Defining workplace wellbeing through interpretative dance

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 room first. From a health and safety (and general sanity) perspective, standing on a desk to do yoga as your colleagues get on with their work is inadvisable. The same goes for desktop meditation or interpretative dance. While these things are nice, doing them on a desk while your teammates study graphs on their computer, is not.

Here’s a wellbeing definition based on this image:

‘Wellbeing at work is the ability to engage in meditation and yoga beside fruit and very tolerant colleagues.”

This image reinforces a damaging stereotype that wellbeing is a one-time activity that can be inserted into the day if or when there is time, such as a pre-meeting breathing session, a monthly newsletter, or an annual mental health workshop. Like yoga and meditation, these things are also great, but isolated activities are not going to improve psychological safety, or build trust, or increase employee engagement.

Wellbeing involves looking at everything employees experience while at work, and determining how this impacts their ability to succeed in their role, while making them feel positive, engaged and included. That’s why our definition is:

‘Wellbeing at work is when your workplace experience is positive, and you have the desire, ability, and support to attain your goals and thrive in your career.’

As we clarify on our webpage, workplace wellbeing is based on five components: Health, Finance, Career, Connection and Purpose. Improving employee wellbeing means looking at the systems, practices, and expectations across these components to establish how your organization makes it easier for someone to do their job with minimal stress and frustration.

So while the picture above is good on the Health front (they clearly have access to good food and a pleasant work environment) and Connection (you must have positive relations with your colleagues if they don’t pelt you with food while meditating on a desk), it doesn’t do much to overcome the misconception of wellbeing at work, and how important it is to make work a more pleasant and more productive experience.  

Full disclosure, when I entered the w@w definition into the image generator, I didn’t get any meditation but the resulting image wasn’t much better…