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A group of experts, including Physio Med's very own Paul Wimpenny, discuss wellbeing in the workplace in the first of a two-part article. Chaired by Iris Cepero.
What is wellbeing at work?
Tim Marsh: My definition would be getting to the end of the day quickly. If time passes quickly and you’re engaged and you have traction then you’ve probably got the right job. And if time passes slowly you probably haven’t.
Paul Wimpenny: My version of wellbeing at work is being able to go to work and tie in an activity that’s productive, while at the same time it’s not having any derogatory effects to your physical or mental wellbeing.
Rebecca Pearce: I think I’d definitely agree with that second definition. And I think we probably need to expand that in terms of the way that the physical workplace actually impacts you, or how a task can enhance your experience of life. Not just that it doesn’t detrimentally affect you but that it can actually enhance what we’re doing.
Professor Kevin Daniels: The reason I wanted to go last answering this question is because as part of our work at the What Works Wellbeing Centre we’ve actually been asking people what they think wellbeing is. From one point of view, and I very much agree with Rebecca that good quality work is actually good for your wellbeing, it’s good for your mental health. Traditionally, from a psychologist’s perspective the definition would be ‘a job that’s satisfying, a job where you experience a relatively high frequency of positive emotions like happiness or motivation and optimism, and a relatively low frequency of negative emotions like anxiety and anger’. So that’s the type of a scientific approach if you like. But part of our work at the What Works Centre is that we had to go out and ask people what they thought their priorities would be about, including wellbeing in the workplace. One of the things we did was to ask people what they thought wellbeing at work was, and what were good indicators of that. We went all over the country; Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and all over England and talked to about 400 people in different ways, different stakeholders including managers, trade union officials, adult learners.
For a lot of people the two key indicators relate to satisfaction and also mental health within that. But a lot of people did say, in relation to the workplace it’s also important to have some link between wellbeing and productivity. And that can mean actually productivity as we understand it, but also lack of absence. That would be the public views as well around productivity, mental health and satisfaction. One of the things that came up – which was very surprising – was that people mentioned, and we did some analysis of some existing data, was a sense of community in the workplace, a sense of belonging and social activity, as well, as a part of it. It’s not that it predicts wellbeing but is actually part of wellbeing and identity.
What are the main occupational issues that can affect wellbeing at work?
Paul Wimpenny: When we looked at occupational issues that actually affected employees’ wellbeing or employees’ ability to work and be at work, they were very interesting. Leaving aside little bits and pieces like flu, coughs, colds, bits and bobs like that, it was split: about 40% of the issues seemed to be musculoskeletal problems and 40% of the issues seemed to be around what I’m going to call mental health issues. So if you were to tackle those two issues on their own, you would be able to reduce the negative part of issues around wellbeing at work very significantly.
Tim Marsh: My understanding is there’s been a lot of work from people like Carol Black, there’s a massive overlap between musculoskeletal and mental health. I’m sure I saw the figures somewhere that she quoted that 60% of people off with back pains are actually off with mild mental health issues.
Paul Wimpenny: It’s interesting you mention that. In the real world you’re going to have pressures, and musculoskeletal problems just can’t be separated out. There are influences. And in fact probably influences both ways as well. If you are struggling with anger management for whatever reason, and you get a back problem, that gives you pain and stops you from sleeping properly, and influences what you’re able to do with your hobbies, so you can’t relieve stress as well as you could, and it will have an impact back on your anger management issues. So the two work in both ways. I don’t think it’s possible to separate them out.
Professor Kevin Daniels: I agree with all that’s been said around musculoskeletal and mental health problems there. My understanding of some work with the Health and Safety Executive about back pain is that in most cases there’s actually no identifiable tissue damage, but for whatever reason there is back pain, and there seems to be no discernible physical cause. And they (MSDs and mental health) are by far the biggest two impacts on absence in the general working population. So the question comes about how these things can be prevented.
It’s not possible to prevent all mental health/stress issues and musculoskeletal disorders through changes to the workplace, but it is possible to alleviate some of the issues and make things a little bit better. I actually suffer from back pain, because of a curved spine, and mine is actually made worse by playing cricket, and there’s absolutely no way I’m going to give up playing cricket, because it is actually better to keep moving than to give in to it. But in relation to the work conditions that might make people’s time at work happier and any symptoms that they do have in relation to musculoskeletal or stress problems is less of an issue.
