrkel 5y ago

Wellbeing, even when it's sincere, is a top-down effort - as in way up the tree-tops - and usually raining down diagonally from a different org. Meanwhile, down on the leaves of the org tree, you have delivery pressure from users, peers, and so on. If the pressure is high, no amount of messaging about wellbeing will make any difference. Taking time off, whether it's some kind of leave or for some wellbeing meetings of some kind, just takes time out of your workday, resulting in increased pressure because now you're even further behind. It's quite hard not to become cynical about the disconnect between aspirational messaging and these pressures. There are answers, but they require cultural and managerial enforcement. Heroism needs to be discouraged. Delivery slippage and failure to make dates need to be seen as organizational process and planning failures, and not as individual failures: feedback that schedules are too tight, expectations are unsustainably high, resourcing isn't right. If your team or org has a culture of heroism - people risking burnout, working into the night, on weekends, on holidays, to make deadlines - stop it. Don't reward it. It's not sustainable, it creates peer pressure to do the same, and it is one of the most damaging things you can do to employees' wellbeing.

granshaw 5y ago
Let me tell you, delivery pressure exists even right at the very top. You think there’s no pressure as a CEO/COO beholden to 30% top line growth this quarter? I sometimes think about being in that position and it seems pretty scary too
- deleted 5y ago
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- inter_netuser 5y ago
  I’ll take it with a golden parachute. Why not? Can’t lose.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Delivery pressure increases as you go higher in the management structure. The most stressful part is that as you transition from IC to manager and work your way up the org chart, you become more abstracted away from actual being able to do the work and influence the outcome yourself. More responsibility, less direct influence. Some managers struggle with this pressure and resort to trying to make their teams feel as much of the pressure as possible. Good managers learn how to set a healthy cadence, manage expectations upward, and keep a healthy but reasonable amount of delivery pressure on the team. There is no realistic scenario where teams have zero delivery pressure, but it needs to be kept in balance. Burning everyone out all the time only works if you have a constant stream of replacement employees as everyone leaves, but then you lose institutional knowledge and reputation tanks. Managers who use these tactics need to be coached or removed from the company.

svenghopeful 5y ago

As a somewhat outside observer (socially liberal/democrat country, in SWE but outside of VC/Silicon Valley/FAANG - for now!), I wonder if the community think the rise in "F** you, pay me"[1][2] sentiment will be mediated in any way? I can definitely see the rise of this feeling with record profits, sky high stock prices, big Venture Funding rounds paired with rising income inequality it makes sense. If a group of workers are core to a companies profits, as Software Engineers are for tech companies, demanding a larger share of said profits also makes sense and should be encouraged. However if this new mercenary attitude is to just move at will because you can[3], I don't know how that endgame plays out. Is this a feature of the winner takes all/gold rush era we're in at the moment, does it fizzle out, is there a crash? Just thinking out loud as how this progresses...I dunno I just find it interesting. I'm sure the response will come something about the company do not care about you, however now I've started to see people here regard anyone just one "level" above them as part of the global capitalist elite.[4] All seems a bit unsustainable to me. [1] https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592 https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714 [3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464

fogihujy 5y ago
I haven't been in Sweden for a while, but in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers, but based on what I've seen it's basically tech workers changing careers because they are: 1) fed up with useless benefits 2) get no possibilities for developing their skills while on the job 3) are expected to work unpaid overtime for wages that won't pay the rent in the larger cities I've no idea how it will end to be honest, but I suspect there'll be a lot of buzz about it once post-COVID hiring starts.
- fernandotakai 5y ago
  >in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers same where i live, tons of headlines saying there's shortage, but in our case, the salaries are just horrible. not only that but when you have a job that pays well, they basically demand your life for the company. it's much better to work as a contractor for foreign companies than working at local ones.

heisenbit 5y ago

I thought not much about this corporate wellbeing stuff until Corona. Then decisions my employer made started directly affecting my chances for survival. My employer was surprisingly proactive and protective very unlike the one of my wife. This wellness spam is virtue signaling. Whether it is truly based on values becomes only visible when the boundaries are tested.

atty 5y ago
I would agree. I was pleasantly surprised with how my company handled the pandemic. I knew going into the job that they had a reputation for treating their employees well, but I saw it first-hand with how they handled work from home, letting employees be flexible with time, letting employees take home equipment, and a million other little things. (We have a huge manufacturing footprint and quite a few place-dependent workers in other areas. I’m unsure if they are as happy as most of the work-from-home crowd, to be fair. I just don’t interact with that part of the org) Because of how well they have treated us, I see the occasional advertisement for yoga classes or meditation sessions as a perk I’m not interested in, instead of as a symptom of a poor workplace environment. However, if I felt constantly overworked, under appreciated, and under-equipped, each one of those emails would definitely feel like a slap in the face.

