The Expectations Arc · Row 5 of 10: Well-being. Ten rows, ten Sundays. Five down.
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
New here? This is row five of ten. Start with #044 and the People Expectations Framework™, both free.
Last week, row four closed the transactional currency: flexibility is what the team permits. This week the deal changes register. Rows five to eight are relational: not what I'm given, but how I'm treated.
Row five has the most merchandise. A step challenge with a leaderboard. A mental-health first-aider who is also the most overloaded analyst on the team. A well-being day booked into the week of the quarter-end close. Ask HR what the organisation does for well-being, and you get a catalogue.
Ask the nurse who gave up her break to cover a vacancy for the third time this month, and you get another answer.
Lamott meant it kindly, and she is right: almost everything works again if you unplug it. But at work, who holds the plug? Not her. Most organisations answer burnout by teaching people to unplug themselves. Nobody unplugs the workload.
The framework states the expectation plainly: that the organisation will protect my health and not consume me to deliver the work. And it names how people judge it: whether demands stay within bounds, whether boundaries are honoured, and whether support is real rather than a poster.
So here is my position, before the evidence: well-being is not a benefit you provide. It is what the work leaves behind, and people judge it by the workload, not by the app.
Expectation first, experience second, and then the line no wellness budget shows: the work itself.
— Tanguy
This week's content
Row five, read twice: what people expect for their health at work, and what the work actually does to it. Then the fifth Expectation Gap, a self-audit and five metrics.
🌿 WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT 🌿 | AXA Mind Health Report 2026 | AXA (2026) | Do people expect their employer to look after their mental health? AXA and Ipsos interviewed 19,000 adults aged 18 to 75 in 18 countries in January and February 2026. 84% would take part in mental health and well-being support programmes if their employer offered them. Yet 48% would not discuss mental health challenges at work, and 56% of working people report moderate to severe stress in their professional lives over the past year. People want the help. Half of them will not ask for it. Support that starts with a disclosure starts with half the room missing.
⚖️ WHAT PEOPLE GET ⚖️ | State of the Global Workplace 2026 | Gallup (2026) | How are people actually doing? Gallup's World Poll interviewed 141,444 employed people between January and December 2025. 40% of employees worldwide experienced a lot of stress during the previous day; 34% are thriving in their overall lives. Europe reads two ways at once: 49% thriving, well above the world, and 39% stressed daily, level with it. Good lives, hard days. The life holds up. The day does not.
🌀 WHAT CHANGE COSTS 🌀 | 2026 Global Human Capital Trends | Deloitte (2026) | What does the pace of change leave behind? Deloitte and Oxford Economics surveyed more than 3,000 business and HR leaders in 15 countries, alongside 6,000 workers, managers and executives. Asked what the past year's changes did to them, 68% named decreased well-being and 60% named increased workload. One-third of workers went through 15 major changes in a single year. Every transformation programme carries a well-being line. It just never appears in the business case.
📈 WHAT THE PERKS RETURN 📈 | Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions | Industrial Relations Journal (2024) | Do the apps work? William Fleming, of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, compared 46,336 workers in 233 UK organisations: those who had used mindfulness, resilience or stress-management courses, relaxation classes or well-being apps, against those who had not. "Across multiple subjective well-being indicators, participants appear no better off." The design is cross-sectional, so it cannot prove the courses do nothing. It shows that, at scale, they do not show up.
The Expectation Gap: row five
80% say health and well-being benefits matter. 79% get them.
Here is the figure for your next people review, and four things it tells you.
The benefits gap is closed. The well-being gap is not. Aon surveyed 9,202 employees of large organisations in 23 geographies: one point separates what people value from what they receive. The one benefit in short supply, emotional well-being support, reaches 21% of employees, and only 13% put it in their top five. Yet four in ten employees worldwide felt a lot of stress during the day yesterday (Gallup). The budget went to the benefit. The strain sits in the job.
Row five, measured: what people value against what they receive. The gap is not in the benefits. Aon, 2025.
You cannot meditate your way out of a workload. In a randomised trial of 32,974 employees across 160 worksites, a wellness programme changed what people reported about their exercise, but nothing about health, absence, or performance. Karasek named the cause in 1979: heavy demands and little control. A breathing app touches neither.
Strain runs down the pay scale, and through the middle. Aon's low-income earners are 30% more likely to be chronically stressed at work. Gallup's managers are more stressed than the people they lead (45% against 39%). We have made the most stretched person in the team the delivery channel for everyone else's well-being.
