Sustainable Healthy Habits in Australian Workplaces
Ally was about to lose her job.
She was in her late 20s, recently married, and struggling to get to work every day. Despite going through a battery of medical tests, counselling through her EAP, and taking time off for a break, she couldn’t find the motivation to get to work, focus on work, or enjoy her work.
Her managers were incredibly supportive. But after so many let-downs, they were starting to get frustrated. She’d been escalated to HR and they were throwing all the resources at her that they could, because the last thing they wanted to do was let her go.
Despite the seemingly dire situation, the HR leader asked for my help. We started with a handful of coaching sessions to see how Ally responded to the support. The results were immediate, with an uptick in attendance at work, self-reported improvements in energy, and greater engagement.
The real test though, was how long this improvement would last. We continued coaching for 6 months, and Ally went from barely getting to work and almost losing her job, to restoring her hours to full-time, and returning to the star player status she held earlier.
What helped her get there?
My aim as her wellbeing and performance coach was to help her design both a personal plan, and understand what she needed in her environment in order to make positive change.
Maintaining healthy habits at work depend on both personal responsibility and supportive work conditions. People can choose to sleep better, move regularly, eat well, and manage stress. But even the most motivated individuals will struggle if their work environment is high-pressure, unpredictable, or unsupportive.
Thankfully Ally worked in an organisation that was willing to be flexible, and provided some short-term accommodations so she could make long-term behaviour change.
Long hours, back-to-back meetings, constant interruptions, and blurred boundaries disrupt healthy habits. These interruptions can easily make healthy choices less obvious, less attractive, harder to achieve, or less satisfying.
Think about how you feel in the afternoon, when you’ve been up late worrying about a big project or a difficult colleague and then worked through a day of back-to-back meetings. It’s much harder to avoid sweets and go to the gym when your fuel gauge is running low.
My work with Ally stretched from setting short and long-term goals, restructuring her environment to support her recovery, reviewing her home routine and environment to understand what could support and what was hindering her progress, exploring her values and inner belief system, and much more.
Going further than this single case study, we’ll explore how personal responsibility and workplace systems intersect to strengthen, or weaken, the structure of healthy habits and what individuals and organisations can do about it. We need to reframe the concept of health and wellbeing to go beyond personal decision-making and look at how the systems we’re operating in contribute to our outcomes, including our workplaces.
Chronic Health Conditions and Their Impact on Australian Workers
Healthy habits are vital for preventing and managing chronic health conditions. In Australia, these conditions are widespread and continuing to impact people, the health-care system, and the economy.
Prevalence of Chronic Conditions
Recent national data shows around three in five Australians live with at least one long‑term health condition, and many live with multiple conditions. These include heart disease, diabetes, respiratory conditions, mental health conditions and musculoskeletal issues (AIHW, 2022).
Chronic conditions aren’t just personal issues. They intersect with workplace dynamics. A new report found that over one‑third of Australians living with chronic health conditions have left a job because their condition was made worse by work stress or lack of support. Among those workers, many cite stigma, fear of discrimination and lack of accommodation as barriers to staying in work (Abbvie, 2024).
Work Stress and Health Outcomes
Long‑term stress from work doesn’t just affect mental health. It’s linked with physiological responses such as increased blood pressure and chronic inflammation, which are risk factors for heart disease and other conditions.
This shows why healthy habits, like sleep, movement, stress recovery, are key to both wellbeing and chronic disease prevention. But for these habits to be effective, workplaces need to create conditions where people can practise them.
The Myth of Motivation: Why Willpower Isn’t Enough
We often treat healthy habits as personal issues - people just need to “try harder”.
But one thing I’ve learned as an award-winning health and performance coach is that healthy behaviours are shaped as much by the environment as the individual.
An unhealthy lifestyle, including stress, sedentary behaviour and poor work–life balance, are driven by work conditions and affect productivity, wellbeing and health outcomes (OECD, 2022).
Governments and employers both play an important role in creating work environments that support healthy behaviours rather than undermine them.
Shared responsibility provides benefit for all parties, driven by an understanding that, while the individual makes their choices, a workplace can support them to choose well.
We’ll explore more about what an individual can do, even when they’re operating in a challenging system, below.
The Habit Loop
The habit loop is a core element of behaviour change.
Cue – a signal that triggers a behaviour
Routine – the behaviour itself
Reward – the positive outcome that reinforces the habit
With it’s roots in operant conditioning, the Habit Loop helps to explain how habits form, whether they’re wanted or unwanted.
James Clear add to this model with the “Four Laws of Behaviour Change”. He shows us how to make habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
Obvious: The cue for a habit should be clear and visible.
Attractive: The habit should feel appealing.
Easy: It should require minimal friction to do.
Satisfying: It should feel rewarding so the behaviour repeats.
Healthy habits can be established more easily when both individuals and organisations align to support these conditions of behaviour change. Conversely, when there are unhealthy habits that are in clear reach, attractive and easy to obtain, you’ll find people gravitating towards them. Therefore, shaping the environment plays a key role here.
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I walked into an office last week and noticed the beautiful natural light filtering through the windows. The light flowed into the kitchen and brought my attention to a bowl of grapes sitting on the counter. Beside the grapes were marshmallows, chocolate biscuits, and a bowl full of lollies.
