Should you follow your boss on social media? Can you meditate at work? Are employees as productive working from home? And what’s the real cost of wellness programs? Ripple Effect’s recent Wellness at Work series aimed to answer some of the questions business leaders may have when work and personal life intertwine. Through four podcast episodes that aired in May to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, host Dan Loney interviewed Wharton management professors Iwan Barankay, Nancy Rothbard, Lindsey Cameron, and Stew Friedman on the challenges of balancing work and life, and whether wellness programs help maintain an equilibrium.
Unpacking Employee Wellness Programs
The question that kicked off Iwan Barankay’s episode was a simple one: Why do companies create wellness programs in the first place? “I thought you would give me an easier question first,” Barankay joked with Loney. He noted that although companies’ motivations and how they define wellness vary, what they have in common is a focus on prevention and steering employees toward healthier behavior.
The increased popularity of wellness programs might have been due in part to the Affordable Care Act, which Barankay said allowed a big component of government costs to be dedicated to the programs. Fast-forward to today, and wellness programs haven’t been without controversy, including issues such as disability care lags and data protection concerns. “People’s behavior is being tracked more than before,” Barankay said, and not everyone is comfortable with giving away personal data in exchange for health-related rewards.
But Barankay suggested the true cost of wellness programs transcends data or money. In his academic view, one component is the human capital theory, noting the employer rationale: “I invest in their health. People are then healthier. They are not absent. And if they’re healthier, then health-care costs go down.”
Now that employers recognize the importance of wellness programs, how can they determine whether they’re effective? Barankay said rigorous studies and randomized control trials have tested whether incentives can change behaviors. Some proved that the programs did motivate people to eat better, exercise more, or take part in preventative care. But there was no compelling evidence that they led to outcomes like actually losing weight or quitting smoking. “We are still out on the quest to identify: What are the components that work well? The latest candidate for these are really the wellness programs that focus on mental health,” Barankay said, pointing to employee-reported concerns about stress and motivation. He also noted the difference between a wellness program and an amenity: A workplace gym by itself is an amenity, but if going to the gym is something the company rewards or fosters, that’s an example of a wellness program.
“The big challenge that many employees face is to understand: How can I manage my life and achieve all the goals I have for myself?” said Barankay, adding that when you’re in the same environment for both life and work, it’s difficult to set boundaries: “With remote work, and also with the experience of COVID, many people have not been able to develop a structure that allows them to identify goals and pursue them and manage their life in an effective way. They still look towards the company to help them in this process.”
Workplace Boundaries and Social Media
Remote work might be one reason employees have turned to social media to connect with colleagues in greater numbers than ever before. Nancy Rothbard, who is also deputy dean of the Wharton School and the David Pottruck Professor, conducted several studies around how people use social media at work.
Although the platform of choice may vary by age, Rothbard said, “By and large, people are connected with their colleagues on one of these platforms.” Her research involved asking participants to recollect various interactions with co-workers and also relied on an archival dataset of a nationally representative sample regarding social media use.
An interviewee’s position on the organizational chart matters, Rothbard found. “They would equate connecting with a boss on Facebook or Instagram as equivalent to connecting with their mother,” she said. “It was sort of the same horror that they would express as they talked about those relationships.” Her research also showed an interesting difference when it came to a supervisor’s gender. While Rothbard’s subjects responded positively to female bosses who disclosed personal information on social media, male bosses were viewed as “creepy” or spying on their staff. “This is one way in which gender role stereotypes around warmth and disclosure and connection were helping women bosses to be connected with others,” she said.
Rothbard found that colleagues were more comfortable connecting with their peers. Sharing content that was a little more personal, like photos of their dogs, can create stronger bonds in the workplace, she noted, adding that when people disclose personal information — not necessarily deeply personal information — it makes those around them more comfortable. “It gives them a sense of warmth that you’re displaying and a feeling that they know something about you that’s important, that’s not fake or surface-level,” Rothbard explained.
As some companies develop social media policies regarding what employees can post, Rothbard cautioned against banning the platforms altogether: “Especially throughout the last couple of years, where we’ve engaged in more remote and hybrid work, it’s also an opportunity to know what’s going on in people’s lives.”
