Dr William Fleming’s open-access article called Employee well‐being outcomes from individual‐level “Mental Health Interventions: Cross‐sectional Evidence from the United Kingdom” is receiving a lot of online and mainstream media attention, and rightly so. It is a robust piece of research from a sample of over 46,000 workers in 233 organisations. The article compares: “…participants and …
Researcher William Fleming found that there is little evidence to support the claim that workplace wellness programs provide the health benefits typically promised. That research from a couple of years ago still resonates, but Fleming has continued to research corporate wellness programs and is broadening his discussion. The latest research paper, “Health lifestyles at work: …
In an era where employee mental health is increasingly recognised as critical, organisational psychologist Adam Grant offered useful insights into creating healthier, more productive workplaces at the Psych Health and Safety conference (PHSCon) in Sydney. Grant argued that investing in employee well-being is not just a compassionate gesture but a strategic imperative. Companies must move …
Delegates at the recent Psych Health and Safety Conference were desperate for case studies on how psychosocial hazards are being prevented in Australian workplaces. Instead, they were largely presented with examples of how to manage psychosocial hazards, and many of those strategies were unsurprising – policies, training, counselling, leadership buy-in – and were familiar to …
Occupational health and safety (OHS) has been fairly successful in reducing the frequency and numbers of traumatic workplace injuries largely because such injuries cannot be hidden or may occur in front of others and increasingly on video. It is a sad reality that work-related deaths generate change and progress. Sometimes the more deaths, the more …
Another article reporting on Dr William Fleming’s workplace wellness research appeared recently in the New York Times, reproduced in some Australian newspapers like The Age (not available online). Newspapers are entitled to edit other newspaper’s articles for many reasons. Most tweaks are legitimate, but, in this case, The Age dropped an entire paragraph, which does …
First, there was brainwashing, then greenwashing and safewashing. Could the well-being industry be accused of safewashing? Has well-being had its day in the sun? The first use of safewash to describe presenting occupational health and safety (OHS) information in a diffused truth was in the 2016 research paper by Sharron O’Neill, Jack Flanagan and Kevin …
