The Well-Being Illusion at Work
- Jun 29
- 7 min read
Barbara Suigo is a charisma expert, HR consultant, and author. Specializing in the development of soft skills, she has published the "Charisma Trilogy" and offers personalized training and coaching programs for leaders and professionals.
This article draws on some reflections inspired by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose work has long focused on power, leadership, and organizational dynamics. In his book Dying for a Paycheck, Pfeffer addresses an issue that is still often difficult to state clearly in the workplace: some management practices considered normal can have a profound impact on people’s physical and emotional health.
He is not only referring to extreme environments or openly abusive managers. He also looks at the everyday reality of work: excessive workloads, long hours, insecurity, limited autonomy, constant pressure, and the difficulty of separating private life from professional life. Taken individually, these elements may seem part of the normal strain of work. Over time, however, they can become a steady source of exhaustion.
In recent years, many companies have started to speak more seriously about wellbeing, and this is certainly an important shift. Mental health, balance, engagement, resilience, and listening have become common topics. Companies offer webinars, support programs, coaching paths, and initiatives focused on stress management.
All of this can be useful, but it becomes truly credible only when it is not separated from the way work is organized every day.
A course on stress management can help, just as a mindfulness program can certainly offer valuable tools. But no initiative can compensate, on its own, for a work structure that produces constant pressure, fear, overload, or lack of control.
This is where the wellbeing illusion begins: when wellbeing is presented as an answer to distress, without looking closely enough at the conditions that help create that distress.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and the human cost of work
Jeffrey Pfeffer does not approach this subject from a moralistic point of view. His work is interesting precisely because it starts from organizations, systems, management practices, and their concrete effects.
In Dying for a Paycheck, Pfeffer argues that many practices of modern management can have serious consequences not only for employees’ health, but also for the quality of work and organizational results.
The point is simple. When people work for too long under constant pressure, the cost does not remain confined to the individual sphere. Sooner or later, it enters the organization as well, appearing in turnover, absenteeism, disengagement, loss of trust, and the difficulty of retaining talented people over time.
For this reason, well-being cannot be treated as a secondary topic or as an initiative detached from the real life of the company. It has to become a very concrete question: how work is designed, distributed, measured, and guided every day.
A company can achieve results even in very demanding environments, at least for a while. It can have people who stay late, always respond, accept heavy workloads, do not complain, and withstand pressure. From the outside, everything may look efficient. But the real question is: for how long? At what human cost?
Pfeffer invites us to look exactly there: not only at the final result, but also at the way that result has been produced.
The problem is not stress itself
Work, as a matter of fact, always involves a certain amount of pressure. It would be naive to imagine an organization without urgency, responsibility, or difficult moments. In some cases, a certain tension can even activate positive energy: an important project, a new challenge, or a responsibility that helps people grow. So the problem is not effort itself, but what happens when it becomes chronic.
There is a major difference between an intense period and a chronic condition. It is one thing to go through a demanding phase knowing that it has a beginning and an end. It is another to live in an environment where every week feels like an emergency and every request is treated as urgent.
When everything becomes a priority, nothing really is. When pressure becomes the normal way of working, people start adapting to it. They get used to sleeping worse, answering outside working hours, feeling guilty when they disconnect, and avoiding asking for help so they do not appear weak. Little by little, what should be exceptional becomes ordinary.
This is precisely where wellbeing risks losing strength. It often intervenes later, when distress is already visible, and it frequently cannot reach what came before: the structure of work, implicit expectations, the way power is distributed, and the relationship between goals and resources.
When symptoms are treated, but the causes remain
Many well-being initiatives are born with good intentions, and no one can deny the usefulness of tools that help people manage stress, conflict, or difficult moments more effectively. What needs to be observed is when these tools are used as the only answer to a problem that existed before them.
A webinar on resilience may be useful, but it cannot, by itself, lighten a workload that has become structurally excessive. In the same way, talking about empowerment has little meaning when people have no real room to make decisions, and a day dedicated to positive communication does not change a climate shaped by fear and constant pressure.
The point is this: well-being initiatives work when they accompany concrete change. They lose strength when they are expected to compensate, on their own, for organizational conditions that continue to produce stress.
