As we navigate our way through the COVID-19 pandemic, we have entered a new workplace, one that both differs from and resembles the old work landscape. Some aspects of work will drift back to our pre-pandemic experience (for example, resumption of direct contact with co-workers and customers). Other elements may never trend back to the prior state (we will continue to avoid extensive business travel, for instance).

Weathering this kind of dynamic environment requires a strong foundation. Architects know this to be true of the buildings they design to survive earthquakes and hurricanes. Well-being is the load-bearing structure that underpins employee performance when change causes the earth to shift.

What Is Well-being?

Well-being is a sense of overall health, incorporating physical, mental and emotional wellness. Like a building’s foundation, it’s often out of sight – we don’t think about it when it’s solid and stable. When well-being is under threat, however, cracks may emerge that imperil the rest of the structure. Employees with high well-being can weather workplace vicissitudes that might otherwise reduce their productivity and make them physically sick.

Job Demands and Resources

To see how workplace architecture can either support or jeopardize employee well-being, consider the demands a job places on employees and the resources they have to address those demands. Job demands deplete energy. They include elements like excessive workload; unclear tasks; administrative hassles; lack of critical information; overloaded roles (juggling too many big and small responsibilities); and work-family conflict. Sometimes, demands can inspire performance. A challenging new task with a tight but feasible timeline can energize people to ratchet up their contribution and increase fulfillment from succeeding at a tough assignment. Too often, however, high and shifting job demands (such as the tectonic job transmutations that occurred during the worst of the pandemic) become hindrances to both well-being and performance.

Job resources help people cope with job demands. Resources include such elements as autonomy to determine how work gets done; flexibility in where work happens; social support from managers and team members; fairness in how the organization allocates work and rewards; ability to gain new knowledge and skills; and a workload that keeps people engaged but not overwhelmed.

When resources provide an adequate buffer against demands, the foundation of well-being can remain strong. When demands exceed resources, however, distress occurs, and well-being suffers. Distress (also referred to as job strain) hurts people and organizations in three ways: performance shortfalls, disconnection from work and increased health care costs. Employees who experience distress are likely to be deenergized, distracted and disconnected. Performance shortfalls are bound to follow as employees’ mental energy is diverted from work to worries about job security, physical health and work-family tensions. Disconnection, in turn, leads to further productivity-diminishing actions: presenteeism, absenteeism and turnover. Unhealthy levels of job demand also damage physical health, with attendant costs for individuals and organizations.

The expense associated with these challenges is mostly soft, difficult to quantify and often not compelling to CFOs with sharp pencils. So let’s look at the harder costs of reduced employee well-being.

Financial Toll of Reduced Well-Being

Researchers Goh, Pfeffer and Zenios looked at the financial and mortality consequences (yes, decreased well-being can kill people!) of job strain elements that threaten employee well-being. They focused on an array of factors, including: low job control (insufficient influence over how work gets done); high job demands; work-family conflict; and low social support in workplace. They also examined the effects of workplace conditions that might lessen the harm done by these stressors. These included increased social support; organizational justice (perceived fairness in the workplace); and availability of health insurance (which has both psychological and financial implications). (Goh et al p. 45) To make their analysis more concrete, they compared the results of workplace distress to the health effects of exposure to secondhand smoke, a health hazard with well-established physical and health cost effects stemming from morbidity (physician-diagnosed threats to health) and mortality.

Hard dollars enter the equation when we consider health conditions requiring medical care that carries a financial burden for employees and companies. The odds an individual will experience a physician-diagnosed medical condition increase significantly with the presence of five workplace stressors:

  • Lack of health insurance (more than doubling the odds of a formally diagnosed health problem)
  • Low organizational justice (a nearly 60 percent increase in odds)
  • High job demands (more than 30 increase in odds)
  • Exposure to shift work (about 30 higher odds)
  • Unemployment (30 percent greater odds).

By comparison, secondhand smoke exposure increases the odds of a medical problem diagnosis by about 30 percent, equal to or less than the odds increases from each of the five stressors.

In a separate study, the same researchers compared the financial and mortality experience of U.S. employers with that of companies in wealthy European countries having more formalized policies for identifying and dealing with workplace stress and employee well-being. Their most conservative estimate is that the preventable cost of workplace stress in the U.S. amounts to about $44 billion per year, or $156 per American per year. This estimate includes only direct health care costs, leaving out the financial burden on companies of absenteeism and reduced productivity. Consider what this means in mortality terms: 17,000 preventable workplace deaths per year. By comparison, about 19,000 Americans are killed in homicides each year. The latter figure provokes outrage; workplace deaths are rarely reported and hardly noticed. Why?

If an organization’s leadership finds these figures sobering and unacceptable, what should they do to strengthen the foundation of well-being in their employee populations? Part 2 will suggest actions.

Sources

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2018). Multiple levels in job demands-resources theory: implications for employee well-being and performance. In E. Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of Well-being, Noba Scholar.

Goh, J., Pfeffer, J., & Zenios, S. A. (2015). Workplace stressors & health outcomes: Health policy for the workplace. Behavioral Science & Policy, 1(1), pp. 43–52

Goh, J., Pfeffer, J., & Zenios, S. A. (2019). Reducing the health toll from U.S. workplace stress. Behavioral Science & Policy, 5(1), 1–13.