Beyond Happiness and Meaning: Transforming Your Life Through Ethical Behavior

It has been about five years since I published my book, Beyond Happiness and Meaning: Transforming Your Life Through Ethical Behavior. From time to time, I read about ways to bring greater meaning and enjoy a higher level of happiness in life. In today's blog I will discuss the concept of workplace wellness.

What is Workplace Wellness?

Workplace wellness can be defined in different ways. It could focus on the health of workers and safety concerns. It might address an organization’s programs to enhance safety on the job and provide a mechanism to address discrimination and harassment issues. One definition that best describes it, I believe, comes from the Society for Human Resource Management paper that says:

“Workplace wellness is any combination of holistic workplace characteristics that support healthy behavior in the workplace, improve health outcomes, and strengthen workplace culture. Workplace wellness practices have been proven to aid in recruiting and retaining highly skilled employees. Practices that support workplace wellness help reduce health risks, enhance productivity, improve employees’ quality of life and happiness levels, benefit the organization’s bottom line, and help the organization recruit and retain top talent.”

A study by Michigan State University addresses the issue from an organizational perspective, which I like because it looks at ethics in the workplace. MSU characterizes workplace wellness as follows: “Workplace culture can be framed as, The personality of an organization from the employee perspective. More specifically, it is the environment and atmosphere that employees work in, combining leadership, beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, and interactions within the workplace. A positive workplace culture successfully creates a space where employees feel comfortable, trusted, valued, and empowered in their work. An organization’s culture is interwoven into everything they do, stand for, and how they treat their employees.”

Taken together, we can say that workplace well-being and culture encompass every topic from physical and mental health to teambuilding, aspects of the work environment, and beyond. Many of the practices instituted will have overlapping benefits, such as improved productivity, retention, collaboration, job satisfaction, mental health, and engagement. From my perspective, workplace wellness is an essential ingredient of finding happiness and meaning in life.

Employee Perspective on Wellness in the Workplace

Since 2019, Indeed has partnered with leading experts at the University of Oxford to collect data on how employees feel at work, resulting in defined criteria for measuring work wellbeing: happiness, purpose, stress, and satisfaction. 

Building upon this massive dataset — the world's largest study of work wellbeing — Indeed has collaborated with the University of Oxford to create The Work Wellbeing 100, an index of the top 100 publicly traded companies ranked by the Work Wellbeing Score. These companies consistently outperformed leading stock indices, including the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, and Russell 3000, showing that prioritizing wellbeing benefits people and business.

"Prioritizing wellbeing is the right thing to do for your employees," said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics at the University of Oxford and director of its Wellbeing Research Centre. "However, many still see wellbeing as a nice to have. Oxford's analysis of the business case for work wellbeing finds that companies with higher levels of employee wellbeing see better valuations return on assets and profits."

The data from the report confirms that there is a link between remote work opportunities and a climate of well-being, suggesting a need for employers to address work-life balance challenges for the workforce. However, since managers typically encounter lower stress levels than their junior employees, some managers may not fully appreciate these needs. This research also highlights some important differences by gender and ethnic groups, showing that well-being in the workplace is still consistently lower for women and African Americans. 

Interestingly enough, researchers also completed a comparison analysis of the climate of well-being between the top 100 companies listed in the Fortune 100 Best Companies, as recognized by Great Place To Work®, and non-ranked companies in 2023. They found that ranked firms have significantly higher employee well-being scores, further strengthening the potential link between employee well-being and organizations recognized as great places to work. 

According to Indeed, wellbeing at work makes business sense. According to the research with the University of Oxford, public companies hiring that prioritize work wellbeing are outperforming leading stock indices. The results include the following.

• Globally, only 22% of Indeed survey respondents say they're thriving at work.
• Social factors are the most influential drivers of one's sense of wellbeing at work.
• Indeed's new Work Wellbeing 100 demonstrates that companies with higher work wellbeing collectively outperform stock market benchmarks.

These data sets are interesting and provide lots of food for thought. However, a significant challenge in measuring wellness is the lack of a well-defined, structured framework. There is no one set of data that various organizations could agree on to measure workplace wellness. Moreover, certain terms are not well-defined, such as what does “thriving at work” mean?”

Employee Perspective on the Role of the Employer and Workplace Wellness

I have previously blogged about how employer concern for employee well-being enhances their value in the workplace and creates a more positive outlook for the employee.

A Gallup Poll released on March 14, 2022, addresses the various dimensions of wellbeing in the workplace. The Percent of respondents who feel their employer cares about their wellbeing has been declining. This finding is critical for organizations because employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing, in comparison to others, are:

• 69% less likely to actively search for a new job
• 71% less likely to report experiencing a lot of burnout
• five times more likely to strongly advocate for their company as a place to work and to strongly agree they trust the leadership of their organization
• three times more likely to be engaged at work
• 36% more likely to be thriving in their overall lives

Gallup's research has also found that teams who are most likely to feel the organization cares about their wellbeing achieve higher customer engagement, profitability, productivity, lower turnover, and have fewer safety incidents.

Employers typically focus on external results--financial- rather than internal needs, such as an ethical culture and workplace wellness. It is time to emphasize the latter more than ever before because today's workers--millennials, Gen X and Gen Z--seek out firms that pay attention to the environment, society and governance issues or ESG. There have been many surveys that indicate employees want to work for organizations that are committed to sustainability. Workplace wellness is one element of creating a sustainable organization culture. 

Mental Health and Well-Being

In October 2022, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, released the office’s first-ever Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being.

The results of APA’s 2023 Work in America Survey confirmed that psychological well-being is a very high priority for workers themselves. Specifically:

• 92% of workers said it is very (57%) or somewhat (35%) important to them to work for an organization that values their emotional and psychological well-being.
• 92% said it is very (52%) or somewhat (40%) important to them to work for an organization that provides support for employee mental health.
• 95% said it is very (66%) or somewhat (29%) important to them to feel respected at work.
• 95% said it is very (61%) or somewhat (34%) important to them to work for an organization that respects the boundaries between work and nonwork time.

Fortunately, the majority (77%) of workers reported being very (36%) or somewhat (41%) satisfied with the support for mental health and well-being they receive from their employers, and more than half (59%) strongly (22%) or somewhat (37%) agreed that their employer regularly provides information about available mental health resources. Further, 72% of workers strongly (30%) or somewhat (42%) agreed that their employer helps employees develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

These results notwithstanding, there is some evidence that employee satisfaction is in decline, perhaps because of increased instances of harassment, bullying and even violence in the workplace.

Posted by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, on October 9, 2024. You can sign up for his newsletter and learn more about his activities at: https://www.stevenmintzethics.com/.