A Problem With Workplace Health and Well-Being Programs

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Many initiatives in organizations focus on offering training to employees to help them enhance their mental health and well-being. However, these initiatives are not likely to have a strong or enduring impact unless organizations also make structural changes to the organizational practices and policies that may be responsible for compromising employees’ health and well-being in the first place.

Factors outside employees have a major influence on their health and well-being, and addressing internal psychological issues without addressing external structural factors may prove ineffective or even counterproductive.

For instance, mindfulness training is currently very popular—despite the fact that I recently did a talk on mindfulness for a group of about 30 young business students, and to my very great surprise, only a couple of them had ever heard of it. Mindfulness has been shown to have lots of benefits in organizations. One review of the literature suggested that although the results are not conclusive, “mindfulness appears to have an overall beneficial impact upon mental health” and can reduce anxiety, stress, and anger, and enhance job satisfaction, physical health and subjective well-being. However, mindfulness can also make employees more alert to the negative features of their workplace, such as unfair compensation practices, an unsupportive workplace culture, or abusive leadership.

In fact, one study found that mindfulness worsened the negative association between abusive supervision and employee well-being. That is, mindful employees who worked for bad leaders had lower levels of well-being than their less mindful counterparts. This study demonstrates the general principle that training initiatives to promote health and well-being can be ineffective and actually backfire in the absence of a healthy organizational infrastructure.

In general, individually-focused health-promotion initiatives have a hard time making a difference in unhealthy environments. This does not only apply in the workplace. It’s hard to succeed in a personal effort to reduce your alcohol consumption when you have a home environment featuring a fully stocked bar. At work, the best results are achieved when healthy training initiatives occur in healthy work environments. To best promote employee health and well-being, initiatives such as training should occur in tandem with organization development efforts to create healthy organizational infrastructures. The best results occur when internal and external forces are pushing in the same direction.

Efforts to promote workplace health and well-being can be targeted at building resources at three different levels: individual-level efforts involve things like training and development. Group-level initiatives involve things like building social support and leadership, and organizational-level efforts involve things like changing job design or culture. Interventions to promote health and well-being can be targeted at any one, or all, of these levels. And although interventions at all levels may provide some value, those at the organizational level may be particularly impactful because they serve as the foundation within which the others can “take hold.”

For example, a study out of Germany that examined the drivers of one specific form of workplace well-being, employee engagement, found that although resources at all three levels were associated with employee engagement, those at the organizational level had the greatest impact. The authors concluded that interventions that are targeted at the organizational level, such as how work is organized, are most promising for developing healthy workplaces.

One profession that has considered the interaction of individual (training) and organizational (culture) influences on employee well-being is medicine. American researchers have noted that burnout among medical residents is a serious problem, affecting more physicians than any other profession in the USA. To combat this problem, training that attempts to foster personal resilience (meditation, mindfulness) is frequently offered to residents. However, this training occurs within a professional culture that places major demands on residents who must work 80-hour weeks caring for patients, learning, and documenting their activities, with little or no time to address personal needs.

Residents thus receive mixed messages about well-being. The importance of their health and well-being is implied by the training they are offered, but the actual work practices they are expected to engage in reveal that their health and well-being is not a priority. The researchers conclude that “wellness programs should include a combination of personal resilience training and initiatives to address organizational issues that contribute to burnout” (emphasis added).

Well-intentioned training initiatives to promote the health and well-being of employees are a valuable part of workplace wellness efforts. However, such initiatives can represent superficial, band-aid solutions that fail to address the more fundamental structural pains associated with poor work design, unsupportive human resource policies, and outdated organizational practices. Training is not a magic bullet. In the absence of a supportive organizational infrastructure, with policies and practices that support employee wellness, training is unlikely to have much effect and may even backfire by fostering cynicism among employees who recognize that the organization fails to truly walk the talk of employee health and well-being.