Wednesday focus: The workplace
Does it matter if workers are happy?
Only if an organization wants to do well.
One academic study found that managers with average salaries of about $65,000 cost their organizations roughly $75 a week per person in lost productivity if they are “psychologically distressed.”
Multiply that at large businesses, and the financial whammy is big.
Research shows that employee well-being is inextricably tied to higher performance, which is inextricably tied to the bottom line, says Thomas Wright, who holds the Jon Wefald Leadership Chair in business administration at Kansas State University.
After controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, job tenure and educational attainment, Wright has found that an employee’s psychological well-being is a significant indicator of job performance.
Maybe you didn’t need an academic study to tell you that psychologically healthy people make better decisions and have better interpersonal behavior.
It’s practically a given.
What’s not so universally accepted is what employers and employees can do about maintaining or encouraging such health.
In all the talk about employee wellness these days, the focus mostly is on physical health – on providing incentives to employees to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, and manage their health care expenses.
Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association’s “Stress in America” survey said that about half of adults surveyed feel stressed, fatigued, irritable or angry or lie awake at night because of stress.
The psychological malaise translates into lack of interest or motivation, sadness, depression, headaches and muscle tension.
In one possibly hard-to-believe survey of 1,000 adult workers, released this month, Lynn Taylor Consulting found that “the average employee spends 2.8 hours a day worrying about job concerns,” such as company layoffs or losing his or her job.
The Taylor survey found that something as ordinarily innocuous as a boss’s closed door spark job-loss fears in 65 percent of those surveyed.
McClatchy