I run mental health workshops for corporates across Australia. And the most common conversation I have with HR leads, before we even start, is some version of this:
"We've done speakers. We've done training. We've got an EAP. But people still aren't really… engaging with it."
Here's why.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day. One percent of that is 14 minutes. Most workplace wellbeing programs ask for less than that — an annual training, a Wellness Wednesday email, an R U OK? Day morning tea. They generate awareness for an hour and then nothing changes. By Monday morning, the same overwhelmed manager is still skipping lunch, the same junior is still anxious about their inbox, the same culture quietly grinds on.
Awareness without practice is like reading about exercise. Knowing isn't doing.
The 14-minute idea didn't come from a wellbeing strategy session. It came from me sitting on my floor mid-meditation, trying and failing to settle my mind, opening my phone calculator, and realising that 1% of a day is 14.4 minutes. I posted on Instagram that morning saying I was starting an accountability group — meditation in the morning, three gratitudes at night. By that night, 40 people had messaged to join. That little experiment has now reached more than 75,000 Australians and become a book published by Wiley.
What makes it work in workplaces isn't the meditation, or the gratitude, or the breathwork. It's the consistency. The thing most wellbeing programs miss is that mental health is identical to physical health — daily reps beat occasional intensity every time.
What an actually-effective program looks like
- Stop running annual events. Start building daily habits. A workshop that ends with one small daily commitment beats a half-day offsite that ends with a feel-good moment and no follow-through.
- Frame it for everyone, not the strugglers. Every person in the room has mental health to manage. Not just the 1 in 5 with a diagnosis. All 5 in 5. When you stop framing wellbeing as a service for the broken, you stop creating shame around using it.
- Make the entry point smaller than people expect. 14 minutes. Not an hour. Not a week-long detox. Small enough to fit into the worst day someone's ever had — which means they'll actually do it.
I've watched this work in school halls, in NRL clubrooms, in corporate boardrooms and in the comments of an Instagram post. The mechanism doesn't change.
Awareness ends. Practice compounds.
The companies that lead the next decade won't be the ones with the loudest wellbeing campaigns. They'll be the ones whose teams have actually built something into their day.