Corporate giant Amazon is taking heat over reports of its WorkingWell initiative, a physical and mental health programme intended to improve employee health in the retail giant’s fulfilment centres.

A leaked pamphlet , which Amazon has claimed was created in error and is not being circulated, encourages workers to invest in their own fitness and become “ industrial athletes ”. One aspect attracting particular attention is a plan for “ AmaZen Booths ”. Also called Mindful Practice Rooms, these kiosks are intended for employees to take breaks from work, experience periods of calm, and access mental health resources. Amazon deleted a social media post about the booths after being mocked on Twitter.

The details paint an unflattering picture of the company in light of its unprecedented rise in revenues, profits and stock value during the pandemic. Critics of Amazon say the company’s unparalleled financial success is on the backs of its 1.3 million employees who are subject to precarious employment contracts – issues that came to a head after an unsuccessful campaign among some US-based Amazon workers to gain trade union recognition.

Commentators are also saying that these workers experience higher than average rates of workplace injuries and are treated like “ galley slaves ”. In such conditions, it is argued, a wellbeing initiative is beside the point.

These programmes are gaining in popularity: COVID-19 has raised “wellness” up the agendas of corporations like never before – and not always in a good way. Many companies have introduced exercise classes, fruit and other sticking-plaster solutions rather than measures which assess risk, focus on prevention and prioritise “decent work” as a driver of both wellbeing and productivity.

Having been a judge for the Global Healthy Workplace Awards since 2014, I have run a critical eye over many corporate wellness programmes. Like other big companies, Amazon faces the challenging balance of promoting employee wellbeing without being accused of tokenism.

In trying to improve worker wellness, companies often miss the mark. Here are some things they should keep in mind:

1. Health and productivity can and must coexist

To imply that there should be a binary choice between health and productivity is facile and misleading. One of the more breathtaking things I heard from a senior executive of a large UK organisation during the pandemic was this:

Far from being a niche or outdated opinion, this thinking is representative of a significant proportion of business leaders around the world. As it happens, this large organisation is also very keen to tell anyone who will listen that “employee health, safety and wellbeing is their biggest priority” – though when I checked their latest report to shareholders and prospective investors, the words “revenue” and “profits” outnumbered mentions of “safety” by a ratio of 25 to 1.

2. Lifestyle evangelism is no substitute for decent work

The former chief medical officer of UK telecoms giant BT, Dr Paul Litchfield , famously derided what he called the “fruit and pilates” approach to workplace wellbeing. He argued that no amount of healthy snacks in canteens, “step challenges” or company fun runs can compensate for jobs with impossible deadlines or targets, or the stress of reporting to a manager who is a bully.

One of the founding fathers of modern motivation theory, Frederick Herzberg , once said: “if you want someone to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” Wellness programmes that ignore this simple idea are unlikely to have an enduring impact.

3. Context is everything

The AmaZen Booths are no more than a contemporary take on many successful community and workplace mental health programmes such as the “ Men’s Shed ” movement, which originated among working men in Australia in the 1990s. It targeted older men, who can often find being open about mental health very difficult, by offering resources and support which encouraged reflection and “help-seeking”.

Similar booths have been used successfully by some UK employers. Electricity supplier E.ON created a “Head Shed” to encourage employees to find out more about mental wellbeing, for instance.

The real test of Amazon’s version is whether it is part of a genuinely coherent programme of initiatives which assess and reduce exposure to risk, and convince employees that the company really is prioritising their wellbeing over the long term. Having a well-branded initiative on wellbeing is never enough by itself, especially if many employees’ everyday experience of work is that it is intense, strenuous and toxic.

4. Employers: beware of ‘fool’s gold’

Employers need to be more critical consumers of wellbeing “miracle cures” offered by commercial providers. I have seen too many employers divert resources from unglamorous but evidence-based interventions (like having access to a good occupational health nurse) towards those meant to “showcase” their commitment to health and wellbeing.

Used by themselves, laughter coaches and head massages are really no more than perks, with little or no direct impact on health or productivity. Even very popular initiatives such as Mental Health First Aid have very little strong evidence of any long-term benefit.

