Do Employee Wellbeing Programs Improve Mental Health?

Source: WallsIO / Pexels

A happy and healthy worker is a productive worker... right? This belief has fueled the rise of the multi-billion-dollar employee wellness industry. Organizations spend an estimated $8 billion annually on individual-level initiatives like mindfulness training, resilience workshops, wellness apps, and workplace counseling. The reasoning? Helping employees reduce stress and anxiety will make them happier, more engaged, and thus more productive. However, mounting scientific evidence reveals this isn't necessarily the case. Despite the persistent marketing hype, employee wellness programs rarely improve worker wellbeing, engagement, performance, or provide evidence of real return on investment.

New research from Oxford University sheds light on these interventions' ineffectiveness, questioning the wellness industry's value. The study by William Flemming, published in Industrial Relations Journal, analyzed responses from 46,336 workers across 233 UK organizations. His conclusions? Those who participated in employee wellbeing programmes were no better off than those who didn't. In practical terms, participants did not show to be happier, more engaged, more mentally healthy, or more engaged than before. In fact, for some interventions like resilience training, participants reported worse mental health than non-participants. This study joins a growing body of academic literature questioning the efficacy of work-related wellbeing interventions.

Why Do Employee Wellbeing Interventions Fail?

So why do these enormously popular programs fail? There are several potential reasons:

1. Addressing Symptoms, Not Root Causes: Programs largely centre on addressing outcomes of larger organizational issues (e.g., disengagement) instead of treating their causes (e.g., excessive workload, time pressure, poor cultures, etc). Mindfulness can't give you more control over your workload. Wellness apps can't fix toxic cultures. You can't simply breathe or meditate your way out of high-pressure environments controlled by ineffective leaders. Without changing the actual root causes, individual interventions are mere band-aids on gaping wounds.
2. Lack of Data-Driven Approach: Interventions fail because organizations implement them without understanding the specific factors contributing to or detracting from employee wellbeing in their unique contexts. Without leveraging predictive models and empirical data, identifying the most impactful antecedents to target and effective interventions becomes challenging.
3. They Promote Unhealthy Blame-Shifting. Corporate wellbeing shifts the burden of the problem from the organisation to employees. If you're feeling stressed, anxious or burned out, the implication is that it's your problem — maybe you're not resilient enough or not managing yourself well enough. The company's role becomes "fixing" employees through mental conditioning rather than improving working conditions and operational practices, thus absolving itself of responsibility.
4. Evidence-Based Practices Failing the Reality Test. Workplace interventions developed and validated in clinical or academic settings tend to be small-scale and highly supervised, so benefits can't be generalized to real-world contexts. Once these "evidence-based programs" roll out in actual work environments, beneficial effects tend to disappear.
5. Poor Intervention Design. Most real-world interventions are poorly designed, ignoring basic behavior change models, neglecting validated diagnostic models, focusing on problem outcomes rather than causes/moderators, and cherry-picking unproven activities. Further, they show poor person-activity/intervention fit, employ inappropriate dissemination methods, aren't implemented/supported long enough for the effect to take place, and neglect important cultural and contextual factors influencing effectiveness.
6. They Adopt a One-Size-Fits-All Approach. These interventions assume all employees across business units present with the same problems, and the drivers are the same. Interventions not tailored to individuals' needs, capabilities, and problems will never yield tangible wellbeing changes.
7. They Are Events, Not a Process. Employee wellbeing is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Without sustained organizational effort, consistently reinforcing and integrating interventions into the culture, any potential positive effects will be short-lived.

What Interventions Do Seem to Work?

You'd be hard-pressed to find an organization that doesn't profess to value employee wellbeing. However, looking below the surface of many companies and you will find they are still quite authoritarian, impersonal and uncaring about the human costs of their practices. There is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence showing that organisations play a major role in causing common mental health problems through poor job design!

In Flemming's data, this sad statistic was again highlighted. Across all industries, workers participating in wellbeing programs were more likely to report unrealistic time pressures, high workloads, strained colleague/manager relationships, and poor expectations management than non-participants. These are not individual-level problems but issues deeply rooted in the organization’s design. High job demands, limited resources and toxic organisational cultures majorly impacts employee wellbeing and no individual level intervention could possibly aim to fix that.

Unsurprisingly, Flemming found that only organizational-level interventions tended to improve wellbeing. This implies organizations should change structural aspects of work like improving compensation and benefits, providing secure/permanent job contracts, allowing more autonomy and flexibility over work/schedules, and providing opportunities for professional development/upskilling. Further research shows reducing red tape, shortening meetings, and creating psychologically safe work environments tend to improve wellbeing and, ultimately, performance.

Additionally, research shows that data-driven approaches to employee wellbeing seem to yield higher returns for employees and organizations. These approaches allow organizations to target interventions more effectively at both levels. At the individual level, collecting data on factors like work preferences, coping strategies, and personal resources can identify employees at greater risk of strain or burnout. Tailored interventions like coaching, training, or counseling can then be provided to proactively target the right aspects needed to bolster resilience and wellbeing. At the organizational level, thorough organizational diagnostics using frameworks like the Job Demands-Resources model can pinpoint the precise job demands (e.g., workload, role ambiguity) and inadequate resources (e.g., supervisor support, autonomy) undermining wellbeing. This enables targeted organizational interventions like redesigning work roles, improving leadership effectiveness, or fostering a healthier culture. Using empirical data and predictive modeling to guide wellbeing efforts at both levels allows organizations to develop impactful, cost-efficient interventions that drive meaningful, lasting improvements in employee health and performance.

Conclusion

The simple truth is there's no quick fix or easy solution that corporations can bottle and sell to magically make workers happier. Real, sustainable employee wellbeing will only arise when companies acknowledge the toll their cultures and operating practices are taking on people and authentically adjust those conditions.