whatever1 5y ago

Oh well in the US they actively abolished their right to organize and have a democratically formed representation against the autocratic corporate hierarchy. Ceos could not care less about the company or its employees. What is the worst case scenario for them? A golden parachute on top of platinum compensation that is 100’s of times higher than their average employee. The employees and the local community will have to eat the s** from the management decisions. There is no social accountability for mismanaging companies, despite its wide social repercussions.

jack_riminton 5y ago

At one of my previous employers they boasted about the uptake of the free counselling service, which was more of an alarm bell to me

chasd00 5y ago
hah yeah my employer has a legal benefit which basically just means a free divorce lawyer.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Wow, no thanks!

Graffur 5y ago

Agreed - it's all BS. I get no benefit from the company pushing wellness crap.

hackerbabz 5y ago

I want to be allowed to do my work and then I want to go home. I can’t be weller than that.

ultrastable 5y ago

on the subject of pointless employee "benefits": I recently started working as a courier for a big food delivery platform. the agency through which I'm "employed" emailed me the other day about the benefits they provide, which consist of a link through which I can _buy for $15_ a phone app which gets me a small discount at a selection of participating retailers.

nkohari 5y ago

In case it wasn't apparent, it's useful to keep in mind that Tribune is very explicitly [0] a socialist magazine. That isn't to undermine the article's point -- which I largely agree with -- it's just critical to keep in mind the author's intent. [0] https://tribunemag.co.uk/about https://tribunemag.co.uk/about

minikites 5y ago

>but no amount of self-care can substitute for a living wage, manageable hours and secure employment. The motivation behind not providing these things is so that employees are too burned out to look for another job: https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

pdimitar 5y ago

I feel this is one of those areas where it pays off if you are a bit darker and a more cynical individual. If you ask any random Eastern European (a group to which I belong) I can bet my neck that likely 90% of them will tell you "workplace well-being is a feel-good signal for the people on top and nothing else". I have had people fiercely contesting this with me during a table conversation, only for them to eventually begrudgingly admit in the end: "Yeah, I see your point, maybe preaching yoga to very stressed people who already almost don't have free time in their day isn't the best way to go about this...". And I am like -- oh, you think, dude? There are a number of things that can be done but I found many organizations to not care about enforcing policies like "no Slack messages after 19:00" or "minimize emails religiously" or "is this meeting actually useful for anyone except me who is in a chatty mood?" etc. Not to mention have people who police the meetings to keep them on topic and brief. And somebody paying attention if you are loaded with responsibilities outside of your job description? That's science fiction. Start from these: multi-tasking and having too many responsibilities. Reduce these two factors for each person as much as possible -- or, if the person likes the extra load, maybe consider a pay bump plus reducing a smaller chunk of their stress. Before something else outside of empty virtue signalling is done, the problem will persist. Companies just refuse to see the huge problems that even a single employee possessing a lot of institutional knowledge leaving will entail, so I guess they'll just keep suffering and pretending that some extremely half-done measures will fix the problem. They will not. Nobody cares about your luxury coffee at the office. Nobody cares about the funny furniture. Nobody has their life sustainably improved by a free neck massage for 15 minutes a week (although it does help somewhat). If any manager or business owner is here, take this single piece of advice: aim for measures that solve problems long-term.

agumonkey 5y ago

My issues with these things is that it's selling friendliness coated in newspeak lingo to make it special.

kingsuper20 5y ago

Hang on, first sentence: >As conditions at work deteriorate, How so?

ginko 5y ago

I really dislike HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end.

FranchuFranchu 5y ago
HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end is horrible?

RaceWon 5y ago

I work for a Huge healthcare corporation; they own 23 hospitals and employ over 60,000 people. Yet lunch breaks are 30 minutes long--an Adult can not eat a healthy meal in 30 minutes, a 6 year probably could though, they require far less food than a grown man. They also constantly promote walking as a real form of exercise---which is a joke. You have to workout to be healthy: working out, in case you don't know, is painful and it makes you smell bad; but there is No substitute.

PCMDAVE 5y ago

Outsourcing is the new slavery. I've been working in call centers for the last 3 years, and on top of that, I live in a third world country...yeah...I'm fucked.