You can’t claim to care about employee mental health and still glorify 60-hour workweeks, shame people for using PTO, or micromanage your team into the ground.

A ping-pong table doesn’t fix burnout, and a pizza party doesn’t erase psychological harm. Yet, performative wellness is everywhere, shiny perks mask toxic work cultures.

What Is Performative Wellness?

Define it: Surface-level wellness initiatives without systemic support.

Common examples:

• Offering meditation apps but not respecting boundaries.

• Celebrating Mental Health Month but discouraging mental health days.

• Encouraging “self-care” while ignoring workload overload.

The problem: It’s gaslighting—telling employees to “take care of themselves” while creating a system that actively burns them out.

How Gaslighting Shows Up at Work

Real World Examples:

• "We’re like family here" → but there's no psychological safety.

• "Just reach out if you’re struggling" → but HR reports go nowhere.

• "Take time off whenever you need!" → but your absence is met with guilt or silent punishment.

• "We care about balance" → but Slack pings still come in at 10 p.m.

“You can’t preach balance and reward burnout. That’s not culture—it’s manipulation.”

What Employees Actually Need

Replace performative perks with real mental health support:

• Clear boundaries around time off, meetings, and response expectations.

• Transparent communication and workload prioritization.

• Manager training in empathic leadership and psychological safety.

• Anonymous pulse surveys to assess stress and morale.

• Normalizing therapy, EAP use, or mental health check-ins as leadership behavior.

From Performative to Authentic: Where to Start

For leaders ready to change:

1. Audit your culture – Are we living our values or selling them?

2. Involve employees – What do they actually need to feel safe and supported?

3. Train your people leaders – Because mental health starts at the manager level.

4. Rethink success metrics – Stop measuring “hours worked” and start measuring sustainable output and team trust.

Stop performing. Start transforming.

The most powerful mental health initiative you can offer isn’t a branded wellness challenge; it’s creating a workplace where people don’t need to recover from their day, every day.

Let’s build workplaces where well-being isn’t a perk, it’s a promise.

About Life Force Wellness

At Life Force Wellness, we don’t partner with just any company. We work exclusively with organizations that are ready to go beyond checking a box and are genuinely committed to fostering a mentally healthy workplace.

We get to the root cause of stress and burnout and co-create solutions that foster psychological safety. Our approach is grounded in behavioral science, stress management research, and real-world experience.

Using evidence-based frameworks, dynamic workshops, and tools rooted in positive psychology, we equip leaders to lead with empathy and empower employees to thrive. If your team is ready to shift from performative perks to real culture change, we’re here to help.

Email us at [email protected] or visit www.lifeforcewellness.com to learn more.