Are we sleepwalking into wellbeing washing?

Wellbeing washing is when companies say all the right things on LinkedIn, but don’t genuinely care about their employees’ wellbeing. Instead, they implement cheap, ineffective support to improve the organisation’s reputation. How can we avoid this?

Wellbeing washing come back to bite offending organisations through poor engagement, attrition and reputational damage. But they deserve it, right?

Unfortunately, these outcomes can also affect companies that are trying their best with wellbeing but find themselves sleepwalking into a similar scenario.

How to spot wellbeing washing

Everything might look good to those outside a company: the organisation looks wellbeing-focused and rosy-cheeked. But, to employees, there’s often a disconnect between what the company is saying and the actual working environment.

Over time, the mismatch between what the employer says and what they do can cause damage to engagement, productivity and, ultimately, lead to attrition. It can also affect external perception, such as through Glassdoor reviews.

What is accidental wellbeing washing?

Wellbeing washing, like greenwashing, can be a conscious decision to sugarcoat a reputation in order to achieve a certain outcome, such as becoming an employer of choice, or appealing to socially minded consumers.

By contrast, accidental wellbeing washing happens when a company genuinely cares about employee wellbeing, and does its best to implement an effective and impactful wellbeing strategy, but that strategy fails to meet employee expectations. Accidental wellbeing washing has no malicious intent behind it, but it can certainly affect employees in the same way.

This can happen for several reasons. One of the most common is because wellbeing strategies that appeal to a majority fail to meet the needs of several small cohorts that collectively make up a sizeable proportion of the workforce. This means that the strategy can fail due to lack of inclusion.

Secondly, accidental wellbeing washing can be due to poor choices of wellbeing support. For example, one-size-fits-all solutions that deliver a generic service but struggle to be effective across a diverse population.

Thirdly, it can be due to mismanaged communications with employees. You could have the most effective wellbeing support in the world, but it will fall flat on its face if employees don’t understand its value or how to get access at their time of need.

How can HR avoid this?

The key to avoiding wellbeing washing is to be aware of cohort-specific needs across your workforce. It’s difficult to integrate cohort needs into your wellbeing strategy unless you, or someone in your HR team, has similar lived experience.

The best vendors on the market for wellbeing support provide services that are personalised to individuals. But they also remain aware of the impact gap that can occur when well-meaning employers implement wellbeing support.

Remember, even if you’ve listened to employee feedback, you may only be meeting the needs of the majority. Establishing working groups based on shared characteristics is an effective way to surface cohort needs across your workforce.

After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. But unless you’ve surfaced these needs, how do you really know for sure if your wellbeing strategy is meeting the needs of your workforce?

HR Magazine – Samuel Lathey