Short answer: The wellbeing activities for staff that work are the ones answering a question people already have. Fruit bowls, step challenges and lunchtime yoga are pleasant and get thin attendance, because nobody arrived at work worrying about their step count. Sessions that solve a live worry fill up on their own.
In short:
- Low attendance is rarely apathy. It usually means the session answered a question nobody was asking.
- Pick topics by what your staff are actually dealing with, not by what is easy to book.
- Parenting in a digital world is the biggest unanswered worry in most workforces, and almost no employer covers it.
- Run sessions at times parents can attend, and record them, or you exclude the people who need them most.
- Judge a session by the questions it produces, not by the feedback form.
Why do most wellbeing activities for staff fall flat?
Every wellbeing calendar contains roughly the same things. A step challenge. A mindfulness hour. A talk on sleep. Fruit in the kitchen. A resilience workshop somebody booked in a hurry.
Twelve people attend. Nine of them already exercise. The organiser concludes that staff are not engaged.
That conclusion is almost always wrong. What actually happened is that the session offered an answer to a question nobody had. The people in your building are not lying awake about hydration. They are lying awake about money, ageing parents, their health, and their children.
The CIPD’s guidance on wellbeing at work makes the same point in more formal language: wellbeing works when it is built around what people actually need, rather than bolted on as a series of activities.
So the test for any session is simple. Is somebody already worrying about this?
| Common wellbeing activity | Why attendance disappoints | Who it does help |
|---|---|---|
| Step or fitness challenge | Attracts people who already exercise | Teams who want something social |
| Lunchtime yoga or mindfulness | Clashes with the only hour parents have to run errands | Staff with predictable, protected lunch breaks |
| Generic resilience workshop | Sounds like being told to cope better with a workload | Almost nobody, unless the cause is named too |
| Talk on sleep or nutrition | Useful, but the advice is already widely known | Shift workers, where it is genuinely specialised |
| Financial wellbeing session | Works well, because the worry is real and specific | Most of the workforce |
| Menopause session | Works well, for the same reason | A large group nobody used to speak to |
Look at the two that work. Money and menopause are both real, specific, previously unspoken, and answerable by an expert. That is the shape to copy.
Which wellbeing activities for staff do parents actually turn up to?
Parents are the largest group in most workforces and the hardest to get into a room, because their time is already spoken for. They will not give up an evening for a nice-to-have. They will absolutely give up an evening for something that stops an argument at home.
The subject that does that, consistently, is what their children are doing online.
Ask any parent of a nine to sixteen year old and the questions come out immediately. Is this app safe. Should she have a phone yet. Who is he talking to in that game. What is this chatbot their daughter calls a friend. Why does every evening end in a row about screens.
They are not idle questions. Parents carry them into work and get no answer anywhere, because the advice they find online is either frightening or vague.
| What makes a session fill up | Why it works |
|---|---|
| It names a specific worry | People recognise themselves in the title and book |
| It is led by somebody who does this professionally | Staff can tell the difference between expertise and a facilitator with slides |
| Attendees can ask their own question | The real value sits in the questions, not the content |
| Nobody is made to feel they have failed | Parents will not attend anything that might expose them |
| It gives something to do that evening | A concrete next step converts interest into relief |
| It returns, rather than happening once | The subject keeps changing, so the support has to as well |
That last row matters more than it looks. Platforms change constantly. A session on the apps children used last year is worth very little this year, which is why one-off bookings underperform and continuing support does not.
How should you choose what to run?
Three steps, and the first one costs nothing.
Ask, then count. Put an open question in your next engagement survey: what is worrying you outside work? Do not offer a list of options, because a list only returns the answers you already thought of. Count what comes back.
Book against the answers. If forty people mention children and screens, that is your session. If nobody mentions posture, cancel the posture workshop.
Then fix the timing. This is where good sessions die. A parent cannot attend at five o’clock. Run it at lunchtime or mid-morning, record it, and make the recording easy to find. An unrecorded session excludes shift workers, part-time staff and anyone on the school run, which is a large share of exactly the people you were trying to reach.
What do good wellbeing activities for staff have in common?
Strip out the specifics and four things are always present.
They answer a question people already had. They are led by somebody who genuinely knows the subject. They leave people with something they can do. And they come back, rather than appearing once in a wellbeing week and vanishing.
Judge them on the right measure, too. A feedback form tells you whether people were comfortable. The number and specificity of questions asked tells you whether anything landed. A session that generates thirty questions and runs over time has worked, whatever the scores say.
What organisations tend to miss on the digital side
Two things, and both are easy to fix.
The first is that this gets treated as a parenting topic rather than a wellbeing one, so it lands in a parents’ network with no budget instead of on the wellbeing calendar with the other sessions. It belongs on the calendar. The worry is as real as money worry and considerably less spoken about.
The second is that employers assume their staff have this covered because schools mention online safety. Schools talk to children. Almost nobody talks to the parents, who are the ones making the decisions about phones, ages, apps and rules at home.
Our training programmes cover this properly as one of your wellbeing activities for staff: how the platforms children actually use work, which risks deserve real concern and which are noise, and what a parent can change tonight. Kids n Clicks also runs continuing support for corporate organisations where a single session is not enough.
The session teaches the technology, not parenting theory. Parents already love their children. What often goes missing is a clear read of what is actually happening on the phones, the apps and the accounts, and that is the gap this session fills. It is a specialist session, delivered online or in person, to a whole workforce or to a parents’ network.
If you lead people, wellbeing or inclusion in your organisation, connect with Parven on LinkedIn or explore our training programmes to book a session for your team.
Parven Kaur is a digital parenting and online safety expert, and the founder of Kids n Clicks. She works with employers to support working parents and carers on the technology side of family life. She won the Scottish Cyber Security Award, and she sits on the National Board of Advisors for Barnardo’s Scotland.
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