It’s inevitable. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will. The subscription audit. Money gets tight, the bank statement gets scrutinized, and the purge begins. The meditation app goes first, followed by the language course and the gym membership nobody has used since January. What survives isn't the best or most valuable subscription. It's the streaming service, because the season finale is tonight and nobody in the house is letting that go. Organizations run the same audit wheneve

It happens every December. Somebody, somewhere in your organization is buying sunglasses they don’t need. They’ve just realized there’s money left in their flexible spending account (FSA), the spending deadline is approaching, and the only other option is losing the money (their own money!). And so, it’s a pair of sunglasses, a jumbo box of Batman Band-Aids, and another spare thermometer. That money was set aside for them. It sat unspent for eleven months, not because they

You want to renovate your kitchen. You agree on a budget and describe what you want (“open it up, make it brighter!"). Eight months later, the kitchen is finished to a high standard and looks beautiful – but it’s just not what you imagined it would be. The island is in the wrong place, there’s only one cupboard, and is that a toilet!?!? The work isn’t bad. The contractor built exactly what was asked for. The problem is that the ask was never clearly specified. That gap betwee

Most organizations know how to look like they're transforming. The workshops get scheduled. The journey maps get built. The roadshow slides look polished. Stakeholders nod in the right places. And then, six months later, the same frustrations are still there, it's just buried under new vocabulary and a lot of collective fatigue. This is transformation theater. And it's far more common than anyone in the room wants to admit. The tell isn't usually the quality of the work produ

Picture this: 2pm on a Tuesday. Strategy session. Packed agenda. But across the table, someone is shifting in their chair every few minutes with chronic back pain. Someone else has had a tension headache since Monday. A third person mentally checked out twenty minutes ago from two weeks of poor sleep. Nobody says anything. The meeting carries on. This is what poor physical health looks like at the organizational level. Not dramatic absences or disability claims, but a quiet e

If you’re waiting for exit interviews to uncover what’s driving turnover, you’re already too late. By the time employees sit down for...

There’s an increasing awareness of the importance of employee engagement in organizational impact. When figures like ‘US employee...

Change is essential for continued organizational success but can be confusing and exhausting for staff, especially if communication is poor.

How does low levels of employee engagement impact your organization, and what can you do about it?

There is no mental health without physical health, and there is no physical health without mental health.

If you can’t change what you don’t measure, but you don’t know how to measure something, will it ever change?

Not sure if you could be bothered implementing a wellbeing initiative? Then don't.

Like an annual physical, avoiding a regular organizational health check-up won't make your problems magically go away...

To most people, the term ‘wellbeing framework’ makes as much sense as the term ‘spaghetti clock tower’. Which is fair. And delicious...

This is the result when I asked an AI image generator to create ‘wellbeing at work’: Where to start… Let’s address the elephant in the...

Scenario 1. You’ve never owned Lego but somehow, as you jump out of bed, 25 minutes late on a Monday morning, you stand on a particularly...

A variation of this conversation happens more often than you’d think: Person 1 (at a dinner party): Paul, I hear you do wellbeing too!...

Quantum mechanics is one of those terms that gets used by TV and movie characters to sound intelligent, and by writers of TV shows and...