When Workplace Wellbeing Really Means “Please Cope Better With What We Won’t Change”

There is a particular kind of workplace message that always makes me pause.

Please remember to prioritise your wellbeing.

It usually arrives with good intentions. Sometimes there’s a reminder about the EAP, perhaps a link to a wellbeing resource, an encouragement to take proper breaks and switch off at the end of the day.

Then you look at the reality of the working culture.

People eat lunch at their desks. Senior leaders send emails late into the evening. Someone who leaves on time is described as having “good boundaries” in approximately the same tone you might use to describe someone who has taken up an unusual hobby. Teams have been restructured, roles have quietly expanded and everyone is doing more with less.

But please, remember to prioritise your wellbeing.

There is something uncomfortable about placing the responsibility for wellbeing entirely in the hands of the employee when the organisation controls so many of the conditions in which that

wellbeing has to exist.

And I think we need to become much more honest about it.

You can’t empower people to set boundaries and punish them for having them

This is something I see in coaching all the time: the official message and the cultural message are not always the same.

Officially, nobody expects you to answer emails outside working hours.

Culturally, your manager replies at 10.47pm.

Officially, employees are encouraged to speak up when their workload becomes difficult.

Culturally, the person who always says yes is the one described as committed, dependable and ready for progression.

Officially, flexible working is supported.

Culturally, everybody has quietly noticed who is physically in the office when senior leadership arrives.

People are extraordinarily good at learning the real rules of an environment.

You can write whatever you like in a wellbeing policy, but employees tend to pay far more attention to what gets rewarded, what gets noticed and what happens to people who actually use the policies available to them.

That matters psychologically because behaviour is shaped by consequences. If saying no repeatedly results in subtle disapproval, if requesting support seems to affect how capable you are perceived to be, or if the people who sacrifice the most are consistently celebrated, employees learn.

They adapt.

Sometimes what an organisation describes as a personal boundary problem is actually a perfectly rational response to the culture it has created.

The employee is not separate from the system

I’m a coach, so of course I believe individuals have agency.

There are times when somebody genuinely does need to look at their own behaviour. Maybe they’re perfectionistic. Perhaps they agree to everything because they’re frightened of disappointing people. They might avoid delegating because they don’t trust anyone else to do something properly, or spend two hours producing something that needed to be good enough in forty minutes.

Those things are absolutely coachable.

Psychologically informed coaching shouldn’t turn every struggle into somebody else’s fault. Compassion without accountability isn’t particularly useful, and neither is telling someone that the entire world needs to rearrange itself before they can make any changes of their own.

But the opposite is just as problematic.

We can become so focused on building individual resilience, confidence and coping strategies that we stop asking whether the environment is repeatedly undermining them.

The Health and Safety Executive’s approach to workplace stress is useful here because it looks beyond the individual. Its Management Standards identify six major areas of work design associated with stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.

Employers are expected to consider things like whether workloads are achievable, people understand what is expected of them, employees have enough support and people have some reasonable influence over how their work is carried out.

That is quite different from asking whether Sandra has downloaded Headspace.

And it should be.

Sometimes “self-care” quietly becomes self-management of organisational dysfunction

I’m increasingly wary of conversations in which an employee describes being exhausted by workload, unclear priorities, constant organisational change or poor management and the conversation immediately moves towards how they can regulate themselves better.

There is nothing wrong with regulation. I work therapeutically and from a trauma-informed perspective; I understand how valuable it can be to recognise our stress response, increase our window of tolerance and develop ways of responding rather than simply reacting.

But nervous-system regulation is not an alternative to fixing bad systems.

If a person is repeatedly activated because their manager changes expectations without warning, they may benefit from developing strategies to manage uncertainty. Their manager may also need to stop changing expectations without warning.

Both things can be true.

If someone is terrified of saying no, coaching might help them understand where that comes from and practise being more assertive. But if everybody in their team knows that saying no damages your reputation, we don’t have an individual confidence problem anymore.

We have a culture problem.

This is the part organisations sometimes find less comfortable because it moves wellbeing away from something employees consume and towards something leaders are partially responsible for creating.

