Mental Health Matters: The Right Way To Support Employee Wellbeing in the Workplace
Employee wellbeing is critical to any organization. However, recent data shows that the $8 billion dollar employee wellness industry does little to nothing to actually support or improve it. With such a waste of resources, it’s clear that more targeted initiatives are needed. Improved benefits for counseling, psychiatry and psychotherapy do help individuals address specific mental health issues and can improve wellbeing.
How Employee Wellbeing and Mental Health is Tied to Productivity
Lost productivity due to anxiety and depression costs the global economy $1 Trillion per year, according to the World Health Organization, in the form of 12 billion working days per year. And this is just one metric; many employees with mental health issues don’t take days off, and may have poor performance at work. 40% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials report being stressed and anxious all the time, with nearly half experiencing workplace burnout.
Understandably, employers want to make sure that their people are mentally well. Not just for productivity improvements, but to foster a more positive culture. However, many employers fall into the marketing trap of the wellness industry, which offers preventative solutions that are often cheaper than increasing medical and mental health benefits.
Some Wellness Programs Don’t Improve Employee Wellness, But Help Engagement
While improved employee mental health is the goal, one-size-fits-all employee wellness programs are not the way to meet it, according to new data from Oxford University. In fact, some programs, such as resilience training, had participants reporting worse mental health than non-participants.
Instead, organizational-level addressing of problems which impact employee mental health seemed to be the best way to improve employee mental health. On a positive note, the study did find that these programs improved worker engagement, which is also correlated to company growth.
In the study, worker wellbeing is defined as a holistic construct of how well someone’s working life is making them feel. The study focused on promotional and preventative employee wellness practices, which promote positive psychological function and prevent deterioration - basically everything that isn’t centered around helping medically with specific mental health issues. These practices include:
- Resilience training
- Mindfulness
- Stress management
- Wellbeing apps
- Volunteering
In conclusion, volunteering was the only program to actually show workplace wellness benefits for participants. Resilience training and stress management had negative outcomes, and the rest showed no improvements at all. Time management and volunteering seemed to show the best benefits for worker engagement, with all combined programs having a positive effect on engagement.
Ironically, volunteering is generally the only activity on the list that is free. The rest combine to support an $8 billion dollar global industry which companies are glad to pay into for the promise of improved mental health. This investment isn’t for nothing, since it does help employee engagement, but things like resilience training and stress management may need to be reexamined after reviewing the results of this study.
Study Authors & Deloitte Recommend Fixing Systemic Organizational Issues Instead
Companies that implement these sorts of proactive employee wellness programs also tend to have cultures that are more toxic to employees, according to the study authors. They were more likely to report unrealistic time pressure, bad expectation management, strained team and management relationships, and high workloads than workers at companies without employee wellness programs.
Deloitte’s Wellbeing at Work survey unearthed similar conclusions. In that survey, most employees reported that their wellbeing was the same or worse in 2023, even though 88% of organizations reported that they would be more focused on wellbeing programs over the next two years. They suggested organizational change and going beyond traditional wellbeing programs to include Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts to address the needs of disparate workers.
Fixing organizational issues should be of top priority to improve employee mental wellness and improve engagement. We have written about how to improve work culture and invite you to follow the advice there. Instilling a positive company culture and offering increased medical mental health benefits are preferable to throwing money away on employee wellness programs which function as little more than window dressing, and may even negatively impact employee wellness.
If you want to measure how engaged and productive employees are, we have the solution. Prodoscore is an employee productivity monitoring solution that gives managers consistent insight into how their people are engaging and working, without invasive technology.
