The mental health of people who undertake mindfulness or meditation courses offered by their employer is generally no better than those who are not offered such programmes
By Chen Ly
10 January 2024
Well-being initiatives offered by employers generally don’t improve workers’ mental health, but volunteering may be the exception
Nuva Frames/Shutterstock
The well-being initiatives offered by many companies do little to boost their employees’ mental health, according to a survey of more than 46,000 workers.
In the UK, more than half of employers have adopted formal staff well-being strategies. These can include employee assistance programmes, which provide support on professional or personal issues, as well as counselling, online life coaching, mindfulness workshops and stress management training.
“Increasingly, employers have been offering various strategies, practices and programmes to improve well-being and mental health,” says William Fleming at the University of Oxford. “The basic aim of them is to change people’s psychological capacities and coping mechanisms,” he says.
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No clear evidence that meditation or mindfulness makes you happy
To investigate whether these interventions are useful, Fleming analysed data from the Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey, carried out in 2017 and 2018.
He looked at the responses from more than 46,000 individuals, the majority of whom were office and service industry workers, at 233 organisations. Around 5000 people reported taking part in at least one well-being initiative in the past year.