Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. When a new employee finds a restroom and enrolls in his 401(k) plan, he is provided with an array of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions, and a sleep app.
These programs are the pride of a forward-thinking HR department and are proof that employers value their employees. However, British researchers analyzed survey responses from 46,336 employees of companies offering such programs and found that those who participated in the programs did better than their colleagues who did not participate in the programs. I discovered that I was not living my life.
The study, published this month in the Industrial Relations Journal, looked at the results of 90 different interventions and found one notable exception. They found that workers who were given opportunities to do charity work or volunteer work did appear to be happier.
None of the other services, such as apps, coaching, relaxation classes, or courses on time management or financial health, had a positive effect on the large population studied. Training in resilience and stress management actually appears to have negative effects.
“It’s a fairly controversial finding that these highly popular programs were not effective,” said study author William J. Fleming, a fellow at the Center for Wellbeing Research at the University of Oxford. Ta.
Fleming’s analysis suggests that employers concerned about the mental health of their workers should focus on “core organizational practices” such as scheduling, pay, and performance reviews.
“If employees want access to a mindfulness app, a sleep program, a health app, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says. “But if we are serious about promoting employee well-being, it has to be about labor practices.”
Dr Fleming’s research was based on responses to the UK’s Healthiest Workplaces survey from workers in 233 organizations in 2017 and 2018, including those in financial and insurance services. , younger workers, and slightly more women.
This data captured workers at a single point in time, rather than tracking workers before and after treatment. Using thousands of matched pairs from the same workplace, we compared the health status of employees who participated in a wellness program with co-workers who did not.
Fleming said there may have been selection bias, as workers who enroll in resilience training programs may be less happy to begin with, for example. To address this, he separately analyzed the responses of workers with high levels of pre-existing job stress and compared those who participated with those who did not. But even among this group, survey responses suggested that the program provided no clear benefit.
The findings call into question common practices across all professions. But researchers said this was not surprising.
Tony D. Lamontagne, professor of work, health and wellbeing at Melbourne’s Deakin University, said: “Employers want to think they’re doing something, but they’re not taking a hard look or changing how work works. I don’t want to do that.” Australia was not involved in this study.
Workplace mental health interventions can send the message, “If you’re still stressed out even with these programs, it’s your fault,” Lamontagne says. “People who don’t take a critical view may internalize their failures as, ‘So I’m really a loser.'”
The corporate wellness services industry has boomed in recent years, with thousands of vendors competing for billions of dollars in revenue. Companies invest in this intervention in hopes of saving overall costs by improving employee health and productivity.
There are also studies that support this prediction. A 2022 study that followed 1,132 U.S. workers using Spring Health, a platform that connects employees with mental health services such as treatment and medication management, found that 69.3 percent of participants showed improvement in depression. It has been found. Participants also reported taking fewer days off from work and being more productive.
Adam Chekroed, co-founder of Spring Health and assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, said Dr. Fleming’s study tested an intervention that was “not very reliable” and measured happiness several months later. He said if workplace interventions were ignored entirely, there was a risk of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”.
“There’s recent, very reliable data that things like mental health programs improve all of the indicators he mentioned,” Dr. Chekrud said. “That’s a baby you shouldn’t throw away.”
There is also solid evidence that practices like mindfulness can have positive effects. Controlled studies consistently demonstrate reduced stress, anxiety and depression following mindfulness training.
Larissa Bartlett, a researcher at the University of Tasmania who has designed and taught mindfulness programs, said the lack of effectiveness found by Dr Fleming could reflect variations in the offering. Ta. She added that “light touch” interventions like apps are generally less effective than one-on-one or group training.
Dr. Fleming’s study found that “most of these details are missing, condensing the type of intervention into a broad label, with intervention participants saying yes/no that they were involved and felt they had benefited from the program they had undertaken.” “We are ignoring reports from the government,” she said.
She added that a key missing piece is long-term data to show whether participants experience improvement over time. As a result, she said, they were able to see a “bird’s eye view” of participants’ well-being, “ignoring any changes that may occur on an individual level.”
Dr. Fleming said he was aware of a body of research supporting the treatment’s effectiveness, but because the data came from controlled trials in which the treatment was very well implemented, “this is a very positive result. I’ve never been more convinced.” , may not apply to employer-sponsored programs.
Dr David Klepas-Key, head of research and applied learning at the UK Mental Health Foundation, who advises the World Health Organization and Public Health England on mental health initiatives, has drawn on Dr Fleming’s data and analysis to: It is stated as follows. It’s stronger than “most of the research that has produced a consensus that employee assistance works.”