There’s a number of things that organisations should look at in addition some more direct wellness programmes, which I know we’re going to come onto. There are a lot of things you can do around job quality, the amount of support that people get in relation to training, advice, having supportive relationships with colleagues. Certainly, a sense of job security is really important.
Now, the interesting thing about job quality is if you look at the literature, there’s plenty of reviews published in various places like occupational and environmental scientific journals. The actual evidence on what organisations do if they try and improve job quality, is that sometimes these interventions work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they create adverse effects, and sometimes they create mixed effects. We’ve got no systematic evidence as yet. And this is one of the things we are looking at in our programme; what differentiates those organisations that aim to improve job quality and wellbeing. We want to find out what that additional thing is, because is important to be able to provide guidance to support organisations.
Another couple of things come out as well; and again this is borne out in the scientific literature. The most important relationship you’ve got at work is with your line manager; so if there’s a good relationship between you and your line manager it might link to better wellbeing. And also if there are stress-related problems or musculoskeletal problems, being able to talk to your line manager about those is essential. That’s a very important relationship. I’m not so sure that that knowledge is in the managers’ domain. Another thing that came up again was fairness and community in the workplace; if promotions and pay rises are distributed in a fair way, and everybody has a strong sense of community in that organisation, it will be a happier place to work.
Tim Marsh: I don’t know about the rest of you but I’ve never seen anything that really develops much on top of the actual Warr’s vitamin model of worker wellbeing, [Warr’s Vitamin Model analyses the relationship between job characteristics and wellbeing] which covers an awful lot of the points that you’ve just covered. It basically says if you’ve got control, if you’ve got reasonable goals, if you’ve got an opportunity to use your skills, if there’s traction and clarity about where you fit in, if there’s variety, enough money, physical security and it’s good company and gives you a sense of esteem, you’ve got it covered. It doesn’t actually mention line managers, but that’s absolutely core isn’t it? If you think your line manager’s horrible you’re really struggling. And if you think you’re about to be made redundant it doesn’t really cover that as security of money. But I’ve never seen anything that really adds to that in any way.
Japanese manufacturing methods do not include wellbeing of the workforce but they do cover the same things you would for building a high quality job. Photograph: iStock/EdStock
Professor Kevin Daniels: Tim you’re right, the Warr’s model is very comprehensive. And there’s lots and lots of overlap around the things that you mentioned. I think the key things is how to build a good quality job; some people clearly do but it’s not necessarily widely accessible. And I think a lot of knowledge is yet to be extracted out by the research community. So I think there’s a lot of hidden and tacit knowledge and examples of really good practice that we’ve got to build up and turn into something; a toolkit that people can use in multiple situations. The important part is actually collating it all and turning it into something that everyone can use.
Issues affecting mental health, or stress have different causes and in many cases are not work related. Should employers help mitigate them?
Tim Marsh: I think that employers have a moral obligation to address these issues. But not much more over and above the issues that we covered. If you provide people with interesting work where you’re valued, where you treat them with respect, when you have an opportunity to contribute, that covers it; and on top of things like the ability to talk to counsellors and so on. But if you get two of those issues right you’ve probably covered most of what to do, I’d say.
Paul Wimpenny: If I can add to that. I see patients day to day for problems with work- related issues, and there’s a bit of an in joke that’s used when you talk about mental health and happiness in the workplace. The in joke is ‘they’re not happy until you’re not happy’. There seems to be this inherent need for people to be unhappy at work for their manager to be happy. That’s just from people on the ground level, but that seems to be the impression that I get, certainly when we’ve looked at the NHS trusts that we work with. That unhappiness actually seems to go right up the ladder. So if you get somebody on the ground floor who’s unhappy, with the way their line manager treats them, then you speak to the line manager and he is unhappy with the way they’re treated from above, until you get right up to the top where the person at the top is often unhappy with the people underneath them. And so there does seem to be this in joke about it.
Some organisations organise medical check-ups for employees on a regular basis. Photograph: iStock/Thomas_EyeDesign
But I think the key for me is that we talk about managers and line managers being key and responsible for the mental wellbeing of the people underneath them, or the happiness of the people underneath them, but they are often not happy either.
Tim Marsh: One of the most progressive things I’ve seen, and I know we’re jumping ahead a bit, are organisations where their first response to bullying in the workplace is to counsel the bullied person, and then to turn round and counsel the bully.
