As the scope of health and safety continues to expand, many businesses or organisations have begun incorporating wellness into their health and safety frameworks. But before we can meaningfully discuss wellness at work, we need to be clear on what it actually is or what it isn’t.
Health, in a workplace perspective, focuses on how work affects the body and mind, e.g. illnesses, injuries, substance exposure, fatigue, stress.
Wellness is broader. It’s the holistic condition of a person’s overall wellbeing, e.g. happiness, morale, fitness, comfort, diet, energy levels, and life satisfaction.
Understanding the difference is essential, because workplaces often try to influence wellness without addressing the work factors that shape it.
The chicken or the egg problem is relevant when it comes to discussing wellness. It’s well documented that work can influence a person’s wellness, both positively or negatively. Equally, a person’s wellness can influence their work. But the tricky part is determining which came first; is the person’s wellness suffering because of work? Or is work suffering because of the person’s existing wellness outside of work? Or is it a mixture of both?
To complicate things further, workplaces can educate, encourage, and support wellness behaviours, but they can’t control what happens or what the worker does outside working hours. That’s where the limits of workplace influence become obvious. However, from a worker’s perspective, wellness initiatives can feel tokenistic if the organisation ignores the work related factors that directly affect wellbeing, such as:
- Excessive hours or poor roster patterns
- A stressful or unsafe work environment
- Poor workplace culture or strained relationships
- Limited autonomy or flexibility
The common workplace ‘wellness initiatives’ (healthy food options, a mindfulness app, or a wellness week) won’t fix work issues. Workers notice when the gestures don’t match or address the reality they face. I once sat in a wellness presentation where we were told of the benefits of growing a veggie garden at work, so we could pick fresh salads or vegetables for our lunches; great except for we worked on a ship, so where were we supposed to put our garden to protect it from the rough seas on a steel deck?
So, who owns wellness? The honest answer is no single party owns wellness. It must be a partnership. Workplaces and workers both influence wellness, and both must share accountability. That means agreeing on:
- What “optimal wellness” looks like
- Which factors influence it
- Who controls each factor
- How responsibilities are shared fairly
A workplace cannot expect workers to make all the sacrifices, and workers cannot expect workplaces to solve everything outside of work. So how do we make wellness meaningful?
I was involved in an international research project exploring workplace flexibility across leading Australian companies. One of the strongest findings was that flexibility looks different depending on the industry, role, and context. For example:
Working from home may support wellness for office staff with childcare needs. But a train driver can’t work from home, so flexibility might instead mean easier shift swaps, predictable rosters, or adjusted start/finish times. In other industries, flexibility might mean split shifts, choice of worksite, or personalised shift patterns.
The key insight for me was that wellness improves when workers and workplaces openly compare needs, constraints, and possibilities. Without that conversation, assumptions fill the gaps and wellness initiatives miss the mark.
I believe the bottom line is, if workplaces and workers don’t openly discuss what they need, what they want, what’s realistic, and what ‘wellness’ actually means in their context, then any investment in wellness will struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Wellness is a shared responsibility, built on honest conversations, practical flexibility, and a commitment from both sides to make work and life fit together in a sustainable way.