Ep. 10 Wellness Theater
We’ve all seen the emails that start with "Now more than ever, we need to talk about wellness." But whose problem is it really?
IN THIS EPISODE
Lars and Aparna are joined by Hebba Youssef, Chief People Officer at Workweek and founder of the "I Hate It Here" newsletter. We’re digging into the $60 billion workplace wellness industry to ask: Are meditation apps and sound baths actually helping, or are they just cheap bandaid solutions that allow companies to avoid fixing structural problems? Hebba shares her raw experience navigating grief and EAPs, the dark side of workplace "weight loss challenges," and why "burnout" is often just a corporate rebrand for workplace depression.
THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH
Why are wellness programs being used more by managers and not individual contributors? And is it a "benefit" if doesn't change how people experience work?
TAKE THIS WITH YOU
The "CPO of the People" Standard: Why tiered benefits (where executives get better care than hourly or salaried workers) are a moral system set up to fail.
Destigmatize the Calendar: Follow the lead of founders who put therapy sessions publicly on their calendars to signal that taking care of yourself is part of the job.
Exhaustion is Data: Reframe your burnout. If the system is making you sick, the problem isn't your "lack of resilience"—it’s a lack of reciprocity.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
I Hate It Here — Hebba Youssef’s HR newsletter.
Maintenance Phase — A podcast exploring the flaws in the wellness industry.
Minda Harts — Author of The Memo, discussed regarding trust in the workplace.
CONNECT WITH US
Visit us at https://www.circleback.club/
Aparna on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnarae; aparnarae.com
Lars on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien; https://www.larsgallien.com/
Full Transcript
Lars: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of "The Circle Back Club." I'm Lars Gallien, and I am here as always with my lovely co-host, Aparna Rae. This is a podcast for white collar workers who have ever suspected the problem isn't us and want to do something about it. We started this project really to say out loud what workers are thinking and not saying in the all hands meetings, performance reviews, emails that start with, "As we navigate this challenging time," or my favorite, "Now more than ever."
And now more than ever, we need to talk about wellness. We're asking whether the entire workplace wellness industry—the apps, the stipends, the meditation subscriptions, the resilience trainings—are they actually helping anyone or is it just a really expensive way for companies to avoid measuring and addressing the real problem? We're asking today, whose problem is it really?
Aparna: And our guest today is Hebba Youssef. She's the chief people officer at Workweek and the founder of I Hate It Here, which is, to be honest, the only HR newsletter I read. It's actually really funny. It's so good. Your Instagram page is great. You've led people teams at fintech startups and media companies. You write regularly and publicly about the gap between what HR says and what HR does, and we are so glad to have you here.
Hebba: I'm honored to be here. I hope I surprise and delight everybody with some of the things I'm gonna say today, and maybe make people laugh. My goal is to laugh through the pain of this job.
Aparna: We expect nothing less. So I wanna start with asking you both about your experience of wellness at work. What sort of things have you participated in or even championed or implemented? Hebba, we'll go with you first.
Hebba: I'll start with a personal story because I think it's pretty important because it makes my judgment around wellness very clear. In 2019 I lost my father, and in 2022 I lost my brother. They both had heart attacks. My brother was very young, he was 42. So it was very triggering and traumatizing for me. It was my first real experience with big loss in my life. I was really struggling in the workplace. I was like, "Holy cow, I don't know what to do." I had never been to therapy. Therapy is very stigmatized in the Arab community.
My boss, who had also lost her father, saw I was struggling really hard at work, and she's like, "Hey, I really need you to get help." I was like, "I don't know how to get help." She sent me to our EAP, which I used for the first time as an employee. If you've ever used an EAP, they ask you a lot of really serious questions at first to assess what kind of risk you are. It was really scary because I was like, "Oh my God, who gets the answers to these questions? Does my boss know?" At the time I was in HR, so I share this saying that was my first experience with our EAP and I was in HR, someone who told people, "Oh, you could use our EAP."
