The Routledge Companion to Wellbeing at Work

Cary Cooper, Michael Leiter, Cary L. Cooper, Michael P. Leiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317353713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Over recent years, many companies have developed an awareness of the importance of an active, rather than passive, approach to wellbeing at work. Whilst the value of this approach is widely accepted, turning theory into effective practice is still a challenge for many companies.

The Routledge Companion to Wellbeing at Work is a comprehensive reference volume addressing every aspect of the topic. Split into five parts, it explores different models of wellbeing; personal qualities contributing to wellbeing; job insecurity and organizational wellbeing; workplace supports for wellbeing; and initiatives to enhance wellbeing. The international team of contributors provide a solid foundation to research and practice, including contemporary topics such as architecture, coaching, and fitness in the workplace.

Edited by two of the world's leading scholars on the subject, this text is a valuable tool for researchers, students, and practitioners in HRM and organizational psychology.

1
The state of the art of workplace wellbeing

Michael P. Leiter and Cary L. Cooper

It is no longer sufficient for employers to prevent injuries on the job; we expect employers to make a deliberate and constructive contribution to sustaining employees’ physical and mental wellbeing. It is not good enough to do no harm; responsible employers design work to enhance employees’ health and fulfillment at work. Despite evidence of this ideal gaining traction globally, it is a long way from becoming a reality.

Healthy work life remains more of a dream than a reality for most people for two main reasons: First, not every individual, business, or government has actively embraced improving employee wellbeing as a core business responsibility. Second, as becomes evident reading the state-of-the-art chapters in this volume, much remains to be discovered, designed, and shared about workplace wellbeing initiatives. Although research has clearly established advantages of employee wellbeing for organizational productivity and employee satisfaction (Robertson & Cooper, 2011), research has been slower to critically evaluate methods for enhancing employee wellbeing (Chen & Cooper, 2014). Moving research discoveries into practical, cost-effective practices remains a major challenge.

At the heart of the matter lie five core issues:

1. Defining workplace wellbeing
2. Identifying accountability for workplace wellbeing
3. Articulating a strategic, holistic approach to workplace wellbeing
4. Identifying initiatives that contribute to enhancing wellbeing
5. Identifying leadership perspectives and capacities supportive of workplace wellbeing

Defining workplace wellbeing

Defining wellbeing presents something of a challenge. The research community – including the authors in this volume – have not even agreed upon the word’s spelling. Have we or have we not progressed beyond the hyphen? The editorial staff at Routledge will assure consistent spelling in the final proofs but their work will smooth over rifts. The starting point for defining the term accepts its multi-faceted nature (Dodge, Daly, Huyton, & Sanders, 2012). Workplace wellbeing encompasses physical health and comfort, mental health, a preponderance of positive over negative affect, and positive attitudes towards work. Dodge et al. (2012) moved away from well-being as a stable subjective state to emphasize its relational quality as an equilibrium of resources with challenges. Wellbeing from this perspective goes beyond how people feel at a moment to encompass how they make sense of their context, the expectations of others, and their confidence in their capacity to meet the challenges they encounter or anticipate encountering.

The broad, multi-faceted nature of wellbeing results in a rich, diverse research field, but one that presents challenges for incremental progress. For example, a study may assess physical well being with the single-item Global Health Status measure (DeSalvo, Bloser, Reynolds, He, & Muntner, 2006) and mental wellbeing with the five-item Mental Health Index (Ware & Sher-bourne, 1992) without explicitly addressing the question of equilibrium or respondents’ evolution of their work context. Developing shared perspectives on core conceptual dimensions of wellbeing will facilitate the development of widely accepted, theory-based measures. As demonstrated in this volume, the state of the art has developed to include credible measures with foundations in health psychology, psychologically healthy workplace models, and positive psychology.