Fund recovery, not resilience. Employees with access to work-life balance programmes are 20% less likely to be often or always stressed at work (Aon; a correlation, not a trial). The benefit that moves stress is made of time. Every new initiative names the one it replaces. Then say it in the deal: we will size the work to the people, not stretch the people to the work.
Well-being is not a benefit you provide. It is what the work leaves behind.
Your turn. When did your workload last go down because someone at work decided it should? Hit reply; I read every one. And if you know a leadership team about to renew the wellness-app contract, forward this before they sign.
🧭 The row-five self-audit
Three questions for your next leadership meeting. Yes or no.
In the past year, did we stop any piece of work to protect people's health?
Do our lowest-paid teams get the same room to recover as our leaders?
Can our managers cut work, not just refer people to support?
Three "no" answers mean your well-being strategy is a benefits catalogue. The five metrics below show what the work is taking.
📏 Five metrics for row five
No new inventions: five established measures, read together rather than one by one.
Daily stress. Gallup's question: did you experience a lot of stress during a lot of the day yesterday? Read it by team. Benchmarks: 40% globally, 39% in Europe.
Hours beyond contract. Recorded working time against contract and against the legal bound (and against 55 hours a week, the line the WHO and ILO link to stroke and heart disease).
Holiday taken against entitlement. By team and by level. Unused leave is recovery the organisation borrowed.
Work-related burnout. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory's work-related scale, free to use. Track the trend, not the snapshot.
Mental-health absence, read against benefit usage. Rising use of the helpline or the app with flat or rising absence means the benefit is treating the symptom.
🎶 Mixtape Monday
Santé — Stromae (2021). It sounds like a party, and it raises a glass to the people who keep working while everyone else celebrates. The beat says celebrate; the subject is the shift nobody counts. That is row five: the organisation books the well-being day, and someone still covers the work. Tomorrow on LinkedIn: the song, and the one decision most well-being budgets never make.
Next week — #050
⚖️ Row six: Fairness, inclusion & voice — Sunday 8 November
Well-being asks what the work leaves of you. Row six asks whether the rules are the same for everyone, and whether speaking up changes anything. Next week, we read the sixth Expectation Gap: the distance between being asked and being heard.
Ten rows, ten Sundays. In December, subscribers receive the complete Expectation Gap: all ten rows in one workbook, with the questions and five metrics for every row. Stay for the set.
— Tanguy
Mini-lexicon
Recovery, not resilience — the row-five finding: people judge well-being by whether the work leaves room to recover, not by the programmes that teach them to cope. This edition's frame.
Job strain — Karasek's term for the combination of heavy job demands and low decision latitude. The mechanism a well-being app cannot reach.
The Expectation Gap (row five) — the distance between "that the organisation will protect my health and not consume me to deliver the work" and what people judge they get: whether demands stay within bounds, boundaries are honoured, and support is real rather than a poster. This edition's measure.
Fairness, inclusion & voice — the expectation to be treated honestly, included, and heard on decisions that affect me. Read next Sunday as the gap between being asked and being heard. Row six.
Method
The Expectation Gap sits inside the People Centricity Methodology™: Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse. It is Empathise made measurable, the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™, read one row at a time.
References
AXA. (2026). AXA mind health report: The 2026 edition: Global data, trends and challenges. AXA, with Ipsos. https://www.ipsos.com/en/node/1078961
Aon. (2025). 2025 employee sentiment study: Valued and valuable: Better decisions to unlock the full potential of your people. Aon plc. https://www.aon.com/en/insights/reports/employee-sentiment-study
Deloitte. (2026). 2026 global human capital trends: From tensions to tipping points: Choosing the human advantage. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/articles/2026/us188555_ghct2026_introduction/pdf/DI_2026-Global-Human-Capital-Trends.pdf
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework
Fleming, W. J. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: Cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom. Industrial Relations Journal, 55(2), 162–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12418
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-2026.aspx
Karasek, R. A., Jr. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: Implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285–308. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392498
Kristensen, T. S., Borritz, M., Villadsen, E., & Christensen, K. B. (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 19(3), 192–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678370500297720
Lamott, A. (2017, April). 12 truths I learned from life and writing [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_lamott_12_truths_i_learned_from_life_and_writing
Song, Z., & Baicker, K. (2019). Effect of a workplace wellness program on employee health and economic outcomes: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 321(15), 1491–1501. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.3307
World Health Organization. (2021, May 17). Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke: WHO, ILO [Press release]. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo
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