Robert Owen and the 1800s: The Origins of Corporate Wellness

There was a time, around the turn of the 19^th century, that corporate wellness was considered an absurd notion. Employer who give a damn about the health and wellbeing of their employees? Balderdash! (or some equally archaic expression). In to this arena came a Welshman by the name of Robert Owen, who became a successful employer famous for caring about workers’ rights.

Instead of having children work in his factories, Robert Owen funded their education and organised day care. For his employees, Owen provided clean housing, shorter workdays, and a workplace environment where corporal punishment was prohibited. These things were considered unthinkable by any self-respecting businessman at the time, but Owen did them all, and still managed to make a fortune.

A world in which corporate wellness isn’t considered may seem as distant as a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, in comparison to the modern workplace. While it took a long while for Owen’s progressive policies to spread, now you can be provided with onsite gyms, lunchtime yoga, free psychologists, office massages, flu shots, and even services to help you quit smoking, all in the comfort of your own office.

According to a global poll released by a subsidiary of Xerox, an astonishing 87% of employers consider it their responsibility to help employees become healthier, and employees concur, but are you essentially allowing your quality of life to be determined by someone else? Robert Owen exemplified an altruistic take on employee care, but the Xerox survey found that the main motivator wasn’t so much the wellness of workers but the wellness of profits. If your employees are healthy, they are less likely to be ill, injured, unproductive or stressed out, and this translates into a more efficient organisation and more capable employees.

Yet whether their motivations are governed by their desires of wellness or wallets, employers who provide employees with wellness information, training courses, health checks, fresh fruit, a work/life balance, and weight loss programmes have found a relatively inexpensive way to improve employee quality of life, which is surely no bad thing. In November 1858, when Robert Owen was on his deathbed, someone asked him if he felt as though he’d wasted his life on useless projects that didn’t catch on. He replied, ‘My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.’ Looking at current workplace trends, it seems as though he was right.