Workplace wellness programs have little benefit, research shows
Employee mental health care has become a multi-billion dollar industry. New hires, once they find the bathrooms and enroll in 401(k) plans, are offered an arsenal of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps.
These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking HR departments, proof that employers care about their employees. But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 employees at companies that offered such programs found that people who participated were no better off than colleagues who did not.
The studyPublished this month in Industrial Relations Journal, it looked at the outcomes of 90 different interventions and found one notable exception: employees who were given the opportunity to do charity or volunteer work appeared to have improved their well-being.
In the large study population, none of the other offers (apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health) had any positive effect. Trainings on resilience and stress management actually turned out to have a negative effect.
“It's a fairly controversial finding that these very popular programs were not effective,” said William J. Fleming, the study's author and a fellow at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center.
Dr.'s analysis Fleming suggests that employers concerned about employees' mental health would be better off focusing on “core practices” such as scheduling, rewards and performance reviews.
“If employees do want access to mindfulness apps and sleep programs and wellness apps, there's nothing wrong with that,” he says. “But if you're serious about trying to promote employee well-being, it has to be about work practices.”
The research of Dr. Fleming is based on responses to the 2017 and 2018 Britain's Healthiest Workplace survey of employees from 233 organisations, with employees in the financial and insurance sectors, younger workers and women slightly over-represented.
The data recorded workers at one point in time, rather than tracking them before and after treatment. Using thousands of matched pairs from the same workplace, the wellbeing measures of employees who participated in wellbeing programs were compared with those of their colleagues who did not.
It's possible there was selection bias, as employees who enroll in a resilience training program, for example, may have lower well-being initially, Dr. Fleming said. To address this, he separately analyzed the responses of employees with high levels of work stress, comparing those who did and did not participate. But even among this group, survey responses suggested the programs had no clear benefit.
The findings challenge practices that have become common across all employment sectors. But researchers said they came as no surprise.
“Employers want to be seen as doing something, but they don't want to look closely and change the way work is organized,” says Tony D. LaMontagne, professor of work, health and well-being at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, who was not involved in the research.
Workplace mental health interventions can send the message that “if you're doing these programs and you're still feeling stressed, it must be you,” Mr. LaMontagne said. “People who don't have a critical eye can internalize that failure: 'So I really am a loser.'”
The corporate wellness services sector has grown explosively in recent years thousands of competing suppliers billions of dollars in revenue. Companies invest in the interventions in the hope of saving money overall by improving employee health and productivity.
Some research supports this expectation. A 2022 study Tracking 1,132 employees in the United States who used Spring Health, a platform that connects employees with mental health services such as therapy and medication management, found that 69.3 percent of participants showed improvement in their depression. Participants also missed fewer work days and reported higher productivity.
Adam Chekroud, co-founder of Spring Health and assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale, said Dr. Fleming examined interventions that were “not very credible” and that well-being was measured many months later. A blanket rejection of workplace interventions, he said, risks “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
“There is recent and very credible data showing that things like mental health programs improve all of those metrics that he mentions,” said Dr. Chekroud. “That's the baby you shouldn't throw away.”
There is also solid evidence that practices like mindfulness can have a positive effect. Controlled studies have consistently shown this lower stress and reduced anxiety and depression afterwards mindfulness training.
The Moderate Benefits Dr. Fleming found, may reflect variations in supply, said Larissa Bartlett, a researcher at the University of Tasmania who has designed and taught mindfulness programs. “Light-touch” interventions such as apps, she added, are generally less effective than one-on-one or group training.
The research of Dr. Fleming, she said, “ignores most of these details, summarizing intervention types into broad labels, involvement into yes/no, and dismissing intervention participants' reports that they felt they benefited from the programs they did pushed.”
One important omission, she added, is longitudinal data that shows whether participants experience improvement over time. The result is a “bird's eye view” of participants' well-being that “overlooks changes that may occur at the individual level,” she said.
Dr. Fleming said he was aware of the amount of research supporting the effectiveness of the treatments, but that he had “never been more convinced of the very positive findings” as the data comes from controlled trials in which the treatment was very effective. is implemented. , something that may not be the case with employer-offered programs.
Dr. David Crepaz-Keay, head of research and applied learning at the Mental Health Foundation in the UK, who has advised the World Health Organization and Public Health England on mental health initiatives, described Dr. Fleming as “certainly more robust” than “most of the research that has created the consensus that employee assistance works.”