How To Improve Employee Well-being Without Breaking The Bank

Even before the pandemic, employee well-being has always been an essential business metric to track. If your employees do not have the energy to be creative and resilient in front of business challenges, you are running a business that cannot ensure key strategies will be executed. Once you start measuring and tracking employee well-being improving it becomes possible. Many organizations spend tons of money on the process of improving well-being when research shows that improving employee well-being should not break the bank. By doing so, any organization can succeed by providing the autonomy, control, social connections, and support that foster physical and mental well-being.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and the author of 15 books, emphasized job control and social support as two critical contributors to employee engagement that also improve employee health, and potentially reduce healthcare costs and strengthen the case for them as a top management priority.

Job control consists of the amount of discretion employees have to determine what they do and how they do it. Studies revealed that job control has a major impact on employees’ physical health. Limited job control has negative effects that go beyond the physical damage to impose pressure on employees’ mental health, too. The only way organizations can guard against these dangers is by creating roles that grant employees more flexibility and autonomy. Increasing flexibility and autonomy as well as reducing micromanagement have become very essential in preventing employee burnout during the pandemic and after the introduction of remote offices.

A study of 8,500 white-collar workers in Sweden examined changes in stress- and health-related psychosocial exposures and sickness absence during more than 20 years in Swedish working life. Findings proved that employees with a passive work profile (low job demands and low job control) had the lowest rate and the lowest increase in sickness absence. Individuals with active work profiles, where high jobs demands are supposed to be balanced by high job control, had a rather high increase in sickness days. The same study revealed increased and more prevalent sickness absence among care workers who had low social support. Employees’ autonomy allows them to control what happens to them at work, increases their motivation to learn, and attain a certain degree of mastery over their environment allowing them to achieve desired results. On the other hand, low job control undermines employees’ feelings of competence and accomplishment and ultimately contributes to stress, anxiety, and depression.

Social support is another important aspect of a healthy workplace. Research going back to the 1970s consistently demonstrates a connection between social support and health. A 2015 study with 319 respondents in Taiwan revealed that social support at the workplace directly contributes to subjective well-being and indirectly via self-efficacy.

Job control and Social support are two concepts that employers can use to increase employees’ well-being without incurring significant costs on the organization.