What survives a hard year
- Aug 11
- 2 min read
There is a particular kind of optimism that flourishes in good times.
It appears in employee programmes, culture statements, leadership commitments, wellbeing budgets. It is easy to believe in people when the numbers are healthy and the calendar is full of launches. The more revealing moment comes later, when the year turns difficult.
Martina Ercoli has spent enough time around workplace programmes to notice the difference between the ones that are announced and the ones that are actually believed in. The distinction is not always visible at first. Both can come with polished language, strong sponsorship and ambitious intentions. But only one survives contact with pressure.
For Martina, wellbeing belongs in that category.
Workplaces have spent years treating it as something supplemental: a benefit, a programme, a gesture of care sitting somewhere beside the serious business of performance. Yet the separation has always been somewhat artificial. A person who is exhausted does not become more innovative because the quarterly target remains unchanged. A team running on depletion does not become more resilient because resilience appears in a leadership deck.
“Wellbeing is a precondition for performance,” Martina says.
The statement feels almost too simple. Perhaps that is why organisations have found so many ways to avoid acting as though it were true.
The question becomes more complicated as AI enters everyday work.
Most organisations still approach technological change as an adoption challenge. People need training. They need access. They need to understand the new system. They need to use it.
But this account misses something.
A new technology does not only alter the task. Sometimes it alters the person’s understanding of the task, and therefore of themselves.
What happens when something you have spent years becoming good at can suddenly be done, or partly done, by a machine? What happens to expertise when the boundaries around it begin to move? What happens to pride, confidence, usefulness?
Martina is interested in what organisations owe people in that space, underneath the familiar metrics of productivity and adoption. Not because technology should be slowed down to protect every existing role, but because transformation that ignores how people make meaning of their work is incomplete.
Perhaps this is also why she is sceptical of one-size-fits-all approaches to wellbeing. People do not arrive at work as standardised units, and the forces reshaping work will not affect everyone in the same way.
Her version of a fair workplace is therefore less about designing the perfect universal programme and more about creating enough room for difference.
“One size fits one,” she says.
There is something sternly demanding in that idea. It asks organisations to move beyond the comfort of programmes that look good at launch and towards practices that remain credible when budgets tighten, technologies shift and people begin asking harder questions about what their work is becoming.
At FAIR Barcelona Conference, October 1st, those are exactly the questions Martina hopes you will stay with.
Come meet her and have a deep dive practice lab with her and so many other established leaders in People and Culture.
Book your seat here 👉🏼
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