Ep. 43: Punk Rock Saves Lives

If you've never read all the way to the bottom of the episode notes, you won't know what PRSL is. Now you do. It's a good name for an episode, but seriously, go check out punkrocksaveslives.org. They're solid folks doing really kickass work. Not like this podcast. In this episode, the boys start off debating the merits of bacon and egg rolls. Or egg and bacon rolls, because priorities. Pretty quickly, things go headfirst into the world of “wellbeing,” getting glued onto safety job titles. We’re talking about how psychosocial risk has (sometimes) become the new buzzword, and whether that’s actually making work better or just giving us more posters and press releases. We dig into whether safety is the right place for wellbeing, or if it’s just being dumped there because no one else knows where to put it. The real deal? Wellbeing only matters if we fix the work itself. Stop with the mindfulness sessions between 13 meetings and start giving people real control over their jobs. The wellbeing that really works: redesigning the work, not the posters. If “wellness” just means more compliance for the sake of it, we’ll get the same result we got with a lot of efforts around culture - a brand campaign with no change to the conditions of work. And yeah, Ron’s sleep pods might’ve been reasonable, but Dave’s story about an actual Australian office having a “masturbation station” took a turn no one expected. Ben reminds us, if your safety work can’t tie to actual wellbeing, maybe it’s just busy work. But when you fix the work, people get better by default. Or because of the pods. Bottom line: Wellbeing is more than fruit bowls and yoga mats, and if we don’t change the work, we’re just putting lipstick on the same old compliance pig.