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Workplace Wellbeing or Band-Aids?
Workplace wellbeing starts with a human environment of caring about people. In the United Kingdom, many companies, about half, adopt formal wellbeing strategies. These strategies include services such as Employee Assistance Programs, wellness apps, counseling, and spaces for meditation.
They also offer training in stress management and mindfulness. Yet, it’s important to ask: do they really impact wellbeing?
The Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford recently conducted an investigation that challenges the effectiveness of current wellbeing strategies.
Analyzing survey data from 46,336 workers in 233 UK organizations, the researchers uncovered limited benefits from these interventions.
The survey asked whether the respondents participated in around 90 different employee wellbeing programs that fell into one of the following categories:
- Volunteering or charity work
- Mindfulness classes or programs
- Resilience, energy or stress management classes or programs
- Wellbeing app on broad range of physical health, mental health and lifestyle issues
- Massage or relaxation classes or programs
- Workload or time management training
