In June 2023, I wrote a column for a Portuguese business publication about sustainability.¹ I confessed my ignorance about the topic and described the growing irritation I felt watching the contradictions pile up: companies organising beach clean-ups while handing out plastic merchandise, cosmetic CSR and ESG operations that breed more cynicism than trust. By the end, I glimpsed a different dimension of sustainability — one that had little to do with carbon emissions and everything to do with people: the psychological, emotional, and intellectual footprint we leave on one another.

I developed that idea in a longer essay, “Relational Sustainability: The Footprint We Leave in People.” Among the responses I received, one made me think and research longer than expected: my friend Ana Vargas Santos (who has contributed to this publication before) asked how the concept of greenwashing might apply to relational sustainability. I told her it was exactly the part I hadn’t had the courage to include. Not out of ideological caution, but out of fear of offending potential clients. A kind of commercial cowardice dressed up as prudence. But her question made it impossible to keep dodging the subject.

This is the third essay in a sequence. This time, prudence stayed home.

For those who haven’t read the previous essay — and may not want to — the core idea is straightforward: if we talk about ecological footprints, extractive economies, what we take from the planet and fail to replenish, what footprint do we leave in people?² I don’t mean legacy in the usual sense (achievements that outlast us). I mean something more intimate: the residue we leave in the inner lives of those we encounter. How someone feels about themselves after years of knowing us. The patterns of thought or feeling we transmit, almost always without knowing — patterns that propagate across generations not only through genetics, but through the quality of relating: through what was contained and what was expelled, what was transformed and what was passed on raw.³

The essay also argued that relational sustainability isn’t measured by the positive “impact” we have on others. That’s the language of influence, of the saviour complex. It’s measured by non-depletion: not extracting more than can be replenished. Not leaving people with less capacity to live and relate than they had before they knew us. Someone can be charming, admired, successful by every conventional measure, and still leave a trail of depleted people. And relational damage, unlike ecological damage, hides well. Melting glaciers are visible; the person we’ve diminished doesn’t appear in any metric.

So if greenwashing is what happens when a company exaggerates, lies, or misleads about its environmental impact, what do we call it when they do the same with people’s wellbeing?

Wellbeing washing.

The expression isn’t mine. Nora Rosendahl, then Chief Operating Officer at the Finnish consultancy Hintsa Performance, popularised it in 2021 by adapting the “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” that TerraChoice had identified in its studies on green deception.⁴ Rosendahl observed that something similar was happening with corporate wellbeing: organisations addressing it with smoothies, standing desks, and yoga classes while ignoring its systemic nature; inviting a celebrity speaker to talk about burnout without being able to answer the question “and when I need help, who do I turn to?”; investing in the already healthy and giving perks to those who least need them; offering coaching or resilience workshops to exhausted workers without addressing the manager running an exhausted team (I know this one all too well). The logic is consistent: making it look like you’re doing more than you are.

The same organisation that produces burnout subsidises meditation apps to treat it; the same leadership that creates the conditions for distress appoints a “happiness officer” to manage its symptoms.⁵ Barbara Jeffery and Martin Dewhurst, of the McKinsey Health Institute, put it concisely in a phrase that caught on: “You can’t yoga your way out of this.”⁶ You don’t solve a structural problem with individual interventions. You don’t cure a toxic culture with mindfulness classes.

This is where one of the most repeated phrases in contemporary management enters the picture: “happy people are more productive, for longer.” It sounds harmless. It even sounds generous. But it reveals the logic of wellbeing washing: people’s wellbeing only matters insofar as it serves productivity. Happiness isn’t an end; it’s an instrument. The person doesn’t matter; what the person yields does. And when wellbeing is instrumentalised, it stops being wellbeing.⁷

My intuition and experience tell me that the companies most in need of changing their culture are often the ones most attracted to superficial wellbeing programmes, although this can be a unintelligent thing to say. Nevertheless, it’s watering the leaves of a plant whose roots are poisoned. Or, to use the analogy from my 2023 piece, it’s the organisational equivalent of picking up plastic from the beach while handing out plastic as merchandise for the initiative (true story).

