Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: Cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom

This interesting study has already done the rounds – but worth a read. Via survey of >46k workers in 233 organisations in the UK, it explored the evidence behind individual-level workplace mental health interventions.

Providing background:

·?????? Promotion of workers’ well-being is common in contemporary British workplaces, with recent data suggesting over half of UK employers report a formal wellbeing strategy

·?????? Specific mental well-being interventions either seek some change in the individual, or in the organisation

·?????? They argue “Despite formal recommendations …for Health and Care Excellence … and evidence supporting the effectiveness of organisational change and work redesign on improving worker well‐being …interventions that target the individual worker are most common”

·?????? Popular practices include EAPs, counselling, resilience and stress training, promotion of healthy lifestyles

·?????? This article focuses on practices that promote generally positive psychological functioning and preventing deterioration of worker well-being

·?????? Mental well-being in this paper is a catch-all term for “mental states component of work well-being, made up of mental health and mental illness, which are constitutive components of the broader construct of well-being”

·?????? Lots of prior research has focused on these interventions and their effectiveness. Some systematic reviews have reported moderately positive effects for mental well-being initiatives

·?????? Despite this, “across all of these studies, authors share consistent concerns with multiple methodological limitations, including heterogenous effects, temporality, publication bias, attrition, outcomes and fidelity”

I’ve skipped heaps of this paper; so consider my summary just scratching the surface.

Results

Key findings about individual-level workplace mental well-being interventions:

·?????? Across multiple subjective well-being indicators, “participants appear no better off”

·?????? And that, “those who participate in individual-level interventions have the same levels of mental well-being as those who do not”

·?????? “results suggest interventions are not providing additional or appropriate resources in response to job demands”

·?????? Finally, “there is no support from this analysis to support [hypothesis 1] that these interventions are beneficial for workers' subjective wellbeing, instead indicating a null hypothesis is more appropriate”

Unpacking the findings, it’s said that these findings don’t entirely discount positive effects for some individual workers, it’s said that “any such effect may be averaged out by a negative effect elsewhere”.

The lack of impact was consistent across gender, ethnicity and income groups.

The results are said to “echo others who found low-level interventions such as these to be ineffective for mental well-being unless linked to preventative structural change”.

The author then explores why these interventions may not be successful from the Job Demands-Resources model.

For one, interventions like resilience training and mindfulness attempt to teach workers to “consciously develop their coping mechanisms”, and in turn better manage job demands. It’s argued that the interventions aren’t supporting workers here, nor may they be relevant to contextual job demands.

Moreover, while workers may report feeling supported in their stress, “this is not matched in subjective well-being….[moreover] the survey item places peculiar emphasis on the individual”. That is, focus is placed on what individuals must do rather than organisational support structures.

Participants in these initiatives were more likely to report unrealistic time pressures. Several explanations why are provided, but one is that while the “interventions may make workers more aware of unrealistic time pressures, without being given the psychological tools to cope with them”.

Said differently, the programs enhance a worker’s skill in identifying job demands without enhancing their ability to psychologically manage those demands.

An exception to the null findings relate to volunteering work. This was found to have a small positive effect.

?It’s argued that high-quality research, like with carefully controlled RCTs may find statistically significant and meaningful impacts on such interventions, perhaps an issue is the largescale implementation and research in the wild.

Finally, while the study had several strengths, it also had some notable limitations, e.g. cross-sectional, survey with little information on the interventions, and interventions evaluated separately and not holistically.

Author: Fleming, W. J. (2024). Employee well‐being outcomes from individual‐level mental health interventions: Cross‐sectional evidence from the United Kingdom.?Industrial Relations Journal,?55(2), 162-182.