An app is easy to purchase.

A difficult conversation with a director about the way their team is being managed is less convenient.

People notice when wellbeing is performative

Employees are not stupid.

They know when an organisation genuinely cares about their wellbeing, and they know when “wellbeing” has become another corporate vocabulary word.

They notice when mental-health awareness week is followed by another round of redundancies handled badly. They notice when leaders encourage openness about stress but visibly reward the people who work themselves into the ground. They notice when a staff survey produces the same concerns for three years and every year the response is another listening exercise.

At some point, asking people how they feel without changing anything starts to become its own source of cynicism.

The latest CIPD health and wellbeing research illustrates some of that gap. In its 2025 survey, 64% of organisations said they were taking steps to identify or reduce workplace stress, yet only half believed those efforts were effective. Average sickness absence had also risen to 9.4 days per employee, the highest level reported in more than 15 years, with mental ill health the leading cause of long-term absence.

That doesn’t mean wellbeing programmes don’t work.

It does suggest that having activity and changing the conditions people are working under are not necessarily the same thing.

HSE guidance is very explicit about this too: employers are expected to identify the underlying causes of work-related stress and take action to reduce them. Workload, control, management support, workplace relationships, clarity of role and the way change is handled all form part of that picture.

In other words, wellbeing is not only something the employee does after work.

It is affected by what happens to them during it.

This becomes even more important when people are already adapting

I think about this particularly in relation to neurodivergent professionals, disabled employees and people living with chronic illness.

Some people arrive at work already doing a considerable amount of invisible adaptation.

They may be managing fluctuating energy, sensory environments, executive-functioning difficulties, pain, inaccessible systems or the mental load of deciding whether to disclose what they need. Some will have spent years becoming extraordinarily good at making all of that invisible.

I know from lived experience that when adaptation becomes normal, it can be surprisingly difficult to recognise how much energy you are spending simply making things work.

And capable people often become very good at compensating.

That can be wonderful for an organisation right up until it isn’t.

Because if your workplace depends on employees continually using their personal reserves to bridge gaps in workload, management, accessibility or resources, you haven’t really created resilience.

You’ve created hidden debt.

Eventually somebody pays it.

Sometimes through burnout. Sometimes through sickness absence. Sometimes through declining confidence or disengagement. And sometimes by quietly updating LinkedIn at 9pm and taking their talent somewhere else.

Maybe wellbeing needs to become less comfortable

When I work with someone as a coach, I want them to develop more agency, not less. I want people to recognise where they can change something, advocate for themselves, communicate more effectively and stop automatically sacrificing themselves because it feels easier than disappointing somebody else.

But I also want them to be able to recognise when the problem isn’t that they’re failing to cope well enough.

There are times when the healthiest coaching outcome may be somebody becoming less willing to tolerate something.

That might not look like improved resilience from the organisation’s perspective.

It might look like a boundary. A request for an adjustment. A challenge to an unrealistic deadline. A conversation about workload. A decision not to keep rescuing everybody else. Occasionally, it may look like an employee realising they no longer want to work there.

That is the risk of genuinely empowering people.

You don’t get to decide what they do with the clarity they develop.

And perhaps organisations need to ask themselves whether they genuinely want psychologically healthy, self-aware employees — or whether they want employees who are psychologically skilled enough to keep tolerating whatever is asked of them.

Those are not quite the same workforce.

So by all means, tell people to take care of their wellbeing.

Just make sure that when they actually try to do it, your culture doesn’t punish them for taking you seriously.

Because “look after yourself” means very little if the unspoken second half of the sentence is “as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us.”

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I’m Emma, a BACP-accredited counsellor, EMDR practitioner and trained coach. I provide psychologically informed coaching for professionals and organisations, with particular interests in neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness, confidence, leadership, burnout and sustainable performance.

My approach draws on coaching, psychological understanding and lived experience. I’m interested in helping people develop greater confidence, agency and sustainable ways of working — while also recognising that not every workplace problem can, or should, be coached out of the individual.

I work with professionals and organisations online. For individual coaching, workplace coaching, workshops or organisational enquiries, you can contact me through my website.