The importance of employee wellbeing in the productive work environment

Of late, mental health in the workplace has been the talk of the town in business and media outlets. But why should we care about the mental health and wellbeing of employees? The lack of care owing to hostile work environments and prolonged job dissatisfaction is cited as one of the major reasons for the global phenomenon labeled the “Big Quit” where scores of employees have resigned from their place of employment ever since the pandemic.

Here are some stats that can give us some perspective on how vital these variables are for a productive work ethos.

• In a meta-analysis of 339 separate studies from 230 independent firms spanning 49
  industries in 73 countries, researchers from the London School of Economics identified a direct association between employee well-being, employee productivity, and business performance across all industries and locations.
• According to a study conducted in the US, each firm will spend over $1,967 per
  employee each year as a result of employee fatigue-related declines in productivity,
  motivation, and medical costs. The entire cost of these productivity losses from fatigue at work to U.S. enterprises comes to around $136.4 billion annually.

Is it any wonder that businesses are experimenting with innovative solutions like 4-day work
weeks to combat this problem? If we do implement well-being strategies in the workplace, how do we know that it is effective? Less than 25% of employees who had access to wellbeing
programs at work actually took advantage of them, according to Gartner’s 2020 survey. This is despite the fact that up to 80% of workers had these programs available to them. This clearly points towards barriers in accessing well-being initiatives like stigma, time, effort, lack of awareness, and understanding of one’s well-being needs and respective offerings at work.