Microsoft Report Finds Employees Place Mental Wellness Over Work
In their 2022 Work Index Report, Microsoft uncovered a significant shift in how employees balance...
May 24th, 2021
Employers are becoming increasingly concerned with the well-being of their employees. As a result, they are trying to learn how to help their employees be well. To accomplish this task, many companies are looking at what a variety of wellness experts (e.g., doctors, nurses, psychologists, nutritionists, wellness companies, etc.) have had to say about wellness. Surprisingly, the work of philosophers, who have been studying well-being for thousands of years, is rarely consulted. This should be rectified. While philosophers are certainly not the only authorities on well-being, the amount of time that they have spent studying wellness along with the intellectual rigor with which they have carried out their studies suggests that they must have some unique insights about what it takes to be well. As a result, wellness focused employers would do well to become acquainted with the philosophers take on well-being.
Philosophers of well-being are primarily concerned with what we might call the fundamental components of wellness. These are items, objects, states of mind, states of the body, etc. that are good for individuals on their own and regardless of whether or not they bring about anything else that is good for them. They stand in contrast to things like money or power, which, though not good for people on their own, provide people with the ability to acquire things that are good for them on their own. For example, someone may use money to pay for a trip where they visit friends and family.
Due to their special interest in the fundamental components of wellness, the philosophical study of well-being has been dominated by repeated attempts to identify them. The most popular proposals are typically placed into one of the following three families of theories. These include.
Hedonism: According to hedonistic theories of well-being, only pleasure (or happiness), is a fundamental ingredient of wellness. Everything else that is good for people is good for them when and because it brings about happiness.
Desire-Satisfactionism: Theories of well-being in this particular family claim that having one’s desires satisfied is the fundamental wellness ingredient.
Objective List Theories: This category has, over time, become a catch all for any theory of well-being that is not covered by the previous two categories. Often, objective list theories state that there is more than one fundamental component of wellness. For example, they may claim that both being happy and having one’s desires satisfied are fundamental components of wellness. Objective list theories also typically include other items aside from pleasure and desire satisfaction (e.g., friendship, intelligence, and health). Furthermore, each of the items on the list may be associated with a particular kind of wellness (e.g., mental wellness, physical wellness, intellectual wellness, etc.)
Wellness solutions are supposed to help individuals be well. Ultimately, this can be accomplished in two ways, both of which involve the fundamental components of wellness. In order to be successful, any wellness solution must either:
Whether or not a wellness solution is successful in either of these ways, however, depends on what the ingredients of wellness are. Since, perhaps unsurprisingly, philosophers have not come to an agreement about what the components of wellness are, it might seem as though they are not yet in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of wellness solutions. This reaction, while understandable, is misguided. Though philosophers ought to consider the work that philosophers have done, they are not obligated to wait for a philosophical consensus about well-being to arise before they decide for themselves what it takes to be well.
At the same time, the lack of agreement amongst philosophers might suggest that employers should alter their approach to making their employees well either by:
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