At times, companies ask people to develop increasingly sophisticated inner resources in order to tolerate conditions that should simply be reconsidered. This is one of the most uncomfortable points. Resilience is certainly a valuable quality, but it can become ambiguous when it is turned into an obligation. Being resilient should not mean accepting everything, at any cost. Nor should it become an elegant way of telling people to adapt to an environment that continues to erode them.
The more honest question, then, is not only: how can we help employees manage stress better? The question is, above all, why does this environment produce so much stress?
Autonomy, control, and psychological safety
Among the recurring themes in Pfeffer’s work are autonomy, safety, work-family conflict, and the sense of control. These may seem like simple aspects, but they have a strong impact on the quality of the work experience.
Having some control over one’s work does not mean doing whatever one wants. It simply means being able to organize, at least in part, time, priorities, methods, and workload. It also means not experiencing every day as a sequence of demands imposed from outside, and being able to say, without fear, that something is not sustainable.
Psychological safety, in the same way, is not an abstract concept. It can be seen in meetings, informal conversations, feedback, and the way mistakes are handled. In a healthy environment, people can raise problems before they become crises. They can point out an excessive workload, ask for clarification, and admit a difficulty without feeling immediately exposed.
When all this is missing, distress does not always explode. More often, it accumulates, and people become more cautious and less creative. They speak less, protect themselves, and do only what is strictly necessary.
They stop investing emotional energy. The organization may still continue to function, but it loses something valuable: trust, participation, and collective intelligence.
Cosmetic well-being
Well-being becomes cosmetic when it mainly serves to show that the company “takes care of people,” without changing what, in practice, makes their work genuinely difficult.
Well-being initiatives can be useful, especially when they come from a real commitment. Their credibility, however, is not decided in official statements, but in the daily management of work: sustainable workloads, respected boundaries, problems that can be raised without fear, goals proportionate to available resources, and managers are also evaluated for the climate they create.
An organization may speak a great deal about wellbeing while, in practice, continuing to reward the exact opposite behaviors: constant availability, internal competition, excessive control, long presence, and silent sacrifice. In that case, the message becomes confusing. Words say one thing, the system teaches another. People always understand which of the two messages really matters.
A managerial responsibility too
Well-being cannot be delegated only to HR functions or external initiatives. HR can certainly play a fundamental role: designing policies, offering tools, listening to needs, building pathways, and, first of all, collecting signals. But everyday well-being depends above all on the quality of management.
This is what directly shapes the way work is experienced. Clear priorities, protection from unnecessary pressure, and attention to the climate make even difficult moments more manageable. Confusion, control, and fear, on the other hand, quickly turn a demanding workload into a source of exhaustion.
The quality of management can be recognized in the ordinary life of work: in the clarity with which priorities are set, in the way mistakes are handled, and in the willingness to listen to a problem before it becomes a crisis.
These may seem like small gestures, but when repeated every day, they either build trust or slowly consume it. For this reason, well-being should not be treated as a topic separate from leadership. It is leadership, and it represents the way power is used every day.
Toward a more mature idea of well-being
A more mature idea of wellbeing does not promise permanent happiness, nor workplaces free from tension. Work remains work, and there will always be pressure, goals, constraints, and complex moments.
A healthy environment does not turn personal endurance into proof of value. It asks for commitment, not personal erosion. Well-being becomes concrete when it enters organizational choices: workloads, time, autonomy, roles, management quality, and the possibility of speaking before a problem becomes a breaking point.
It is not enough to help people cope better. We also need to ask what, in everyday work, forces them to cope with so much. Perhaps this is the most useful lesson we can take from Pfeffer: work is not only a place where economic value is produced. It is also an environment that affects health, identity, relationships, and quality of life.
This is why speaking about wellbeing is not enough. We need to look at how work is built. Because well-being does not begin with a program. It begins with a deeper choice: organizing work so that people can contribute, grow, and achieve results without slowly consuming themselves in the process.
Read more from Barbara Suigo
Barbara Suigo, Senior HR Consultant, Author, Charisma Expert
Born in Italy and naturalized as a French citizen, Barbara Suigo is an HR consultant, author, coach, and trainer specializing in the art of charisma. With solid experience in corporate communication and extensive training in NLP, persuasion, and storytelling techniques, she supports professionals and companies by offering personalized coaching, training programs, and in-depth content. Barbara is the author of the Charisma Trilogy, a work that deeply explores how to develop and harness personal influence and leadership presence. She has also published other books focused on personal and professional growth, solidifying her role as a leader in the field of soft skills development.