Mindfulness in the Workplace
Remember “Don’t eat the marshmallow”? That’s the famous Stanford study that Lindsey Cameron, the Dorinda and Mark Winkelman Distinguished Faculty Scholar and assistant professor of management, referenced in the Wellness at Work episode about mindfulness. In the study, children were each offered a marshmallow but told that if they didn’t eat it right away, they’d get a bigger reward later on. “When people are able to have that sort of self-control, there are all these benefits in life,” Cameron explained. “Mindfulness is just another way to have emotional regulation, to allow you to separate and have a gap between a stimulus and a response.”
Cameron could draw from plenty of experience with remaining calm under pressure in her mindfulness research. When she worked with the National Security Agency in Iraq during the early 2000s, she meditated. “There’s actually a fair amount of research that shows that Special Forces, before they go out, if they meditate, there’s a jump in their executive functioning,” Cameron said.
Of course, mindfulness also applies to less high-risk work. “It depends a bit [on] what your job is,” she said. “What does it mean to be fully in the present moment? If you’re a call center rep, it’s right before you pick up the call, taking that breath. How are you going to interact with that client?” Research shows that medical teams who practiced mindfulness were less likely to make errors, she added.
Cameron said there are easy ways to integrate the practice into office work as well — and it doesn’t have to mean chanting “om” every day. While some employers implement traditional six-to-eight-week training programs, Cameron advocates for more on-the-spot interventions: “What can you do for two to three minutes, over two to three weeks, to sort of build up that muscle and put in those reps?” The solution can be as simple as giving employees a subscription to apps such as Headspace or Muse. Or it could mean pausing for a few seconds midday to ask, “Where are your feet? Where’s your back? How’s the quality of your breath?” Cameron called this “present-moment awareness.”
The next topic of Cameron’s research is a different take on mindfulness: In collaboration with the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, she’ll look into the recent popularity of psychedelics at tech CEO retreats. “What psychedelics do is create a sense of deep mindfulness in the person, and also a sense of ego dissolution, so that people become less me-centered and can be more other-centered,” Cameron said. “What are the impacts for tech workers? What is the impact for innovation and leadership?”
The Evolution of Work-Life Balance
In the 1980s, when Stew Friedman, who founded the Work/Life Integration Project and is founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program, started researching work-life balance, he said he was viewed as “strange” for exploring what was regarded as a women’s issue, at least in the U.S. at the time. Today, the concept is finally gaining acknowledgement as critical to the functioning of any modern office. “Now it’s standard for organizations around the world to be asking the question, ‘How do we help our people grow as people?’” Friedman told Loney.
Fittingly, it was a shift in Friedman’s own work-life balance that prompted him to investigate the topic. In the early 1980s, he was a graduate student researching and teaching talent management systems and the development of leadership talent at the University of Michigan. When his son was born, he felt a sense of responsibility for making the world a better place for him.
“What do I do now to ensure that the world he grows up in will be one that encourages his flourishing, his safety? It was a question that I hadn’t really given enough thought to before I actually met him. But it was a question that I couldn’t get out of my head after that moment,” Friedman said. When he went back to the classroom, he framed the question in a way he hoped would resonate with his students: “How are you as future business leaders going to cultivate a world in which people can be the people they want to be outside of work, as parents, as friends, as members of their communities?” Some students didn’t see the relevance of the question. But a few leaned forward in their seats.
After he was hired by the CEO of Ford in the 1990s, Friedman and the company’s executives created a program called Total Leadership. They looked at employees as more than “just components of our productive machines” and had them articulate their values and what they cared about most.
Friedman said that although workplace norms look different than they did when he was growing up — the rise of remote work and the increased number of women in positions of authority are two examples — trusting employees to experiment with the best ways to get things done will lead to greater loyalty and productivity.
“Clearly, the trend is in the direction of greater freedom, greater sense of control, greater belief that people want to be productive in the different parts of their lives,” said Friedman. “And when you give them the tools and the support to do that, the returns are great for your business.”
Published as “The Work-Life Balancing Act” in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
