By Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporter
(HealthDay)
MONDAY, Jan. 15, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Employees at many companies are urged to take advantage of free wellness programs focused on mindfulness, life coaching, better sleep and many other issues.
Too bad most won’t actually boost their well-being, a new study of over 46,000 British workers finds.
Only one of the 90 different workplace wellness offerings appeared to boost well-being: Getting employees involved in charity work or volunteering, the researchers found.
The findings “pose a challenge to the popularity and legitimacy of individual-level mental well-being interventions like mindfulness, resilience and stress management, relaxation classes and well-being apps,” concludes the study’s sole author, William Fleming. He’s a fellow at Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Center.
Fleming’s research is based on data from the Britain’s Healthiest Workplace surveys for 2017 and 2018, representing workers at 233 different organizations.
He compared the survey answers of “matched pairs” of people who were working at the same company: One who was using a wellness program, and another who was not.
Because it is a survey, the data only focuses on worker well-being at a specific moment in time, not before and after the introduction of workplace wellness programs.
The main finding: With the exception of charity/volunteer programs, workers’ mental well-being didn’t seem to change regardless of whether or not they were involved in any…
