From financial counselling and meeting-free time to cycle races organised by staff “affinity” groups, employers around the world are exploring multiple ways to boost the mental and physical health of staff in a post-pandemic world.
Wellbeing in the workplace was, for many years, an incidental add-on, involving one-off interventions to encourage greater physical activity or healthy eating — such as the provision of fruit in the canteen or subsidised gym membership. But there are now more wide-ranging approaches to address mental wellbeing that tackle the underlying structural causes of workplace stress, rooted in how organisations are managed.
There is a clear economic case for action: reduced physical and mental health is associated with lower performance, due to absenteeism as well as presenteeism, where staff come to work but underperform. And other worrying trends have been intensified by the pandemic — not least the high proportion of working-age people withdrawing from the workforce entirely, raising concerns for the economy and individual employers.