Well-being programs at work are not very effective – 02/02/2024 – Balance

Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires are introduced to a variety of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps.

But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 workers at companies that offered such programs found that people who took part in them were no better off than colleagues who didn’t.

The study, published this month in the Industrial Relations Journal, considered the results of 90 different interventions and found a single notable exception: workers who had the opportunity to volunteer appeared to have improved well-being.

Across the entire study sample, none of the other offerings — apps, coaching, relaxation classes, time management or financial health courses — had any positive effect. Training on resilience and stress management actually seemed to have a negative effect.

“It’s a very controversial finding that these popular programs were not effective,” says William J. Fleming, study author and researcher at the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford.

Fleming’s analysis suggests that employers concerned about workers’ mental health would do better to focus on “core organizational practices” such as schedules, wages and performance reviews.

Fleming’s study is based on the Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey carried out in 2017 and 2018, completed by workers from 233 organisations, with employees in the finance and insurance sector, including younger employees and slightly over-represented women.

The data captured workers at a single point in time, rather than following them before and after treatment. Using thousands of matched pairs from the same workplace, it compared measures of well-being of workers who participated in wellness programs with those of their colleagues who did not.

Adam Chekroud, co-founder of Spring Health, a platform that connects employees with mental health services, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, says Fleming’s study examined interventions that were “poorly credible” and measured well-being. be many months later. A blanket rejection of workplace interventions, he said, risks “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

“There is recent, highly credible data that things like mental health programs improve every metric he mentions,” says Chekroud.