The company offers a meditation app, yoga on Thursdays and fruit in the kitchen. The project deadline has not moved, two positions are still vacant, and the team answers email at eleven at night.
What the research shows
Individual offers change little
William Fleming at the University of Oxford analysed survey data from 46,336 workers in 233 organisations in the United Kingdom. People who took part in mindfulness, resilience or stress management courses, relaxation classes or wellbeing apps were no better off than their colleagues on several measures of wellbeing. His conclusion: organisations have to change the workplace, not only the worker.
Changing the work helps more
Anthony LaMontagne and colleagues reviewed 90 evaluations of job stress interventions. Approaches aimed only at individuals improved some individual outcomes but generally had no favourable effects at the level of the organisation. Approaches that changed the organisation of work helped both individuals and the organisation.
What the World Health Organization recommends
In its 2022 guidelines on mental health at work, the WHO recommends organisational interventions that reduce psychosocial risks, such as excessive workload or low control, and notes that they work best when workers take part in shaping them. It also recommends training managers. Individual interventions are recommended too, but as one part of a broader approach, not instead of it.
How to recognise wellbeing for show
- Offers multiply while workload, staffing and deadlines stay the same.
- Wellbeing appears in the newsletter, but not in the planning.
- An understaffed team is offered resilience training.
- The people who need the offers most have no time to use them.
- Nobody checks whether anything has changed.
Not against yoga
Individual offers are not wrong. They help some people and show some care. They become a facade when they replace the questions nobody wants to ask: how much work is there, how many people to do it, and who decides.
What works instead
- Start from the causes. Workload, unclear roles, availability outside working hours, too many meetings, little control over one’s own work, unresolved conflicts. A climate survey shows where to begin.
- Change one working condition each quarter. A meeting-free morning, a charter on availability, cover during holidays, one fewer reporting round.
- Let teams choose. The people who do the work know best what weighs on it. Participation also makes changes last.
- Train managers. How to notice overload, how to ask about it and what they can change themselves.
- Measure before and after. If nothing is measured, nothing can be shown to work.
- Look at the budget. Compare what goes into offers with what goes into staffing, cover and fewer deadlines.
Questions for HR
- Which of our wellbeing measures changes the work itself?
- What would the team stop doing tomorrow if it could?
- How many people actually use our offers, and who does not?
Measuring the climate without surveillance →
Sources
- Fleming, W. J. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom. Industrial Relations Journal. doi.org
- LaMontagne, A. D., Keegel, T., Louie, A. M., Ostry, A., Landsbergis, P. A. (2007). A systematic review of the job-stress intervention evaluation literature, 1990–2005. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 13(3), 268–280. scholars.mssm.edu
- World Health Organization (2022). WHO guidelines on mental health at work. Summary: Malik, A. et al. (2023), World Psychiatry, 22(2), 331–332. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov