A yoga voucher is lovely. It is not clinical care

We should declare an interest before we say anything else. Our own clinic runs yoga, qigong and meditation classes for its team. We take part ourselves, we look forward to them, and we would not give them up. Movement, breath and stillness have a proper place in a working week. Nothing in what follows is an argument against any of it.

The argument is about what happens when the menu becomes the strategy.

When the menu becomes the strategy

Most organisations we meet can show us a wellbeing offering that reads like a menu. A fruit bowl in the canteen. A webinar in the spring. An app licence renewed every January, with a login rate nobody wants to look at too closely. A wellness week in October, with a smoothie bike if the budget stretches. Every item on the list is well intentioned, and some are genuinely pleasant.

Then stand back and ask two quiet questions of the whole page. Is any of it clinical? And is any of it measured? In our experience the honest answer to both is usually no. The menu grew item by item, each one easy to buy and easy to announce, and somewhere along the way the sum of the items started standing in for a plan.

There is a gap hiding under that. In 2022, Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence found that 91 per cent of executives believed their people felt cared for at work, while only 56 per cent of employees agreed. A menu can feel like caring from the top and feel like very little from the floor.

What people actually carry

Here is what walks through a clinic door in any ordinary month. Anxiety that has been building since Christmas. Grief that never got its time. Drinking that has crept up. A marriage under strain, a parent's diagnosis, money worry that wakes someone at four in the morning. This is what staff carry into work, under the lanyard and behind the pleasant good morning.

These are clinical matters. They respond to clinical care, delivered by qualified psychologists and accredited psychotherapists, in a private room, over time, with the same clinician each visit. A lunchtime stretch class does not touch them. It was never meant to, and it is unfair to the yoga teacher and the employee alike to pretend otherwise.

Employers deserve better options

None of this is a failing of intention. Employers bought menus because menus were what the market offered, and because the alternative looked like something only very large companies could do. We think employers deserve better options than that.

A clinical structure is not complicated to describe. A confidential one-to-one session every month for every member of staff, outside the management reporting line, families covered too, because what happens at home comes to work. Individual sessions stay private, and only anonymised themes reach leadership each month through The Listening Post, so decisions can rest on what people are actually carrying. Prevention rather than intervention, with a hand on the pulse in between.

Keep the fruit bowl. Keep the wellness week if the team enjoys it. Keep the yoga above all, we certainly intend to. Just do not ask any of it to do the work of a clinician.