If promoting occupational health in companies is already complex, then the promise of well-being begins to carry its risks

Written by Maite Saenz, Director of ORH.- We’re a little lost with this luxury thing, don’t you think? Concepts dance with us and we tend to use terms as synonyms that may carry a completely hostile hidden meaning. The bad thing is that if we also make decisions based on this starting point, we can end up with a beautiful garden, beautiful on the outside when it comes to planning it, but an enormous maze on the inside when it comes to managing it. This is what happens, specifically, with a healthy couple. I worry that we think they mean the same thing and that we can act on both in the same way. Common prose reduces them to the least common multiple, when in fact both are prime numbers. Sometimes they add, sometimes they subtract, but they never reduce to the same thing.

Let’s start from the beginning (and you know the beginning for me is what). Since we talk so much about luxury, do we know what it means, what it consists of, how it is defined and how it is expressed? In terms of health, we have greater clarity because we have medical indicators that tell us, with a greater or lesser margin of error, when the body and mind are healthy and when they are not. Plus, they warn us when we’re off track even before symptoms appear. But luxury… luxury is something else. And it’s not worth telling me that it’s about that, I don’t know what we don’t know but we feel that… No, not because that’s mental health, it’s not good- universe.

Well-being is above all a perception, it is a unique and non-transferable personal feeling that we are comfortable: with life, with a moment, with a situation, with a team, with a person… To be comfortable, to be good, says a lot. To enjoy luxury, each of us needs something different. Even someone who reduces it to an economic question, how much money does he need to consider himself financially prosperous? Like you, me, the person who sets interest rates, the person who sets the minimum wage among professions or the person who gives me long teeth by showing off his new car on Instagram? No, there is no single measure of well-being. The RAE defines it as “the set of things necessary to live well” and also adds that it is “a comfortable or well-equipped life in terms of what leads to a good time and peace of mind.” What would you like me to tell you? With this lack of definition, it is very difficult for me to come up with a list of well-being indicators broad enough to reflect the diversity with which they can be understood. The diversity is now very diverse and very dispersed.

If the promotion of occupational health in companies is already a complex matter, promising well-being begins to carry its risks, because we can face paradoxical situations such as the adoption of a regulatory measure such as telework that wants to promote well-being through accommodation, and which, in the long run, becomes a Rebound from additional stress or postural and visual problems, and by the way, another interface for the risk prevention and medical services departments of the company. Or we encourage exercise to promote cardiovascular health and end up with peak ILT on Mondays after rugby league (a real case).

Well-being is highly subjective, so the more measured the promises to promote it, the better. It is not a matter of putting a noose around our necks and obliging ourselves to give what we cannot give, but of understanding that the well-being equation is solved by expanding, even slightly, the margins of satisfaction, or, and/or tranquility of the people.