I went through that whole experience—getting therapy, trying to get my insurance to cover it, my insurance not covering it, finding therapy in-network versus out-of-network—it really irritated me. I was trying to actively get help to work on this really serious thing that is impacting my work, and now I have to jump through all these hoops. After that experience, I worked really hard every other place I went to make our benefit offering the easiest and most frictionless one to use. But I still think there's a major gap between employees needing help and actually getting help because of the hoops. Even if you call your EAP today, they're gonna ask you those serious... it can be scary for anybody who's never pursued help. As an HR leader, my job is to make it as frictionless as possible simply because I experienced it and thought it was pretty bad myself.
Aparna: Coming back to work after a loss is already so hard, and then not knowing how to use the services or what you're gonna be out of pocket is so hard. Lars, what about you?
Lars: Now I'm reflecting on being at work after loss, and Hebba, I'm so sorry for the back to back. Grief is weird and doesn't know time. Being at work after having someone die is so weird because it's like, "Why isn't everyone grieving? Why don't we stop everything?"
Hebba: I try to talk about it as much as possible because I think people are so scared to say they're not okay, and I'm kind of one of the first people who's like, "I am not well. Let me tell you why." I am still trying to actively process grief from years ago while navigating a world that feels increasingly unsafe for anybody who's struggling.
Lars: My former employer was Nike. I was part of the Nike Mindfulness Club.
Hebba: I just wanna be like, they weren't like, "Just do it." "Oh, you're sad? Just do it."
Lars: We were trying to "just do it" with campus-wide meditation and sound baths. When you're in a large corporation, it's like, "What's the business case? How do we scale this?" Half of us were in HR, but we had no influence in creating programming like this in HR. It was still from the approach of the personal versus the collective—it was just scaling a business effort but inserting sound baths.
Aparna: When I think about workplace wellness, what comes up for me is my experience having W2 jobs in my 20s. I worked at two different organizations that did some variation of a fitness or weight loss challenge, and it was tied to your health insurance. You can get a break on your premium if you participate in this fitness challenge. The stress of being—I've always been a little chubby, and this was so stressful. They would literally bring in fitness instructors for a 6:30 or 7:00 AM group fitness thing.
Even as recently as 2019, my then business partner wanted to do a holiday weight loss challenge. This was literally a month after my brother had passed away, and I was already at the lowest weight I had ever been. Why was my business partner suggesting we do a company-wide weight loss challenge in the month of December? Since then, I've found a lot of healing in the podcast called Maintenance Phase. They've done multiple episodes on workplace wellness and how tying health insurance to losing weight is insane. Today, Hebba, we wanna talk about wellness with an HR insider.
Hebba: The episode of The Office where they all try to do the weight loss challenge came to mind. I too have been at organizations that track your sleep and weight. First of all, that's none of your business. Thinness was very in when I was growing up, and I was not thin—I had an athletic build and curves. There's so many interesting things that impacted how I experienced the world, only to get to your professional years where you think people are really gonna "get" you, to then have your company be like, "We should all lose weight together." How about no?
COVID rocked us where everybody was suddenly at home and we were collectively having a breakdown. That brought more conversations to light around wellness being more than how much you weigh—it's how you're taking care of your mind, body, and spirit. When I think about wellness now as HR, I'm thinking about how we are supporting their brains, especially where mental health has been at an all-time low. There's been so much job loss that it's messing with the psyche of everybody. My first thought is: are we giving them a place to feel safe to say "I need help"? Where I see it go sideways is when it comes back to being tied to business impact. It feels like such a weird concept, but studies show when you invest in that stuff, healthcare costs go down. How do you walk into that conversation and not just make it about the business? If employees aren't using a benefit, why are we offering it? Maybe they need something else.
Aparna: But it's not totally wild because now employers are offering GLP-1s to bring employees in. Ten years ago, fertility benefits were that carrot, and now it's GLP-1s.