Accountability

Article 7 (b) of the United Nation’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states that citizens of member countries have the right to safe and healthy working conditions (United Nations, 1966). But as Albuquerque and Evans (2012) pointed out, these rights remain ideals without mechanisms to enforce their application. Substantive rights lack substance without procedural rights to assure their implementation, evaluation, and maintenance. The lack of explicit enforcement means that much of the progress in workplace health initiatives has occurred voluntarily. The nonmandatory pursuit of workplace health initiatives has reflected (1) convincing research demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of workplace health programs (e.g., Rongen, Robroek, van Lenthe, & Burdorf, 2013), (2) their contribution to attracting and retaining talent (Montague, Burgess, & Connell, 2015), and (3) the desire to maintain a positive corporate image (Arena et al., 2013). From all three perspectives, the physical and mental wellbeing of employees benefits businesses as well as the employees.

However, all is not entirely well with workplace wellbeing. For example, in the United States, 4,679 fatal workplace injuries occurred in 2014, up 2% from the number in 2013 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). At the very least, employees hope to return home alive at the end of the workday. Regarding physical health, many workers contend with equipment and workstations that fall well short of ergonomic ideals. The increased awareness of the negative consequences of excessive sitting has highlighted the shortcomings of many work settings for assuring that employees at minimum maintain their health rather than deteriorating as a consequence of their work.

The range of perspectives in this volume also convey the message that responsibility for work-place wellbeing does not rest solely on employers: Employees have a role to play as well. As with occupational safety, employees exercise some degree of discretion in the thoroughness with which they make use of workplace resources that support wellbeing. Making the most of workplace resources requires employees to develop the skills, attitudes, and inclinations to make wellbeing a core personal value as well as a corporate value. The power of employee attitude for safety and wellbeing was highlighted by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, who credited the thorough occupational safety culture of the Canadian oil exploration employees with the evacuation without injury of 90,000 residents of Fort McMurray in the face of a monstrous forest fire (Enright, 2016). A community without a deep perspective on safety and wellbeing would be unlikely to take the correct actions on that scale in emergency situations.

A strategic, holistic approach to workplace wellbeing

A strategic, holistic approach to workplace wellbeing goes beyond measuring engagement versus burnout or reducing sickness absence. A holistic model includes primary (wellbeing audits), secondary (e.g., training and development on safety, physical health, and workplace diversity), and tertiary (e.g., employee assistance program [EAP]) perspectives (Giga, Cooper, & Faragher, 2003). A holistic model has both a long-term perspective (considering employees’ productivity and thriving over their lifetime) and a broad perspective (considering the physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual dimensions of life).

Primary

Wellbeing audits provide an essential quality of infrastructure for a psychologically and physically healthy workplace. They make a definitive statement of organizational values by assessing the employees’ perspectives on the qualities that define a constructive and fulfilling workplace. Although such audits include indicators of problems or shortcomings, their principal focus is on the positive qualities that the organization hopes to sustain and develop. In assessing these qualities organizations imply a commitment to enhancing them.

Wellbeing audits take a long-term perspective in that they occur as a regular part of organizational life. Rather than responding to obvious problems reactively, their focus remains on actions that organizations can take to build on their strengths. Providing reports summarizing audit responses to operating units within participating organizations, for example, provides a benchmark for assessing progress, evaluating leadership, and defining needs for further training for leaders and others within the units.

Secondary

Training for wellbeing includes skills as well as attitudes and perspectives that organizations hope to encourage to support workplace wellbeing. In parallel with core training on workplace safety, secondary initiatives on wellbeing provide information and inspiration to employees regarding practices and opportunities for enhancing their physical and mental wellbeing in the course of carrying out their responsibilities. These initiatives may be as simple as encouraging employees to adopt workstations with a standing as well as sitting option or establishing routines for moving around more often during the course of their workdays. To complement primary initiatives, such as providing healthier food options at work, training initiatives can provide opportunities to explore new foods that may not have previously been part of some employees’ repertoires. Similarly, training and fun events encourage employees to make good use of exercise facilities. Often, building awareness does not suffice; training and marketing complete the training cycle, ensuring a good return on an organizational investment in wellbeing.

