Wellbeing at Work - Are We Having the Wrong Debate?

Last week, I ( Jean Gomes ) sat down with Emma Sinclair , our Head of Applied Research and Development and Dr Dr. Emily Clements , our Research and Neuroscience Lead to discuss a recent research paper that has produced multiple headlines suggesting that corporate wellbeing activities don’t work. ?We took a closer look at the research and share a few conclusions from our conversation. ?

First, what were those headlines??

‘The End of Workplace Mindfulness Training’??

Psychology Today??

‘More pay, not free yoga: Workplace wellness programs have little benefit.’??

The Sydney Morning Herland?

?‘Workplace wellness programmes: A waste of time and money?’??

MSN News??

‘Workplace health benefits don’t move the needle on improving employee happiness and well-being?’??

Yahoo! Finance USA?

Emily – What does the research show??

The paper surveys 46,366 workers across 233 organisations, about individual initiatives and practices aimed at improving employee wellbeing, such as resilience training, mindfulness and app-based interventions. They show that people who take part in these initiatives appear no better off on self-report wellbeing measures.???

However, there’s more under the surface to these findings. Often when research is taken at face value, or just the title and summary points are picked up, it can become misinterpreted and fuel a polarised debate. For this reason, it’s important to dissect it a little more.?

The paper does show that the initiatives fail to improve wellbeing in everyone who took part, but that’s not the whole story. The findings also show that the initiative does work for those who really need it - people who report high stress directly caused by their work. Meaning for those suffering due to the demands of their job, the results suggest wellbeing initiatives do, in fact, work.??

Moreover, we must consider the nature of this study and the sociologist lens placed on this. This is what is called a cross-sectional design, meaning the outcome (wellbeing) and exposures (saying yes or no to having taken part in one of the listed wellbeing programs) are measured at the same time point.??

Think of it in the context of a drug study. A cross-sectional method is like assessing if ibuprofen works by asking people: Have you taken ibuprofen in the last year? (yes or no). Then, at the same time assessing their self-reported pain levels. Without assessing the method of delivery, dosage, or how often it was taken. Without controlling the intervention, a cross-sectional design cannot measure change.??

The author does an effective job at measuring how interventions work in situ (in the real world) rather than just in experimental settings. But this research does not test the effectiveness of the programs themselves, look at specific interventions or obtain pre and post measures necessary to be able to confidently assert if these interventions do, or do not, work to improve individuals’ wellbeing.??

Jean – Why are we interested in this??

What caught our attention was not the research so much as the attention it gained, being recycled by news media outlets with polarising and misleading headlines.? Accepting the limitations that Emily points out, misinterpretation of the research risks pushes us backwards. As demand and uncertainty soar, burnout continues to become a reality for more of us. In a study published late last year, 60% of employees, 75% of C-suite, want to escape for a better life to escape the burnout spiral they find themselves in with their current organisation.?

Many organisations are stalled in tackling the problem by an unspoken (or at least behind closed doors debate) question about who is responsible for employee well-being: the individual or the organisation? It may seem obvious that it’s not an either/or answer, but many leaders don’t have the patience to develop creative solutions to manage the paradox.???

This blind spot reinforces the bias of ‘wellbeing as employee benefit’ attitude.? It gives leaders a get-out clause, ‘see; it doesn’t work anyway.’ This is a zero-sum mindset where the company ‘wins’ in the short term at the expense of its people’s wellbeing. The organisation loses in long-term as its culture hollows out, with collective resilience becoming ever more fragile. This mindset prevents us from confronting the real challenge of making wellbeing a source of value creation and building a culture and way of working that enables wellbeing.????

Emma – What does this mean for us all??

Wellbeing isn’t found through a series of initiatives people take part in. It’s found in being aware of, and meeting our core needs, some of which are being continually sacrificed. This personal awareness then needs to be part of a collective engagement so we can find practical ways of balancing those needs with the needs of our work and others’.??

This means integrating renewal, refocus, and resetting moments into our day, week and quarterly cycles. This creates personal and organisational health and unlocks more capacity to perform.?

Meeting individuals’ wellbeing needs to perform has to register as one of the top team priorities for organisations today and can’t be seen or analysed through a list of initiatives or interventions that people can access and use. Instead, wellbeing on the ground is created and fostered through regular interactions and exchanges between people, choices in the way people work and support one another and the responsibility and care they take for each. Measuring individual initiatives and individual self-reported wellbeing as inputs to this system of exchanges reduces the complexity of needs teams have.?

Over the past decade, wellbeing has risen to the top of many organisation’s people agendas for an obvious reason – many of us struggle with constant rises in demand, the need for change and solving problems with considerable uncertainty about what we’re doing.?Wellbeing is fundamentally about our ability to function across every dimension of our life and feel productive and satisfied.??

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Jean – The takeaway message

Our wellbeing is something we generally take for granted until we don’t have it.? Either we plough on and incur the costs of underperformance or negative impact on our life outside work. Or, worse still, we burn out and undermine the performance of others. An organisation’s wellbeing strategy shouldn’t primarily be about mitigating these effects when the damage is done but using an innovation lens and creating a culture that sees a virtuous cycle where wellbeing fuels exceptional performance and progressive ways of working integrate wellbeing into everyday work.????

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