Hebba: I just made a TikTok about how Deloitte is scaling back some of their benefits—cutting IVF or adoption benefits for internal staff, cutting parental leave from 16 weeks to eight weeks, and not doing pension accruals after 2026. Someone in the comments said their employer offered GLP-1s up until this year and stopped because it's so expensive for the overall healthcare cost. Overweight is related to heart health, so whether insurance should cover it is an interesting conversation.
Lars: Let's talk about the industry itself. The workplace wellness industry is $60 billion. Low estimates say 50% of all workers in the US are suffering from burnout. Dr. Nicole DeKay told us burnout is another way to say workplace depression.
Hebba: I'm writing that down—"workplace depression." That's good.
Aparna: By calling it burnout, we've taken the responsibility away from having to address the fact that we're giving people acute depression. The symptoms of burnout—that Venn diagram is a circle with depression.
Lars: For the workers, they may not even know what benefits they have or what is feasible for them to be addressing. What are the signals that they can disclose real issues?
Aparna: One thing I want us to be careful about—we're not saying all wellness efforts are fake. But we've noticed we're turning a structural problem into a personal problem. An organization not knowing how to support employees coming off bereavement leave, which is usually only three days long.
Hebba: I can't get over my grief in three days. Bereavement doesn't even cover things like miscarriage coverage. It irritates me—you can lose a pet and that can have the same impact. We can't be playing the "grief Olympics."
Aparna: Dr. Nicole DeKay mentioned how work, especially in the US, is making a lot of us really sick. The answer is not a sound bath, although they are lovely.
Hebba: It always tries to make you the problem, and sometimes I'm like: "I don't actually think you're the problem. The whole system's the problem." How do you as an HR person solve for the whole system?
Lars: We look at this through the lens of liability. When we see the pattern of risk tolerance moving from the company to the worker, we gotta put a flag up. If you are inserting a wellness program and only measuring use rates instead of focus on the actual health of the employee because that liability would be on the employer—what's actually happening? Are leaders signaling care without actually requiring that behaviorally employee to employee?
Aparna: You write for an audience of HR people and leaders. These people in these roles are also really exhausted. What are you hearing from people leaders about what's actually working versus theater?
Hebba: The HR people are really tired. The emotional labor is at an all-time high. LinkedIn noticed HR people are changing jobs the most—90% are changing jobs every year or two. As we try to solve for the wellbeing of our employees, we are also struggling. What's not working are things like random apps—"we got you all Headspace for a year, enjoy." Some employees love it, others roll their eyes. The "mental health workshop" is another one that doesn't work—we're not gonna solve all issues in 60 minutes.
What is actually working are benefits employees come and tell you they need. For us, that was covering more therapy. Some people are on an Oura Ring kick where everyone can figure out if they're sleeping enough. I'm not even sure it's the best at tracking sleep, but people like it. What I think works is taking the burden off the employee. We cover 85% to 100% of healthcare costs. If we're taking most of the burden off, that could be the thing to get them access to what they really need.
Lars: Who takes advantage of the benefits? Manager usage is as high as 87%, but it's down to 41% for individual contributors.
Hebba: We do not do tiered benefits like that. You're gonna give better benefits to your most paid people who have more access than your least paid people? That is a system set up to fail.
Aparna: Starbucks had tiered benefits where store workers had shorter parental leave than people in headquarters. If you are on your feet all day, you need more recovery than someone sitting in an ergonomic chair.
Hebba: I would feel so morally compromised if I was getting access to better things than my employees. It doesn't sit right with me. They deserve all the benefits that I get access to.
Aparna: When someone is mentally unwell and there's no support at work, the strain lands elsewhere—it comes home. How often is that getting named in HR data?
Hebba: Some people believe work and personal lives are separate—that's so false. Your manager has more of an impact on your mental health than your partner. I don't know many people measuring that because they don't know how to solve those problems. If they measure it and it's in the data, they might feel compelled or liable to solve it. Managers often tell me, "I can tell that person's suffering, but I don't wanna ask about it because then I have to reply and I don't know what to say."