In the global economy of the 21st century, workforces have become increasingly diverse on multiple dimensions – gender, age, national origin, family structure, religion, and profession, among others. Leaders cannot reasonably assume that everyone entering their workforce shares values about work, assumptions about workplace roles, or the degree of formality that is appropriate for workplace communications. While this diversity of backgrounds brings strengths and perspectives to workplaces, it requires active dialogue among employees to establish a coherent workplace culture. To begin the process, a facilitated conversation within workgroups about their expectations and assumptions helps to clarify how people interpret signs of civility and respect. Subsequently, explicit discussion of workplace culture would be included as part of the process of integrating new employees into the workgroup.

Tertiary

Broad-based EAPs build wellbeing in the course of alleviating acute problems. Such programs may take a prospective approach to facilitating employees’ recovery from a physical injury through physiotherapy or occupational therapy. The aim includes both recovery from the injury as well as insuring that employees establish a new level of physical wellbeing. Similarly, treatment in the wake of emotional disturbances contributes to employees’ resilience when encountering potentially distressing incidents at work. Ideally, EAPs would link to active lifestyle coaching for employees to assure that they establish routines for exercise, mindfulness, or other practices that help to maintain their capacity to thrive through their work and in their personal lives. In that way the treatment options responding to injuries or disruptive events include both recovery as well as enhancing employees’ capacity to address future challenges.

Practical, effective, validated intervention

Although meaningful progress has occurred in designing, implementing, and evaluating organizational interventions to enhance wellbeing, much work remains to be done. Intervention research presents serious challenges regarding costs, timescales, and the complexity of the research/organization relationship.

Nielsen (2013) described a challenge in organizational intervention research arising from that complex relationship inherent in applied research. Sound ethical methods call upon a participatory approach to the design and implementation of interventions. Informed consent works directly in opposition to the double-blind randomized control trial that is the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions. When participants have full knowledge of the research questions, it is difficult to disguise a control group activity as the actual intervention unless it shares so many features with the intervention that has a similar impact on participants. The process inherently underestimates the potential for human qualities beyond the research design to influence implementation and evaluation. For example, a manager’s enthusiasm for a healthy workplace initiative may influence the thoroughness of its implementation, the extent of employees’ participation, and the response set that participants bring to evaluation surveys. A meaningful proportion of a work unit’s benefit from a program may arise from that enthusiasm rather than the program design. Nielsen (2013) points out that the theoretical framework for intervention research rarely encompasses the full scope of human and design factors that can play a role in determining the outcome.

These concerns emphasize the argument for going beyond one-off initiatives to improve some dimension of workplace wellbeing to refining a comprehensive perspective on the nature of wellbeing. An essential principle along these lines is emphasizing that wellbeing does not reside solely within individuals but is a quality of social relationships, workgroups, organizational units, and entire organizations. The process of designing, implementing, and evaluating intervention needs to appreciate the essential role of context for any intervention process.

The need for well-designed interventions is underscored by the intervention conundrum (Leiter & Maslach, 2015; Leiter, Peck, & Gumuchian, 2015). Problems with wellbeing – however defined – arise effortlessly. Neglect and inaction undermine wellbeing. However, actions to improve wellbeing require careful planning, dedicated commitment, money, and coordinated action. Progress requires a concerted effort sustained over a considerable time. It also requires organizations to be ready for change in order to implement new policies and practices in a meaningful and enduring fashion, upsetting the status quo (Holt, Armenakis, Harris, & Feild, 2007).

Another dimension of the researcher/organizational relationship concerns access to institutional data. Intervention studies require organizational records to supplement information available through surveys, interviews, and observation. A simple willingness to share such information with researchers constitutes one step towards such access, but it is not sufficient in itself. Rarely is organizational data readily available in a manner that aligns perfectly with the time frame and the organizational structure associated with the intervention. That sort of alignment requires dedicating the time and talents of people with the technical expertise to seek out the relevant information in the organizational databases, structure that information as needed to address research questions, and make the information available to the interested parties. Usually people with these capabilities are entirely too busy already, requiring a genuine commitment from leadership to provide information on absences, indicators of presenteeism, or productivity measures.

Leadership and skills where they are needed

For the most part, supervisors receive training on managing schedules and budgets – but most challenges arise from managing people. Providing meaningful and enduring support for employees’ wellbeing requires leaders at every level of an o...