Picture a company running its wellness week. There is a mindfulness session on Tuesday, a talk on resilience on Wednesday, healthy lunches on Thursday. People attend, some of them find it genuinely useful, and the feedback forms come back warm. On Monday everyone returns to the same inbox, the same vacancy that has not been filled in eight months, and the same manager who sends instructions at eleven at night.
Nobody in that story did anything wrong. The sessions were well run. The organisation meant well. Something is still missing, and I think it is a question.
The question we have been asking
For a long time, workplace mental health has mostly been organised around one question: how do we help people cope? It is a good question, and it has produced real things. Employee assistance programmes, counselling access, resilience training, awareness campaigns that made it easier to say you were struggling. People have been helped by all of them. I have seen it, and I would not want any of it taken away.
The trouble with the question is where it points. It points at the individual. It assumes the pressure is a given, and that the work is to make the person sturdier in the face of it.
The question we have been asking less
The other question is: what are we asking people to cope with? How much work, with how much control over it. How fairly decisions are made. How managers behave on a bad day. Whether people feel secure enough in their jobs to say something is wrong.
This is not a fringe idea. The World Health Organization’s 2022 guidelines on mental health at work set out organisational interventions alongside individual ones, and include training for managers. ISO 45003 treats psychosocial risk as part of occupational health and safety, the same family of thinking as a loose railing or an unsafe machine. The guidance already looks at conditions. Much of everyday practice has not caught up.
What pressure does
Put a capable person under constant pressure and uncertainty, and you should not be surprised when they struggle to think clearly. Offering them a session on focus does not reach the cause.
What nobody teaches
There is a third gap, and it sits between the person and the conditions. Organisations teach people systems, compliance, sales targets and safety procedures. Very few teach them how their own minds behave under pressure, what happens in a conflict, or how stress narrows attention. We promote people into management because they were good at the technical work, and then expect them to handle grief, fear and disagreement in the people they now lead, without ever having been taught how.
I think that education belongs at work as a basic capability, in the same way we would never send someone to operate machinery without training.
Three foundations, together
So I have come to look at workplace well-being through three foundations. Conditions: the environment people work in. Education: what people understand about being human. Support: what is available when someone needs help. They are connected. Better conditions do not remove the need for support. Good support cannot undo conditions that keep producing the strain. Education helps people use both. An organisation can work on all three at once; none has to be finished before another starts.
What I am not saying
I am not saying that every difficulty a person has is caused by their employer. People bring histories, bodies, families and lives into work, and plenty of what they carry started long before their first day. I am not saying wellness activities are worthless, and I am certainly not saying that education or better management replaces clinical care. People who need a psychologist, a psychiatrist or a doctor should be able to reach one, and part of good support is making sure they can.
I am saying that if we only ever ask how to help people cope, we will keep treating the same injuries in the same places. Asking what we are asking them to cope with is harder, less comfortable and more useful. It is the question I would like more organisations to sit with.