Sadly, in the drive for more productivity, the health and wellbeing of employees can be among the first casualties. Reports of Amazon’s WorkingWell programme have, so far, not been flattering. Its challenge – like many other corporations – is to sweep aside the cynicism and demonstrate that its efforts will have tangible benefits for all of its employees and are not just PR spin.

This article by Stephen Bevan , Head of HR Research Development, Institute for Employment Studies, Lancaster University is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Marketers: Change how you approach social media in the post-COVID-19 world

No one really wins when a pandemic hits, but 2020 has been huge for social media. Entire populations have been encouraged or required to stay at home, concerned about infection risks, and feeling the need for connection even more than usual due to heightened uncertainty and anxiety. As a result, the shift of living our social lives online instead of IRL has sustained an alarming acceleration period.

And I’m not just talking about the massive growth in engaged usership on TikTok and Instagram. LinkedIn, the B2B social network, has also shown a huge spike in both the amount of published content and the volume of engagement with that content, according to data compiled by Transmission.

Credit: Transmission This opens up opportunities for marketers to enlarge their share of social attention, but only if you pay attention to the changing ways that consumers are using social media.

You can’t just unpause your social and expect the same kind of response that you enjoyed pre-pandemic. Here’s what to do instead.

Read the mood

People who are living in the shadow of the coronavirus, adjusting to working from home and deprived of regular social activities interact differently with social media than they did back in January. Initially, there was a massive spike in virus-related news and stories as people struggled to understand their new reality.

But the “infodemic” quickly tapered off, and people looked for ways to relieve serious anxieties and fears. Research by Taboola found that engagement with pandemic-related material peaked in March. By mid-April, the mood had already changed.

Engagement data from PathFactory’s user base since the beginning of the pandemic, on the other hand, shows that interest in COVID-19-related topics in the context of B2B content attention minutes has endured. It’s worth noticing here that the long tail is in content not directly related to the virus itself but rather in content related to how businesses should content with the new normal. Topics such as virtual events, cybersecurity and the need to adapt have commanded attention well into the summer.

Credit: PathFactory Mental health, joining an online community, and a desire to distract and self-educate became the driving factors for social media usage. Marketers who overlook these patterns risk facing something of a backlash. Consumers and B2B decision-makers may be too preoccupied to make precise comparisons between products or consider the merits of new solutions. You can’t expect too much deep thought from leads who have precious little emotional bandwidth to spare. That’s why the top and middle of the funnel are where it’s at nowadays.

B2B marketers have to tread a fine line. You need to be sensitive to the pandemic and the toll it’s taking on your audience, but you can’t be seen to be milking it. Some humor is great, but only the right kind of humor. Oh yes, and CoronaCommFatigue is a real thing .

Although marketing might seem like a minefield today, it’s really not as tricky as it sounds. Just go back to the basics of what you’re doing. Understand your audience and deliver value. It’s just not the time for promotions, self-congratulation or aggressive hard-sells.

Create the content your audience craves to lighten the burden of lockdown, whether that’s diverting them with entertainment, building a creative online community, or helping people improve their emotional health. Save messaging meant for the bottom of the funnel for a later date, while you build brand equity by responding to the mood of the moment.

Mental health comes to the fore

Mental health has been coming out of the shadows and making an appearance in marketing for a while now, with marketing campaigns like Nike’s 2019 In My Feels , which raised funds for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and a collaboration between Sweaty Betty and River Island with anti-bullying charity Ditch the Lie.

COVID-19 pushed this trend to greater prominence, with 40% of consumers aged 13 to 39 saying they appreciate brands addressing mental health during the pandemic.

The social media platform companies themselves are meeting the need, too. Snapchat launched a “Here for You” tool a week earlier than originally planned, together with extra resources to help people cope with the coronavirus. TikTok, meanwhile, promoted a #MentalHealthAwareness hashtag, scheduled live sessions with mental health experts, and invited people to share their states of mind.