Workplaces understand the importance of environmental ambience in creating more productive, creative, and supportive work environments. Natural light, fresh air, and plants - they’re essential for wellbeing, and there’s plenty of research to show this. No-one wants to work in a dark, stale and uninspiring office. Organisations want to offer this as a perk, knowing full well that it contributes to productivity.
I’m not concerned about a handful of lollies. They’re inconsequential really. Just a perk to give workers a sugar hit.
What I’m concerned about is whether workplaces are thinking holistically when it comes to the conditions they’re creating for people, and whether they realise that the short-term pay-offs are not worth the long-term consequences, for themselves or their people.
How Workplace Conditions Affect Healthy Habits
Healthy habits aren’t random choices people make in their free time. They’re patterns that depend on predictable routines, recovery opportunities, environmental structure, psychological support, etc.
Work environments that understand frameworks such as the Habit Loop and James Clear’s Four Laws of Behaviour Change are best equipped to support healthy habit development.
Boundaries, Interruptions and Psychological Safety
Research on psychosocial safety climate, the shared perception that an organisation protects psychological health, shows it’s a key driver of wellbeing. When anxiety about job security, role clarity or harassment is high, healthy habits take a back seat to survival behaviours. When the stress response is triggered, people often fall into System 1 thinking. System 1 thinking, is the reactive, impulsive thinking that helps you to make quick decisions. Often these quick decisions are made on the spot, without clarity or foresight.
System 1 thinking is a prime opportunity for someone to break a habit loop, and if the environment is providing the perks within easy reach, this is where the stressed brain will go. That is, if you’re stressed out and there is a jar full of biscuits only three metre away, you’re going to have a much harder time avoiding them.
An environment which reduces System 1 thinking, and provides opportunities for health-fuelled behaviours will nurture people who can more easily maintain their healthy habits, be more productive, and create a more sustainable organisation. This isn’t just a ‘wellbeing benefit’ this is the sustainable practice that contributes to ‘sustainability’ in an employer’s ESG obligations.
What can a person do to keep healthy habits?
Not everyone can change their workload, team structure, or organisational culture. But even in challenging systems, people can redesign small parts of their environment to protect their energy and support healthier habits.
To keep a habit loop strong, it’s important to look at the cues, friction, and rewards you’re using.
Redesign your environment. Move your desk away from food cues, high traffic areas, or noisy spaces. Keep water, fruit, or movement prompts visible and easy to reach. If you’re at home, take the snacks off your shopping list, or move them to a hard to reach area. Make the healthy choice the obvious one.
Create clear cues for recovery. Block short breaks in your calendar, set reminders to stand or breathe, or use a regular meeting transition as a cue to reset. Anchoring your new habit to something that already happens makes it more likely to stick.
Reduce friction where you can. Lay out walking shoes the night before, prep healthy snacks, keep resistance bands near your desk. The less effort you need to get it done, the more likely the habit is to happen on busy days.
Negotiate small, specific changes. You can’t change everything, but you might be able to request small adjustments, like shifting start times, protecting a lunch break, or moving a recurring meeting. Small changes can significantly improve the sustainability of a habit.
Make habits satisfying, not perfect. Track consistency and celebrate progress rather than outcomes. Notice the small wins, and focus on what you did manage, not what didn’t happen. Progress over perfection.
Adjust as needed. If work demands spike, adjust habits rather than abandoning them. A shorter walk, an earlier bedtime, or a brief pause still reinforces the habit loop and maintains the consistency you need. When I had an emergency C-section, I didn’t stop everything for weeks and weeks. I slowed down, focussed on recovery, and did small bouts of movement that gradually built up over time.
Healthy habits aren’t about doing everything right. They’re about making the next healthy choice a little easier, even when the system around you isn’t.
Healthy Habits: Systems and Individuals
Hopefully you can see that healthy habits at work aren’t just an individual responsibility. Healthy habits are most sustainable when the structure of work supports them, and this benefits everyone involved:
Work that respects recovery time and boundaries
Schedules that allow consistent routines
Psychologically safe environments where people can speak up
Leadership that models healthy behaviours
Policies that reward wellbeing as much as output
This complements:
People aligned with their values
Habit loops that are designed for people to improve their health
Individual systems that measure progress over perfection, and help a person build their self-efficacy so they can reach their goals.
Workplaces that prioritise these conditions see not just better individual health outcomes but also greater productivity and lower costs from absenteeism and presenteeism - a win for all.
A Better Question to Ask: From Individuals to Systems
Instead of asking:
“Why aren’t people looking after themselves?”
A better question is:
“What in our workplace system makes healthy habits hard to sustain?”
That shift changes everything.
Healthy habits are a signal of system health, alongside individual system design.
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References
AbbVie Australia. (2024). Working well: Creating workplace cultures to unlock the full capabilities of Australians living with chronic health conditions. https://www.abbvie.com.au/content/dam/abbvie-dotcom/au/documents/Working-Well-Insights-Report.pdf
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2022), Chronic Conditions, accessed 02.02.2026, <https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/chronic-conditions#:~:text=How%20common%20are%20chronic%20conditions?,-Chronic%20conditions%20are&text=Among%20people%20of%20all%20ages,with%20deafness%20or%20hearing%20loss.>
OECD (2022), Promoting Health and Well-being at Work: Policy and Practices, OECD Health Policy Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/e179b2a5-en.