'Are You Okay?' Is Not a Wellness Programme

6 min read · The Workroom · Opinion · Workplace Culture

Full disclosure: we have stood in front of the poster. Most offices in urban India now have one, usually near the pantry, usually put up in October when World Mental Health Day comes around. It says some version of "it's okay to not be okay." Down the corridor, a manager who attended a forty minute sensitisation webinar last quarter is asking a team member if she is okay, because the calendar told him to, and she is saying yes, because she has done the maths on what happens if she says no.

Asking "are you okay?" is a gesture. A wellness programme is a capability: trained managers, a working route to professional help, and the power to change the conditions making people unwell. The question only helps when the organisation can do something with an honest answer. Without that capability behind it, awareness is decoration.

That is the argument of this piece, and we should be precise about what it is not. It is not an argument against asking. The question is good. The question is also the cheapest possible part of the machine it is meant to belong to, and Indian companies have been buying the question and calling it the machine. It is the difference between having a mental health programme and running one that actually works.

What is the difference between a gesture and a capability?

A gesture is something an organisation says. A capability is something an organisation can do. The poster, the awareness week, the CEO's LinkedIn post, the mailer with the helpline nobody has tested: gestures. A manager who knows how to respond when someone answers honestly, an assistance programme someone actually picks up, a workload that can genuinely be changed: capabilities. Gestures are announced. Capabilities have to be built, and paid for, and then rehearsed until they hold.

The distinction is not ours. The World Health Organization's guidance on mental health at work, updated in September 2024, separates the two cleanly. It recommends worker training in mental health literacy and awareness for what awareness does: improving knowledge and reducing stigma. It separately recommends manager training, and defines it by capability: helping managers recognise and respond to supervisees in emotional distress. Two different interventions, doing two different jobs. Most Indian workplaces we walk into have bought a version of the first and framed it as both.

Does asking "are you okay?" actually work?

Here is the half of the story the sceptics leave out: the question genuinely does something. Australia has run a national campaign built on exactly this question, R U OK?Day, since 2009, and an evaluation by Anna Ross and Bridget Bassilios at the University of Melbourne, published in 2019 with a sample of 2,013 adults, found that people exposed to the campaign held stronger beliefs about the importance and ease of asking, were two to three times as likely to intend to help a troubled friend, and were up to six times as likely to have actually reached out to someone. The study was cross sectional, so it shows association rather than proof, and it measured conversations rather than recoveries. But as evidence that a culture can be taught to ask, it is real.

So the awareness campaigners are not wrong. They are half right, which is more dangerous, because half right photographs well. Notice what that campaign is for: it teaches ordinary people to open a conversation. It was never designed to be the whole of anything. The four steps it promotes end with connecting the person to actual support and following up. The question, even in its own home country, is the doorbell. Indian corporate wellness has imported the doorbell and skipped the house.

Employees are not failing to hear the message. They heard it, looked behind it, and found nothing there.

What happens after someone says "no, I am not okay"?

This is the question the poster cannot answer, and it is the one employees are quietly asking before they say a true word. In 2024, Ankur Poddar and Raina Chhajer of IIM Indore published a study in BMC Public Health built on fifteen interviews with HR professionals, counsellors, and employees with lived experience of mental health challenges, across IT firms in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad. One of the factors they found holding employees back from disclosing had a bureaucratic name and a brutal meaning: underestimating organisational capability. Employees assess whether their company could actually handle an honest answer. When the assessment comes back negative, they lie, politely, and the wellness programme records another successful check in.

The employees in that study were not vague about it. One said it directly to the researchers: you tell us it is okay to not be okay, so "please let me be not okay even for one day at work." The email posters and social media campaigns, this employee said, are useless if the company cannot understand the actual issue. Another told them plainly that if the company wished to make any dent in workplace mental health, it should train the managers. Fifteen interviews in one industry cannot tell us how widespread this is across India. They can tell us the shape of it, and the shape is an audience that has seen through the production.

There is one detail in that study we have not been able to stop thinking about. An HR professional described the company's practice of sharing recovery stories to encourage disclosure, and admitted that most of the stories were picked off the internet, because their own employees were not ready to come forward. Read that again. The company's evidence that it is safe to speak is borrowed from strangers, because nobody inside the building believes it. The gesture is not merely failing to build the capability. It is documenting its absence.

Why do companies buy the gesture instead of the capability?

Because the gesture is cheap, fast, and photographable, and the capability is none of these. A poster costs a design intern an afternoon. An awareness week costs a vendor invoice and some mithai. Manager training costs money, and then it costs something harder: it creates obligations. A manager trained to recognise distress will start recognising it, and some of what she recognises will trace back to workload, to the review process, to a boss the company likes. The WHO's list of workplace risks to mental health reads like an ordinary Indian job description: excessive workload, long and inflexible hours, low control, job insecurity. Capability means touching those. Awareness means agreeing, loudly, that mental health matters, while everything that produces the distress stays exactly where it was.

We should implicate ourselves here. The mental health industry, ours included, has been happy to sell the gesture, because the gesture is what gets bought. The awareness workshop closes faster than the manager training. The talk gets booked; the audit does not. Every clinician who works with corporates knows the specific feeling of being invited to be the decoration. In the therapy room, meanwhile, we meet the people the poster was for, usually months after the poster went up, and what they describe is never a lack of awareness. It is a manager who asked the question and had nowhere to take the answer. The WHO estimates 12 billion working days are lost globally every year to depression and anxiety. Those days are lost by people who mostly kept attending, in workplaces that were, by then, extremely aware.

What would capability actually look like?

It looks unglamorous, which is how you know it is real. Managers trained to recognise distress, respond to it, and hand it over properly, which is the WHO's recommendation and the thing employees themselves asked for; we have written about how that conversation is actually had and about when support should become a referral, and to whom. A route to professional help that people use and trust, which is a low bar Indian EAPs routinely fail; the reasons utilisation stays so low in India are a piece of their own. Attention to the people most likely to do this badly, which is usually the first time manager promoted for output and handed other humans. And the willingness to change the work itself, because a counsellor cannot treat a rota, and the psychosocial hazards that make people unwell sit in the job, not the person. None of this fits on a poster. All of it can be built; even a small company can start with a basic, structured support programme instead of a themed week.

Here is the honest part. A company that does all of this will still have employees who struggle, because work is only one input into a human life, and capability is not a cure. What capability buys is narrower and more valuable: when someone finally answers the question truthfully, something happens next. That is the entire difference. The question was never the programme. The question is the doorbell, and an organisation is measured by whether anyone is home.

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