Brands that are rising to the occasion are getting it right to a surprising degree. Jansport already has a large following of Gen Z and Millennials, so it’s made the most of that by stepping up to meet their mental and emotional needs through the hashtag #LightenTheLoad. Beginning in May, Jansport hosted weekly open conversations with mental health experts on Instagram Live.

Credit: #LightenTheLoad It’s the perfect blend of referencing the difficult reality and delivering real value, without overdoing the corona-theme or ruining it by pushing in a discount offer at the end.

Build a community

Staying at home means isolation and loneliness for many people. Acknowledge it by finding ways to bring people together through your content.

Hashtag challenges on TikTok stimulate users to create and share content, making them part of a larger global community. A Lightricks survey found that over 70% of participants said that using a creativity app helped them overcome anxiety.

The company is arguably best known for its Facetune and Videoleap mobile apps for visual manipulation, but research that eventually informed its new Quickart product found that people are not only bent on creating content – a key part of the experience is about using it to connect with others. During the pandemic, the amount of creators using Lightricks apps shared 90% more visuals than they had prior.

Credit: Lightricks The same need to connect is evident in the B2B world too, as the summer conference season has gone virtual. TrustRadius has found that the professional community is unlikely to return to in-person conferences for several months, with 72% of respondents saying that they expect to resume attendance in 2021 or later.

B2B networking and professional development has taken place both on social media and in “meat space” for decades now, but in 2020, it’s virtual-only. But smart B2B brands are finding ways to ensure that going virtual actually enhances the conference experience, while also scaling up on the conversational community aspects of their social media presences. The TrustRadius study shows that Q&A sessions and other interactive elements are among the top draws attracting people to virtual events during the COVID-19 crisis.

The Content Marketing Institute, for example, has been promoting its newly online-only #CMIWorld conference with a themed series of pre-conference webinars, Slack community discussions and Twitter chats, and the engagement has been impressive.

Marketers today would do well to remember that sometimes community is about more than serving the interests of a brand. When the pandemic first hit and layoffs were starting to snowball, Michael King, a B2B marketing influencer and founder of iPullRank, wrote this tweet as a way to help the wider marketing talent ecosystem.

The posts and the resource he promoted in them went on to blow up. The spreadsheet now has around 1,000 rows, a testament to the power of trade professionals helping one another.

There’s still room for light and fun

Social content doesn’t have to be heavy to help users deal with big issues. Boredom is a real burden and one that younger workers have found especially hard to bear. Some 50% of Gen Z respondents to one recent poll said they feel bored and want to see more entertaining ad content.

You don’t have to leave it all to TikTok to raise the mood, either. B2B marketers can and should allow some lightness into their feed. Instagram is becoming increasingly popular for B2B marketing, and the very nature of the platform lends itself to a more playful approach.

Credit: Mark Schaefer B2B thought leader Mark Schaefer shows how to do it. He’s been more personal than ever on his Instagram profile, posting photos of nature views from his home. Even when he promotes an upcoming content asset, he manages to poke some gentle fun at his own home decor choices.

Social media marketing is still effective during a pandemic

The coronavirus changed every area of our lives, so it’s not surprising that it also changed the way we use social media. Brands can and should still use social media marketing to keep their company top of mind, rather than going dark, but marketers need to pay attention to the new expectations of social media audiences.

Content that delivers value by addressing mental health issues, building a community, or entertaining your audience will add to your brand reputation and serve you well in the long term, even if sales need to take a back seat for the time being.

So you’re interested in marketing? Then join our online event, TNW2020 , to explore the latest brand marketing tech, trends, and challenges.

7 ways businesses can value black lives (beyond social media posts)

After a black bird-watcher filmed a white dog-walker on May 25 calling the police on him in response to his request she obey the dog-leash laws in the Ramble woodlands area of Central Park, New York, the video went viral . “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life”, Amy Cooper informed Christian Cooper (no relation) before she called 911 and made a deliberately dramatic false accusation.

Melody Cooper, discussing her decision to post her brother’s footage online, told hosts of American talk show The View that she “wanted to shine a light on” Amy Cooper’s weaponization of racism “so that no other black person would have to go through it from her”.

