Ashish Kothari explains why most workplace wellness programs fail to make a real impact. Research by Will Fleming at Oxford shows that monocultures actually contain many microcultures, meaning problems stay hidden from some groups. Real change requires understanding these invisible divisions.
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There is no such thing as a monoculture anymore. Monocultures are made up of the sum of the microcultures inside an entire business. So you could be in one part of an office and living a great life with five people around you, but the other part of the office, there are a whole bunch of people who absolutely hate you and nobody even knows about it because they're not getting involved. Yes. So you're absolutely right. You're blind to it because you can't see. But the numbers don't lie. And so this leads to my second big point. What's really interesting is that once they get over the fact that, hey, we're just the mirror, if you look closely, you can say no to this, but then you're worse than you were before, in fact, before you came to this with open belief. And what you find is that once they're over that particular point, Ashish, it's very, very hard for them to actually argue the case in point that short term is going to really work. We don't really get into those conversations. And I really like your point. Will Fleming from Oxford University, he published a piece of work at the beginning of this year that said, well, being doesn't actually work in the current form. And it's quite scary because you've got a lot of organizations plowing a lot of money into what they call, well, being services, but they're negligible in their impact.