I recognise these patterns almost daily. Organisations that request “leadership development programmes” to solve problems that are, in truth, structural.⁸ That talk about “putting people first” while the only indicator that counts is EBITDA. That create “People and Culture” departments — rebranding the old Human Resources — while maintaining exactly the same practices. That measure wellbeing through annual satisfaction surveys where nobody tells the truth, then present the results as proof that all is well.

By raising this, Ana stepped on the toes of some certainly important “someones”: culture awards and “best companies to work for” rankings contribute to wellbeing washing because they become yet another competitive arena. Another ranking to shine in. Another facade to invest in. Rosendahl herself opens her article with a telling anonymous quote: “Our Great Place to Work ranking has just been added as a KPI for our bonuses. I guess we’ll now have a great place to work.” The award replaces the practice. The certificate replaces the experience. The seal replaces the substance.

I wrote in 2023 that “what good is it for a company to be carbon neutral if the people who work there get sick from working there?” The question stands, with a slightly different formulation: what good is investing in wellbeing programmes if the organisational culture is itself the toxic agent?

Relational sustainability demands honesty before it demands action. It demands that organisations look at the emotional footprint their leaders leave — not in annual surveys, but in the daily reality of the people who work there. In the meetings that colonise evenings. In the deadlines designed to consume weekends. In emails sent at dawn with an expectation of immediate reply. In silences that say more than any speech about values.⁹

I’d like to say this isn’t about demonising organisations. I’d like to claim I’m making the case to take them seriously when they say people matter, and to demand they prove it. To ask them, with the same insistence used to ask about quarterly results: what footprint are you leaving on the people who work here? What kind of emotional residue are you producing? Are you willing to measure that with the same seriousness you bring to carbon emissions — or is wellbeing just another line in a sustainability report that nobody reads?

But I confess: most days, I’m left feeling that many of them are run by the worst kind of demons. The human kind.

The answer, I fear, we already know. But asking it out loud has its value. At the very least, it forces those who hear it to decide whether they want to keep pretending.

1. ”Uma perspectiva sobre sustentabilidade”, published in Link to Leaders, June 2023. Link to Leaders is a Portuguese online publication focused on management, leadership, and business culture. ↩︎
2. Steven Braekeveldt explored a similar thread on LinkedIn, asking why we’ve learned to question our ecological footprint but not our relational one. ↩︎
3. This owes much to Wilfred Bion’s work on containment and emotional transformation, developed in Learning from Experience (1962) and Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). The earlier essay explores this in more detail. ↩︎
4. Nora Rosendahl, “The 7 Sins of Wellbeing Washing — When Talk and Actions Don’t Match”, Hintsa, 9 June 2021. The framework adapts the “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” identified by the TerraChoice Group. The original November 2007 study identified six sins; the 2009 update added a seventh and, analysing 2,219 products in North America, concluded that over 98% committed at least one. I had already used the term “psyche washing” for a similar phenomenon in “The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized,” using the analogy of a plant that causes allergies: some companies would rather hand out antihistamines than remove the plant. Rosendahl’s framework gives that intuition a more systematic structure. ↩︎
5. I explored this contradiction at length in “The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized.” ↩︎
6. The phrase is attributed to the McKinsey Health Institute team, popularised by Barbara Jeffery and Martin Dewhurst in the context of their work on global health at work. Greg Pryor, who spread it on LinkedIn in January 2023, credits it directly to colleagues at MHI. ↩︎
7. William Davies traces this logic thoroughly in The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015). I’ve also explored the instrumentalisation of wellness initiatives in “The Utility of Uselessness.” ↩︎
8. I explored one such case in “On the Value of Conversation,” where an organisation was prepared to invest in seven individual development programmes rather than have one difficult conversation with the person who was actually the problem. ↩︎
9. I’ve explored this temporal dimension of organisational power in “The Right to Temporal Dignity” and “Corporate Hierarchy as the New Feudalism,” where similar patterns appear: proposals requested for Monday on a Friday afternoon, meetings that colonise evenings, and the feudal logic of summoning and rushing that structures these dynamics. ↩︎