Over half a century ago, African Americans viewed the potential of the newest development in communications technology, television, in strikingly similar terms.

Under the TV spotlight

In 1957, Howard D Gould told readers of his column in the Chicago Defender , an African-American newspaper, that: “Under the spotlight of TV, discriminatory practices will have to stop”. He explained how the Little Rock crisis , when cameras filmed angry mobs protesting against nine black teenagers attending a desegregated school in Arkansas, demonstrated the unique power of television to expose racism to a national audience.

Civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s were well aware of television’s potential to help their cause. “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners,” Martin Luther King Jr said in the wake of Bloody Sunday in 1965, where mounted guards attacked peaceful protesters on Montgomery’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in front of rolling cameras.

Pricking the consciences of a white national audience, a strategy that stretched back to the use of photography in the anti-lynching campaigning of Ida B Wells , was at the core of civil rights activism. In a 1967 interview in Harper’s magazine, Andrew Young, executive director of civil rights organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) said their goal was “to reach the centre of the nation, to affect the elderly white ladies in Iowa”.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was similarly motivated. “Without national exposure and mobilized public opinion, there was no point to the struggle,” argued SNCC’s Mary King .

Seeing with their own eyes how agents of white supremacy operated convinced some white viewers in a way that the written word never could. President of the Louisville Times, Barry Bingham, wrote to television newsman Edward R Murrow that while he had read reports about the white supremacist rabble-rouser John Kasper, he hadn’t believed them until he saw the visual evidence on television.

No room for the big questions

Civil rights activists, however, did not have control of television. The SNCC developed an entire communications department designed to get reports of racial injustice onto the desks of mainstream journalists. But as Julian Bond, communications director of the SNCC, remembered, the challenge was to convince national newsmen that “ this is something hot ”. The SCLC did this through mass nonviolent demonstrations deliberately planned to disrupt public order and provoke segregationist brutality. The power to outrage white audiences lay in showing them something they did not expect: law enforcements’ disproportionately violent response to peaceful protest.

This strategy has had its problems. Television is not an unmediated window into reality. As media scholar Aniko Bodroghkozy has shown , the largely white, male television newsmen who covered these stories framed racial inequality from their own point of view. Television networks, with one eye on the bottom line, did not want to discomfort their white viewers. Showing footage of obvious southern violence allowed northern audiences to condemn racism, yet still feel good about themselves.

Television, while a perfect medium to capture obvious acts of brutality, was not well suited to explaining the less visible systems that produced prejudice and fostered inequality. White television newsmen could not see and understand the structural issues involved. Therefore they did not show white viewers the insidious ways that racism continued to impact African Americans.

Filming everyday injustice

Today the digital age has reduced reliance on a middleman. Smartphone technology has allowed African Americans to shine the spotlight in places camera crews would never reach. Black people can now make the rest of the world bear witness to the way racism shapes their everyday encounters. In 2016 Diamond Lavish Reynolds of Minnesota, to take just one example , was able to livestream the horrific moments after police shot her fiancé Philando Castile having stopped them for a broken tail light.

Still, viewers make meaning of these videos based on their own understandings of how racism operates. While African Americans might look at the footage of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he stopped breathing and see evidence of a racist institution , some white viewers watch just one bad apple cop . They can remain comfortable, condemning an isolated racist action without questioning the deeper structural problem.

With more and more videos of police brutality going viral over the past few years, it’s becoming easier for a new generation of activists to reframe the narrative. A report from American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact showed that the Black Lives Matter movement has begun to convince more white people to see videos of police brutality against black people not as isolated events but as evidence of ongoing injustice.

Melody Cooper has reiterated that she “wanted to shine a light not just on one person, but on the systemic problem of deep racism in this country that encourages her kind of behavior”. Yet, over half a century of shining lights on racism has not eradicated the darkness of inequality. The question remains: when will white people believe without having to see?

This article is republished from The Conversation by Sage Goodwin , Phd Candidate in History, University of Oxford under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .