Workplace Wellbeing: When good intentions at work miss the mark
Next Wednesday, April 29, is National Workplace Wellbeing Day. Organised by the business representative group, Ibec, its aim is to prompt organisations to question if they are providing their employees with the supports they need to thrive at work.
Such supports in the form of workplace wellness programmes are becoming increasingly popular with organisations now offering stress management classes, resilience workshops, and gym memberships.
It’s a trend that looks set to continue too, with the Harvard Business Review predicting that global spending on programmes like these will reach $94.6bn this year.
In Ireland, almost seven in 10 of the 1,000 respondents to a 2025 Ibec survey said that workplace wellbeing had become more important to them over the previous two to three years, and more than one in four had noticed greater investment from their employers.
Deirdre O’Shea, a professor of work and organisational psychology at the University of Limerick, gives two reasons why employers are paying more attention to wellness interventions.
One is that they are under pressure to do so from a policy perspective.
“An ISO standard (internationally agreed guidelines developed by experts) on psychosocial health and safety in the workplace was published in 2021,” she says. “That motivated organisations to think about how they manage employee wellbeing.”
Two is the growing body of research that shows happy and healthy employees perform better at work.
One example is a 2019 London School of Economics report, which found a positive correlation between employee wellbeing and performance measures across all industry types. It also found a lower staff turnover rate.
“Employers benefit from employees being well through lower rates of sick leave and turnover and higher levels of productivity,” says O’Shea.
“It makes financial sense to invest in workplace wellness programmes.”
Wladislaw Rivkin, an associate professor in organisational behaviour at Trinity, suggests another reason why more employers are prioritising employee wellness: The stressful nature of the modern workplace.
“Research shows a steady rise in work-related mental health impairments like burnout, depression and anxiety over the past decade,” he says.
“Some argue this rise is linked to contemporary work demands and changes in the world of work, such as increased flexibility requirements.
“This may have a part to play in why employers are offering employee wellness initiatives in order to reduce sick leave and enhance productivity.”
Not everyone agrees with the effectiveness of these initiatives.
A 2024 Oxford University study A 2024 Oxford University study analysed survey responses from 43,336 employees at British companies that offered workplace wellness programmes.
It concluded that employees who participated in them were no better off than those who didn’t.
William J Fleming, a research fellow at Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, says he was prompted to carry out the study because “there has been a lot of cynicism over certain workplace wellness programmes and extensive debate over the best approaches for improving workplace wellbeing. I wanted to test those concerns.”
Having looked at the data, he now wonders whether employers are making a mistake in implementing these programmes.
Rather than offering interventions such as stress management classes that focus on bolstering employees’ ability to do their jobs, he suggests it would be more effective to look at the demands made of employees.
“But they also take more effort to fix, which is why individualised wellness solutions can be so appealing, especially in contexts where HR departments may have limited capacity to make the changes that would matter most.”
Rivkin agrees that “workplace wellness programmes need to consider the demands workers face in order to have an impact. If you can’t cope with your workload and have to spend lunchtime at your desk trying to catch up, then you can imagine how useful the likes of a lunchtime meditation session will be. Such one-size-fits-all interventions often turn out to be one-size-fits-no-one”.
For such workplace wellness programmes to work, they need to be targeted. O’Shea says: “It’s all about offering the right interventions to the right person at the right time.
“People find it frustrating to be told that the solution to their heavy workload is for them to learn to manage stress better. Organisations can be well-intentioned in offering supports such as stress management classes, figuring that offering something is better than offering nothing. But rather than rushing in, they need to devote time and effort to identifying the issues that need to be resolved.
“It’s only when those issues are diagnosed that they can be treated.”
Patrick Haslett is the product manager of Ibec’s KeepWell Services, which provides tailored workshops and management training to help organisations address gaps in their offerings to employees.
Like Fleming and Rivkin, Haslett believes “the cornerstone of true workplace wellbeing is how work is managed. If an employee is drowning in tasks, a time-management webinar isn’t just ineffective; it can feel incredibly dismissive of their reality.”
Specific and systemic workplace wellbeing policies are what’s needed, and Haslett says they are needed now more than ever.
“If you look at the landscape we are navigating today with its constant economic, technological, and social shifts, and increasingly diverse and intergenerational workforce, organisations should be prioritising wellbeing and taking a proactive approach,” he says.
“When they do, ripple effects are felt across the entire workforce. Businesses thrive when their people do.”
O’Shea’s advice for organisations wondering how to implement wellbeing initiatives in their workforce is to hire a professional trained to assess workforce needs and design appropriate interventions.
“There are resources online that can help with this, such as the World Health Organization’s (WHO) document on mental health at work which provides a simple framework for implementing interventions,” she says.
She recommends starting by looking at the design of work. “When you design it well, you can prevent certain problems from arising. But some things can’t be designed out. Medical staff, for example, will always be exposed to difficult circumstances.
“When you are satisfied that there is little more that can be done to improve the design of the job, you can then look at individualised interventions to provide employees with additional coping strategies such as time management classes, meditation or yoga.”
Jackie Ffrench is a dental health strategist who specialises in wellbeing. Until December 2025, she worked as a business development manager with a Galway-based dental laboratory. There, she took the approach recommended by O’Shea and helped the laboratory win the first healthy workplace accreditation for an Irish dental business.
She started by identifying the particular stresses impacting the staff of this laboratory.
“There were long hours with technicians working 12-hour days five days a week, staff suffering from aches and pains as a result of working in a hunched-over posture all day long, and there was an issue with a lack of job flexibility,” she says.
Some changes were made to job design to tackle these problems. “The technicians now work a four-day week instead of five,” says Ffrench. “And we introduced part-time options to allow for more flexibility.”
Specific interventions were also designed, such as physio-led pilates sessions offered to those with postural problems. Some of the resources she found most helpful when deciding on these interventions included the Health and Safety Authority’s work positive tool, the WHO mental health document, and the Lift Ireland programme.
“All of these helped us to listen to our employees, hear their concerns and act upon them,” she says. “By taking that time to listen, businesses can identify where their organisations are weak so that they can then start making them stronger.”
- Find out more about workplace wellness initiatives taking place all over Ireland for National Workplace Wellbeing Day at www.ibec.ie
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