A provocative new study that questions the value of common workplace wellness initiatives was released in the Industrial Relations Journal in January of 2024. After the study analyzed survey data from over 46,000 employees across 233 British organizations, the research found that outside of employee volunteer offerings, common well-being interventions like apps, resilience training, and meditation programs proved to have little to no clear benefits for workers.
Before we ring the death knell for workplace wellness though, it’s worth considering that these findings offer us an opportunity to reframe our approach to supporting worker health. To do so, however, we first need to recognize that standalone interventions will always come up short. That’s because they fail to provide the long-term, multimodal support required to fundamentally upgrade skills and embed new mental models across an organization. True organizational and personal thriving requires an integrated development approach that embeds well-being principles holistically and equips individuals with the skills to manage the modern workday’s mounting stressors.
Current State of Workplace Well-Being
What do we mean by well-being? Before we can answer that, it’s important to bisect well-being interventions into two distinct categories: addressing mental health challenges, which affect a minority of our working population and requires clinical mental health services, and supporting mental well-being, which affects 100% of the employee population and refers to the personal resources and outlook that allow all employees to sustain resilience and thrive when facing everyday work life challenges. With positive mental well-being, people can get through everyday challenges and thrive regardless of external circumstances or conflicting internal states that may arise.
Cultivating mental fitness results in increased well-being. As people gain the skills to process difficulties, manage their energy, regulate their emotions and maintain a healthy outlook no matter the situation, they can take great strides to prevent the small daily frustrations we all experience from cascading into pervasive distress. This goes a long way towards protecting performance, relationships and overall wellness. In fact, mental well-being’s innate coping tools allow people to tap inner resources to better pivot into productive mindsets and forward movement when faced with adversity.
Unfortunately, mental well-being skills are not being developed at scale across today's workplaces. As evidenced by ever-rising employee burnout rates, a clear signal that many individuals lack positive coping outlets when pressure mounts, organizations have yet to commit to training these personal capabilities with the same rigor typically evident in the development of professional hard skills.
As such, opportunity abounds for real culture change in this great well-being reframe.
Reframing What Success Requires
To achieve success in this endeavor, we must reframe workplace well-being. Organizations expecting peak productivity despite growing complexity must take grander steps to help employees mitigate toxic stress levels while sustaining positive outlooks.
Truly embedded employee well-being relies equally on strengthening individual skills and company policies. It’s a matter of reducing unnecessary strain. Developing individuals and the company requires properly equipping workers with the tools to self-regulate while removing unnecessary burdens across the organization. This is a reimagined model for well-being compared to typical siloed interventions and peripheral offerings that have dominated workplace strategies thus far. Rather than persist in the small-scale, ad hoc wellness initiatives that show little return, this framework orients both leaders and team members towards evidence-based investments.
At the individual level, we have not adequately supported people. They need help to build the mental muscle they need to withstand the ever-increasing pressure the knowledge-based workplace requires. Although strengthening skills like emotional regulation, focus or combating negative thinking patterns can be a boon against everyday events that trigger excessive stress, organizations have not fully committed to integrating the development of these personal capabilities into workplace learning. Despite the fact that mindfulness, meditation and energy management are scientifically validated approaches to cultivating resilience, they remain elusive in the well-being packages afforded most workers.
Conversely, companies have a responsibility beyond offering adequate mental fitness training to their workers. Indeed, they must attend to the primary cause of workplace stress — the work itself. This means proactively identifying and mitigating unnecessary strain points originating from practices and policies within the organization. There’s no mobile app that can erase the detrimental impacts of unreasonable deadlines, unstable staffing, vague role expectations and other chronic pressures that reliably overtax peoples’ limits. As a result, it’s imperative to conduct an analysis of everything from current culture and staffing models to performance management and technology usage. An easy rule of thumb in this endeavor is to approach this analysis through the lens that safety from psychological harm should be figured equally with physical safety in workplace design.
Integrating the Approach
By advocating for better mental fitness skills in tandem with company-wide operational improvement, employee well-being efforts can reach their full potential. In light of the survey data, it is such an obvious response to piecemeal offerings that miss the mark that, in the years to come, we should make this integrated approach fundamental to talent development.
In practice, this model succeeds by embedding itself across operations rather than entering as a time-bound initiative. From recruiting and onboarding through performance management cycles, well-being principles should become inextricable from workflows themselves. This is manifest in team capacity assessments determining work allocation as much as individual resilience tracking.
As broader societal forces like technology dependence and blurred lines between work and home life persist in eroding boundaries, employer responsibility to promote employee well-being will only continue to grow. Outdated attitudes that relegate such efforts to the realm of supplementary rather than essential will continue to experience burnout, retention issues and decreased productivity at an accelerated rate.
The new integrated paradigm flips the script to position individual and organizational health as interdependent and by proxy, expands well-being from a nice-to-have feature to an essential ethos. Organizations that harmonize working and living well will attract and retain top talent more effectively, foster deeper employee engagement, boost productivity and future-proof their operations for the rapidly changing working world in the coming decades. This prioritization of mutual enablement is essential to reframing workplace well-being.
The Path Forward
The path forward requires us to continue focusing on learning and iterating rather than condemning existing well-being efforts outright. Early, isolated initiatives never fully embodied the spirit behind investing in employee well-being. However, understanding workers’ capabilities and limits, especially when matched against intensifying work-life complexity, is imperative to organizational success in the future.
While companies cannot dictate happiness, they can commit to fostering the conditions for it to thrive. This begins by taking employees’ lived experiences as seriously as any other business priority and providing them with the tools and environment conducive to personal and professional excellence. When organizational practices enable this level of self-actualization on and off the job, workplace well-being is assured.
Deb Smolensky, Senior Vice President, Well-Being & Engagement, NFP.