The dogma of wellbeing

With the Office for National Statistics, the British Medical Association and the Duke of Cambridge all behind the concept, a critique is long overdue

You see the ads on the Tube. Vitabiotics, which says that it is the UK’s No.1 Vitamin Company, sells Wellman vitamin supplements, as well as Wellwoman and, inevitably, Wellkid – this last in the form of liquids, soft jelly pastilles, and ‘smart chewable’ tablets.

Like its equally liberal, rounded, holistic cousin, wellbeing, wellness is everywhere. Yet the doctrines of ‘well’ will demand more of the impossible from architects and designers in future.

At workplace designers Gensler, regional managing principal Nila R Leiserowitz rightly notes that design trends in environments that deliver healthcare, rehabilitation and ‘holistic wellness-minded care’ have evolved in a manner similar to the way building design has embraced sustainability. Both have become more structured, more respectable.

Design for wellness and Green design, however, have something else in common: unquestioned assumptions. It is assumed that workplaces can and should be designed to nudge employees into healthier workstyles, lifestyles and ‘behaviours’, just as it is assumed that workplaces and employees must see it as their business to help save the planet.

Wellness will be The New Green. It will be about diet in the canteen. It may prove unable to avoid the excesses of the anti-gluten, anti-fat ‘clean eating’ movement, an inescapable part of wellness today. Wellbeing will be about mental health; already the British mental health charity MIND publishes a Workplace Wellbeing Index. Not to be outdone, Public Health England has since 2009 signed up more than 1000 organisations to the Workplace Wellbeing Charter, which it hopes will become ‘a kite-mark for healthy business in England, and an award that all organisations aspire to’. The Wellbeing Charter audits Leadership, Absence Management, Health and Safety, Mental Health, Smoking, Physical Activity, Healthy Eating and Alcohol.

Myself, I thought the purpose of a workplace was wealth creation; the purpose of workplace design, to assist that process in an effective, efficient and graceful manner. But in the future the workplace will be about on-site screening equipment, up to and including MRI scanners. The well workplace will organise tests on bodily fluids and tissue. It will boast mobile graphics, to encourage employees to make ‘informed choices’ about their health. There will be pollution monitors and rooms for psychotherapy. You think I exaggerate? You’re wrong. Already retailers and mid-sized service firms in the UK have used wearable devices to monitor employee body language, posture and sleeping patterns.

Maybe this will all be deemed as progress. But the idea of wellness at work has only really gained legs in a distinct historical period. That period stretched from when the certainties of the USA’s post-war boom gave way to the recessions that preceded the end of the Cold War, and on to the upheavals that followed that important juncture. As Ben Zimmer’s fine history of wellness in America shows, the concept of wellness has moved from a statistician’s ideal of maximising the potential of individuals (late 1950s), through to being the favoured subject of a pioneering CBS “60 Minutes” enquiry (1979), to becoming the goal of formal programmes with employees in countless workplaces (2000).

So the more technical, technocratic and tyrannical the workplace becomes in future, wearables, algorithmic employee recruitment and all, the more we can expect the agenda of wellbeing to grow in the workplace. The scourge of stress – especially, we may infer, the stress allegedly caused by tomorrow’s mythical waves of automation – will be vanquished by the religion of wellness.

Yet just as employees often suspect that the latest office recycling initiative merely provides another mission for the HR department, so they may one day resist wellness for its regimental overtones and for its intrusiveness. Prolonging life, postponing death – these goals only avoid a morbid dimension if happiness is achieved; but happiness, one of the stated goals of wellness, will itself only be achieved through a human sense of achievement, not through a wellness programme.

Tomorrow’s IT-assisted corporate fascination with wellness will mark a further move away from the desire for achievement. In the world of wellness at work, there will be no Thomas Edison electrical inventors, no more AG Lafley game-changers at Procter & Gamble. Instead, a yogic, Zen-like, zombie state of, um, stasis will prevail, where everyone smiles and begs their way to longevity in a placid, endless present: Night of the Living Well.