Paul Wimpenny: I think that’s an absolutely excellent idea. I work with people at entry level of management. And they all describe their own psychological and sociological pressures that affect their workplace and how happy they are. And I do think it kind of rates right up and down the chain.
Professor Kevin Daniels: People do catch emotion from other people, so you can quite easily get workplace climates which are just unhappy, because key individuals are transmitted that from other people. And without wishing to go on too much about cricket, one of the landmarks that is actually done in cricket teams is how, in a cricket team that’s fielding, the players catch emotions off each other. If you listen to cricket commentary some of the body language and things like that, it’s been picked up where people do try and keep the losers of the team up because it has a knock on effect on performance. And there’s quite a lot of literature that shows that where you have an organisation where people are on average more satisfied with their work, performance is better.
So if you turn it round to a performance question, then people’s wellbeing is relevant to performance. Because on average there is that link, and there’s also some growing body of evidence now that there are things you can do, and it goes back to job quality and training people, giving people the right equipment. Whether you’ve got those systems in place, and they’re often human resource management systems about making sure people are clear on what they do, what they’re trained to do, whether they’re empowered to do it. Not only do you get better performance, but you also get a happier place to work.
There was a recent survey of the best places to work in Britain, and Jaguar Land Rover came out on top. The people on their production line are very well trained, they produce very high quality products, and they’ve got very high quality jobs in manufacturing. They’re very secure, I don’t think there’s any coincidence there if you link good people management practices that you get better performance, better satisfaction. So, yes, wellbeing at work is relevant to employers.
There are always going to be people for whatever reason that will bring poor wellbeing into the workplace because of things going on outside of the workplace. A well-trained line manager can help deal with that if they’re compassionate and they’ve been given sufficient training in being able to spot problems and make workplace accommodations and, if all that fails, then of course you’ve got to go into the workplace counselling, the occupational health practitioner route.
Sensible organisations do have multiple layers of interventions, both at making high quality jobs, but then also having those other processes in position to ensure that if there are any problems they don’t overly affect the work and productivity.
Going back to stress and musculoskeletal problems, if you start going off work sick then that escalates into long term sickness absence, and that’s costing society an awful lot in terms of spend on tax revenue. So it has a double effect.
Sometimes is very difficult to separate stress from musculoskeletal problems; the influence works in both directions. Photograph: iStock/Maica
Paul Wimpenny: I often describe the working environments that are falling to pieces as toxic. If you think about sickness, there is good evidence to suggest that if somebody works in an environment that they’re not happy with, if they get a small problem, whether that small problem be a cold, cough, sniffle or musculoskeletal problem, they are less likely to attend work because the working environment is that way. So, actually, wellbeing at work can have a major impact on sickness levels.
Tim Marsh: I can’t help but boast that Jaguar Land Rover is one of our clients. But only from a safety point of view as it happens.
Paul Wimpenny: Well go steady now, we’re with Toyota, we’re not far down the road from you.
Professor Kevin Daniels: Toyota is another good example. My background is in job design, and Toyota is obviously a very competitive, very attractive employer. I used to work at Loughborough University and our engineering students really did want to get on and work for Toyota. I would imagine there’s a very high level of wellbeing in Toyota and JLR as well, given the recent survey. But the Japanese production methods and Japanese advanced manufacturing are not directed at including wellbeing. They just happen to be the same things that you would do if you were building a high quality job. In this very advanced high performance type of manufacturing, all the things that are in place for productivity also happen to be the things that you’d put in place for high quality jobs and high levels of satisfaction and commitment at work. But again, it’s no kind of accident. And Toyota are one of my favourite examples that I use with the undergraduates for high quality job design.
Paul Wimpenny: It always strikes me at Toyota at a big plant like Branston where they have so few managers. I’m surprised at how few managers they actually have compared to some of the other people I work with.
Tim Marsh: For me it’s absolutely all about vicious circles really. Wherever you go there seems to be one or the other happening, and it’s getting the right side of that fence that seems to be key.
The following people took part in A Safer Conversation: Professor Kevin Daniels, professor, organisational behaviour, University of East Anglia, Norwich Business School; Tim Marsh, chairman, RyderMarshSharman; Paul Wimpenny, clinical governance officer, Physio Med; and Rebecca Pearce, head of sustainability (EMEA), CBRE Ltd.
Original article: https://sm.britsafe.org/safer-conversation-wellbeing-work-%E2%80%93-part-i
