Changing organisational culture — with more attention to scheduling, job design, and management practices — is more beneficial to employees than individually focused mental wellbeing initiatives, a study of more than 46,000 UK workers shows.
The results from an Oxford University study published earlier this year found that those who participate in individual‐level interventions have the same levels of mental wellbeing as those who do not. The researcher behind the study said that companies should focus on improving the work more than on improving the worker.
William J. Fleming, Ph.D., Unilever Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, said that narrowly focused interventions were not helping to alleviate the stress caused by demands placed on workers.
“When there’s an imbalance [between your capacities and what’s expected of you], that’s when your wellbeing declines,” Fleming said in an interview with FM. “These initiatives are being offered as token suggestions or sticking plaster solutions … but it’s not providing … appropriate resources to help people cope with the challenges that people experience at work.”
The results pose a challenge to the popularity and legitimacy of individual‐level mental wellbeing interventions like mindfulness, resilience, and stress management, the study said.
“I think that the best recommendations that are out there do say that we need to improve jobs first and then individual sessions are just the cherry on top,” Fleming said.
However, for larger companies it is often an easier, less costly solution to invest in individual-level wellness programmes than to make changes to their organisational culture, he said.
Organisational change, according to the research, is a more effective way to improve employee wellbeing. These changes can include a focus on scheduling, management practices, staff resources, performance reviews, and job design.
“More emphasis must be placed on the greater benefits of organisational rather than individual change, as well as on the importance of high‐quality intervention implementation,” the study said.
Participation in many individually focused programmes is very low, Fleming said — in general, less than 10% of the workforce opts in to such initiatives.
“I think this shows that these initiatives are not appealing to workers and it’s not actually meeting what they want,” Fleming said. “All the stuff that you think intuitively makes a good job is actually what makes it a good job. People need jobs that pay well, have good direction, that have some sense of social meaning, [with] supportive colleagues and respectful managers.”
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