Lars: It's hard in a system that's bureaucratic and individualized. You are liable—that's what the system tells you. Self-help is just looking at the individual, not the collective. How do we move people towards the structural?
Hebba: Managers are accessing benefits more because they feel the freedom and protection to dictate how their time is spent. You as HR could create time and space within your system. We don't need to be in meetings eight hours a day. I asked my co-founders if they were in therapy actively. They said yes, and it's visible on their calendars. I cannot be your CPO therapist—it helps me to know you're taking care of yourself. Taking time in the middle of the day to take care of yourself—if you can destigmatize that, you start to chip away at the problem. If the executive level sets the example, everybody else feels comfortable.
Europe offers a year of mental health leave in some countries. We don't have that net here. There is a huge gap in America between what the government provides and what people actually need.
Aparna: The government has been unwilling to pass paid family and medical leave legislation.
Hebba: We are one of six developed nations that does not have paid federal parental leave.
Aparna: What gives us the right to call ourselves a developed nation when we have 50% of Americans living in poverty? We don't have community while we're struggling. We don't have paid leave. Chronic burnout is depression. What about this is developed?
Hebba: Our literacy rate is awful too, with half our country reading at less than a sixth-grade level. Some days I wake up and I'm like, "I am gonna send emails today," and then I think: "AI is taking clean water, there are global wars, engagement is at an all-time low." I feel like I'm masquerading as corporate capitalist Barbie. I went into HR to fix the experience for others—I will not be the HR person who lets sexist comments fly or buries sexual harassment. I sleep at night by telling myself if I can make it better for the 65 employees in our org, maybe they go off and help other orgs.
Lars: The first thing we have to do is stop pretending. We are a culture of avoidance.
Hebba: Minda Harts wrote about trust in the workplace—employees don't trust us. People hate HR. At a lot of places, HR does suck. Trust for HR is at a low. I don't want to tell people, "Go disclose everything to your HR person," because the average HR person might do nothing or retaliate. It's hard to build trust when profitable corporations are laying off people in droves. Some of us don't know how to help others, and we inherently do the wrong thing out of sheer ignorance.
Aparna: Let's move towards rapid fire. What is one wellness benefit that actually works and companies underfund?
Hebba: Financial wellbeing benefits—giving access to a financial coach to help budget and figure out student loans.
Lars: Paid family medical leave.
Aparna: A phrase about HR culture you would be happy to never hear again?
Hebba: "Do more with less." It's a way to tell people "I'm not gonna fund what you want to do." Stop asking me to do more than is humanly possible. I'm gonna do less with less.
Lars: Culture fit.
Aparna: A company that's doing something genuinely right when it comes to wellness?
Hebba: Cakes is giving employees $32,000 a year for daycare benefits.
Lars: Duolingo—they haven't laid off a single employee since they moved to their AI-focused strategy.
Aparna: If you could strip away everything companies currently spend on wellness and start from scratch, what would you prioritize?
Hebba: An external therapy resource where you can get a session with a licensed therapist in under 30 minutes without going through insurance hoops.
Lars: Responding individually to people.
Aparna: Same.
Hebba: I need everyone to stop talking to me when the UV is greater than seven. I need to be tanning with SPF 50.
Aparna: You can get as much red light as you get from your mask by just going outside in the morning or evening.
Hebba: If you in HR are not taking care of yourself—if you are burnt out—your employees are going to feel the impacts. I want more HR people to put themselves first because it serves the entire organization. I hate us to always be the servant leader of everything.
Hebba: I'm actively working on a book about how you change the system at your organization, because I am sick and tired of books telling me I am the problem and not acknowledging the system.
Aparna: My action item is for people to use precise language. People use words like burnout or trauma loosely, and these have long-term health consequences.
Lars: On our next episode, we are going to talk about the real cost of symbolic capitalism and how to create liberation for all at work.
Aparna: If you have a story you wanna share, please reach out at hello@circleback.club. I'm Aparna.
Lars: I'm Lars. We'll circle back.
