Wellness Is a Structure. Not a Slogan.

What Most Wellness Announcements Get Wrong Here is what I have observed. Most wellness announcements last about as long as the press release. A step challenge. A meditation app. An email about mental health resources, sent once, referenced never again. None of it is wrong exactly. It is just thin. Most Loved Workplace® Certification Is […]

Is your company a Most Loved Workplace®?

Join 1,000+ certified organizations worldwide

What Most Wellness Announcements Get Wrong

Here is what I have observed. Most wellness announcements last about as long as the press release.

A step challenge. A meditation app. An email about mental health resources, sent once, referenced never again. None of it is wrong exactly. It is just thin.

What Petfolk Did Instead

Petfolk did something less exciting to announce and more durable to live inside. It standardized how a new location actually runs, down to the operational playbook, so people walking into a new site inherit a working system instead of chaos dressed up as culture.

Nothing exhausts people faster than daily ambiguity. Give people a system that works, and you have already done more for their wellbeing than a subscription ever will.

They also built recurring community touchpoints, their own internal Olympics, local gatherings, not as a one-time gesture but as something that happens again and again. Recurrence is the whole trick. A single event is a moment. A recurring one becomes part of how people expect to feel at work.

What This Tells Me

Here’s what that tells me. The companies that actually show up on a Wellness list year after year, like Petfolk’s appearance among this year’s Top Most Loved Workplaces® for Wellness, are rarely the ones with the flashiest single benefit. They are the ones where wellness got built into the boring operational decisions nobody puts in a press release.

If your wellness strategy this month is a single announcement, ask the harder question: what daily friction is quietly working against it.

More this week.

Ready to Build a Loved Workplace?

Take the first step — check your organization’s CertCheck score or apply for certification today.

Frequently Asked Questions

The biggest large employer culture challenges during a spinout or major transformation include: maintaining consistent culture signals across geographically dispersed teams, preventing a vacuum of identity when the legacy brand disappears, and preserving the informal trust networks that made the old organization function. Companies like Kyndryl, which spun out of IBM with 73,000 employees across 5 continents, show that culture infrastructure—systematic onboarding, explicit values, leadership accessibility—must be deliberately built, not assumed to transfer.

Maintaining consistent culture across global offices requires moving from aspirational values to operational infrastructure. The evidence from Kyndryl's Most Loved Workplace certification shows that when employees in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, South America, and the UK independently describe their culture using the same language—'flexible work,' 'you are heard,' 'career and learning outcomes'—it is not coincidence. It is the result of systematic design: shared onboarding, visible leadership behavior, and consistent feedback loops that translate values into daily experience regardless of location or time zone.

A Most Loved Workplace® certification proves that a company's culture claims are independently verified through employee assessment—not self-reported surveys or marketing copy. The certification uses machine learning to analyze sentiment, emotion, and recurring themes across thousands of employee responses. When a large employer like Kyndryl earns this certification despite a major transformation, it demonstrates that their culture infrastructure survived and scaled through disruption, which is the hardest test any organizational culture can face.

About Louis Carter

Louis Carter is the Founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute (BPI) and Most Loved Workplaces®, a global research and certification organization helping companies build workplaces employees love. He is the creator of the Love of Workplace Index™, a research-based framework used to measure emotional connection between employees and their organizations and predict performance, retention, and culture outcomes. Carter is the author of more than a dozen books on leadership, talent development, and management best practices and has advised Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and global organizations on leadership and culture transformation. He also hosted the Leader Show, a leadership interview series featured on Newsweek for five years, interviewing executives and leadership experts about leadership and the future of work. His work on workplace culture and leadership has been featured in major publications including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Learn more in “How Louis Carter’s Most Loved Workplace Measures What Really Matters” (New York Business Now) and “Beyond Employer Branding: How Louis Carter Built the Global Standard for Workplace Culture” (NY Tech Media)

Get Certified?

Join 1,000+ Most Loved Workplaces®

In this Article

What's Next ?

Start your certification journey

Book a Call

Discuss your culture challenges with the Louis Carter team

Continue Reading