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by pdimitar 1870 days 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.