I confess that I have been and am skeptical about polling results asking how people feel. One reason is that measures of feelings are hard to interpret because they don’t correspond in consistent ways to reality. For example, people with great jobs get used to them as to people with bad jobs, so if you compare how they feel, the results may not be very different even though their real experiences are quite different. Changes over time, though, are a different matter.
That takes us to new findings about mental health from Gallup. The organization reported results showing a steady decline in those that report they have good mental health from 2001 to the present, with a sharp decline beginning just before the pandemic. Mental health is not a rock-solid measure, but it is better than most self-assessments of well-being. These results are consistent with their findings. Why it should be declining so steadily over time even as the economy improved and we moved past the pandemic appears to be something of a puzzle.
But Gallup reports an even more disturbing and more objective set of findings asking employees whether they believed their employer cared about their well-being. This result showed a steady improvement from 2011, which was the nadir of The Great Recession when layoffs were still coursing through the economy until 2019. Not surprising that it improved. With the first year of the pandemic in 2020, it experienced a sharp increase as most employers did make a real effort to accommodate and generally care about their employees, many of whom were truly struggling. The measure bumped around a bit during the pandemic period but since 2021, it has gone down sharply and not recovered. It is now roughly at that nadir level during The Great Recession.
Here’s the other revealing data from Gallup. A survey of CHROs indicates that employee wellness is a top priority for their organization. So despite it being a big priority to improve employee wellness, employees believe that employers care less about their well-being than at any time since the layoff purges of The Great Recession. What’s going on here?
This is not all that hard to explain, and it is revealing as to what is happening in contemporary organizations.
“Wellness” is being defined as an HR responsibility made up of programs like employee assistance plans (EAPs), counselling for psychological problems, exercise programs, and so forth. These are all efforts to clean up the problems that employees already have. Those problems are caused at least in part by the way we manage employees. We threaten layoffs not because business is down but because investors think we should. We announce massive restructuring plans that are as of yet undefined that will surely disrupt employee lives, and then we offer stress management classes. We pile on the workload and offer advice on how to manage work-life balance.
When asked whether their employer cares about their well-being, employees are not thinking only about the chair yoga and stress management classes, which are certainly nice things. They are thinking about the never-ending uncertainty about whether they will keep their jobs and the ever-rising demands for greater job performance that are creating the stress and mental health problems.
Could we think instead about addressing these causes of “unwellness,” which stem from how we manage employees? This is like being in a workplace that is truly unsafe and investing in emergency trauma care rather than improving safety.
Why isn’t that happening? Because the way we think about operating the organization is divorced from thinking about employees. We pay virtually no attention to “human capital.” It is rare even for HR people to know the cost of turnover let alone what their leaders know. They have no idea how mental health problems affect job and organizational performance. I believe that business leaders do care about mental health concerns, but they should know that, like all problems, preventing them is better and cheaper than trying to clean them up after the fact.
Peter Cappelli
George W. Taylor Professor of Management
Director – Center for Human Resources for the The Wharton School
