Putting aside whether Thrive is a solution, would you not agree that the forces pushing our corporate culture towards burnout behaviors warrant some push back? And if so, deserve something less like lip-service and more like the tools used to capture our attention?
While it's true there's not much new, for better or worse she has "juice" with her C Level peers. Would I prefer someone else? Probably. But all in all Thrive - for now - is better than nothing at all.
As somebody who got involved in the Agile movement before it had that name, I initially thought the productization of the movement was a positive. In retrospect, it was terrible. The packaged version of "Agile" ended up having most of the nutrients and all of the fiber removed. It was empty calories and an organizational sugar high, all the feeling of process improvement with none of the work (and none of the value).
My expectation with packaged, CEO-friendly wellness is more of the same: a way for CEOs to pay lip service to the trend of the moment without ever having to do anything difficult, without solving the systemic and organizational problems that harm the health of their workers.
I'm not being combative. I'm sincerely looking for a conversation on such things. To me it's all very obvious. But even a pandemic hasn't seemed to change necessary behaviours (e.g., diet).
To do this properly, you can't proselytize, which is generally what I see "raising awareness" to be -- you need to translate beyond the interpersonal gap and figure out how to say things in someone else's language building on their values. To your point, if that means sending a cookie-cutter Thrive Global clickbait article, well, maybe that's exactly what the product is designed for.
Funny, by writing this all out, I seem to understand that old canard about management consultants being primarily paid to help executive fight internal battles a lot better...
For example, we recently had an emergency where part of my team had to work on the weekend. So I started the custom of "incident retros". Before the meeting I started an incident timeline and then asked others to contribute. In the meeting, we read through the timeline, queued up discussion topics, and voted on which ones to pursue. As we discussed, we listed possible action items. At the end we voted on those and people volunteered to pick up the ones they thought they could do.
On the one hand, this is a pretty normal technique for improving business processes. On the other, it helped train people that 1) weekend work is not normal and we should prevent it, 2) we as a team have authority over our work conditions, and 3) we can take frequent small action toward more healthy work conditions.
I don't think one of these will make a big difference. But over time I expect we can create a culture where employee health and worker productivity are seen as closely aligned, and where if managers try to order us to do something foolish, the team will feel empowered to push back. If in that push citing wellness pablum helps, I'm happy to do it. But lasting change comes from shifting organizational power.
Edit: my snark was unwarranted, as commenters helped me realize. Apologies.
That's not to say that's what the article is, just to be clear. But given our incredibly finite amount of time alive, I think it's important to have good filtering heuristics on how one spends one's time.
As an example, people who criticize Qanon as bonkers often get asked to just watch a few (long) Q-fan videos. If somebody asked me to do that, I'd say no. I have an infinite number of better ways to spend my time. All of that goes in my "garbage content" bucket. I know all I care to from the reports of others who have dug around in the bucket.
If you'd like to convince somebody they've mis-bucketed something, I think a better approach is to say exactly what you see as redeeming about the content of the article.
* Give up clutter. Here they make some vague statements about clutter causing chronic stress and then talk about "Marie Condo" (actually, its Marie Kondo). They don't cite any real research to back up their statements about clutter and stress. Here's an article suggesting a correlation between cluttered workspaces and innovation: https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/a-messy-desk-is-a-sign-of....
That is the only one of these points I really take issue with. Rather, I'm just saying that all these other points are pretty well published on just about every other self-help or productivity blog to have ever existed, and this article is just repackaging them without adding anything, which is what I'm saying is the problem with Thrive Global in general.