The Workplace Revolution Isn’t Mindfulness. It’s Standards
It’s trendy and cool for companies to look like they care about their people.
You know the drill. There’s a cool yoga app stipend and a Slack channel full of cutesy self care memes. Someone in HR announces “we’re prioritizing wellness this quarter” and suddenly there’s a soothing pastel-colored slide somewhere about breathing exercises.
It all looks nice on a recruiting page. It also does nothing to fix the actual problems that drive people out the door.
Mindfulness won’t save you from a boss who schedules “quick” syncs at 8 p.m. It won’t change the fact that you’re paid less than the market rate. It won’t protect you from a review process that shifts like a game of whack-a-mole. A Calm subscription doesn’t make it any easier to work in a place where the rules are constantly changing and the boundaries don’t mean anything.
Having a ping-pong table or whatever isn’t what makes a company worth working for. What makes a company working for is the actual standards of work.
Standards aren’t flashy. They don’t make for a cute marketing campaign. They don’t trend on LinkedIn because they don’t fit in a three-word slogan or
one of these.
kinds of posts.
that are exactly what I hate about LinkedIn.
But standards are the thing that separates an organization people can actually thrive in from one that quietly grinds them down and whose main export is burnout.
Standards look like working hours that people can trust will be honored. Standards look like promotion criteria that don’t change halfway through the race. Standards look like leaders who mean it when they say “this is the priority” and don’t bury you under ten competing ones the next week. Standards are about consistency, not ✨vibes✨.
And here’s what leaders often miss: standards protect both the worker and the work. When people don’t have to waste mental energy guessing what their manager wants today, they actually do better work. When employees can rely on boundaries being real instead of “suggested,” they bring their full focus to the job instead of bracing for the next blindside. Clarity and consistency aren’t just nice for morale, they’re rocket fuel for legitimate output.
Without standards, every so-called wellness initiative is theater. You can hand out gift cards for massages all day long, but if the workload is impossible and the culture punishes honesty, you’ve just bought yourself a few quiet resentments and a higher turnover bill. You can slap the word “balance” in a mission statement, but if nobody in leadership respects their own vacation policy, your people learn quickly that it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. Or the email it’s written in, if you’re feelin’ eco-friendly.
Mindfulness has its place. I’m not here to trash meditation or therapy or whatever personal practice keeps someone grounded. Those things are SUPER important on an individual level. But they are not a substitute for organizational responsibility. They are not the revolution. They are, at best, survival tactics while the real problems go unaddressed.
Mindfulness teaches you to breathe a little easier while you’re drowning. Standards drain the water so you don’t have to drown in the first place.
That’s the difference between performative care and actual care. One makes for nice photos.
The other changes lives.