Why workplace wellness programmes don’t work

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

A couple of years ago a piece of work was published that ended up getting headlines across the world. The academic paper – the work of Oxford University’s WillIam Fleming – found that workplace wellness programmes didn’t work. That meditation app, that burnout webinar, that healthy eating week – they had no impact on work. It raised questions about what was really going on at work, were organisations using wellness initiatives as reputational alibis, giving them deniability when workers inevitably became exhausted by an unsustainable pace of work.

While still early in his career William Fleming has already started proving himself as one of the most exciting workplace thinkers around. He works as part of Jan Emmanuel De Neve’s Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University.

My conversation with him takes in not only what is often called the Oxford wellbeing study but also his latest work which explores the stunning finding about impact of compressed working hours as a means of going to a four day week. He talks about his brand new research into AI chatbots and what we’re learning about their impact on wellbeing at work. Overall it’s an outstanding discussion by someone who is examining the impact of accelerating work on the rest of us.