Wellbeing at Work Isn’t About Stress. It’s About Attention.

Most workplace wellbeing conversations start in the same place: stress, burnout, resilience, and coping strategies. Organisations introduce support programmes, mindfulness apps, mental health days, and manager training. All useful. Yet many companies quietly notice something awkward:

The effort goes up.
The wellbeing barely moves.

There’s a reason.

We are trying to solve a modern problem using an old model of work.

For most of the 20th century, work was constrained by information. People were valuable because they had access to knowledge, experience, or expertise others didn’t. Hence the term knowledge workers. Today, the opposite is true. Information is abundant — effectively infinite — and the scarce resource is no longer knowledge.

It is attention.

We now operate in what economists call an attention economy: information keeps expanding, but human cognitive capacity does not. We still have the same brain, the same working memory, and the same number of hours in a day.

This changes how we should understand workplace wellbeing.

Employees are rarely overwhelmed by workload alone. They are overwhelmed by inputs:

Email threads, chat channels,notifications, dashboards, meetings…
Priorities that all sound urgent.

There is also a wider context worth recognising. Employees are not arriving at work with a neutral attention system. Much of modern life outside work — social media, streaming platforms, online gaming, and constant notifications — is designed to capture and hold attention. These environments train us toward rapid switching, novelty, and immediate feedback. By contrast, most meaningful work requires sustained focus, patience, and delayed reward. Organisations therefore inherit an attention pattern they did not create but must now manage. Wellbeing at work is increasingly shaped not only by workload, but by the broader attention environment people live in before the working day even begins.

The real strain isn’t simply working hard — it’s continuously switching. Each interruption forces the brain to drop one mental model and load another. The cost is invisible but significant. By late afternoon, many people feel mentally drained despite not producing meaningful progress.

That experience matters.

Human motivation depends heavily on three psychological conditions: the ability to concentrate, a sense of progress, and the feeling of doing work well. Fragmented attention quietly damages all three. People start the day busy and end it unsatisfied. Over time, that produces disengagement far more reliably than long hours.

This is why many wellbeing initiatives struggle. They focus on supporting the individual while the system continues to pull their attention in multiple directions. In effect, organisations are repairing the person while unintentionally creating the conditions that exhaust them.

Wellbeing at work is not just a health topic. It is a work design topic.

Leaders today are not only managing performance or culture — they are managing attention. When work allows periods of focus, clear priorities, and visible progress, motivation improves naturally. When it does not, no number of wellbeing programmes can fully compensate.

Improving wellbeing, therefore, starts with a different question:

Not “How do we help people cope with work?”
But “How is the way work is organised shaping their daily mental experience?”