WELL-BEING IN THE WORKPLACE!

NEF’s Centre for Well-being and NEF Consulting have published a new report outlining what the evidence shows about well-being in the workplace.

Here are their top five findings:

• "Work-life balance: A poor work-life balance is one of the greatest predictors of stress at work. Well-being appears to increase with hours worked up to an upper-threshold of 35–55 hours per week. For individuals clocking more than 35-55 hours of work per week, there’s a good chance that those extra hours are having a detrimental impact on their well-being.

• Use of strengths and feeling a sense of progress: When people perceive their jobs as matching their skills and desires, they tend to experience higher levels of well-being and less stress. Skill underutilisation is associated with low job satisfaction, and opportunities to develop new skills are strongly associated with job satisfaction. So, it seems it’s not just in your employer’s interests for you to learn a new skill that you could use at work.

• Sense of control: Having a degree of control at work is positively associated with job satisfaction. Lack of personal control at work can be detrimental to performance, which in turn, makes us feel less satisfied with our jobs. Where managers and employees work together to build a trusting relationship that allows staff members to exercise control over their own roles the well-being benefits can be significant.

• Work relationships: It almost goes without saying that good working relationships boost well-being, while poor relationships drain it. But the impact of working relationships is a lot stronger than you might think. Some compelling findings show that having a manager who you trust has a greater impact in terms of both job and overall life satisfaction than significant increases in income.

• Fair pay: And finally, although well-being tends to increase with income up to a point, as income increases beyond a certain level, the well-being benefits diminish. This means that, for employers seeking to maximise the well-being of their workforce as a whole, increasing the incomes of the lowest-paid members of staff will produce the most cost-effective well-being gains."

It’s clear from this evidence, that we all need to take a different approach to fostering well-being at work: one where colleagues are recognised as individuals whose working lives are inextricably linked to their personal lives and employees and employers work together to increase well-being. Nothing new here then!