It sounds intuitive: Give employees reasonable workloads, control over their jobs and support when they need it and the companies they work for will thrive. But proving that concept—particularly showing the economic cost of disregarding such factors—has been elusive. Now, psychologists are bringing a much-needed economic focus to occupational health by conducting research on the concept of "psychosocial safety climate" and documenting the financial cost of ignoring workers' emotional well-being. That is what's needed to get employers' attention and to foster workplace change, psychologists in the area say. "If you can save money and/or save lives, everyone is going to be interested in those outcomes," says psychologist Mo Wang, PhD, a professor in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.
Australian psychologists and the Australian government are leaders in this expanding realm of research. A 2016 reportopens in new window by Safe Work Australia, a government agency that develops and evaluates workplace safety laws, found that employers who prioritize productivity over employee well-being lose on average $6 billion a year—about $4.5 billion in U.S. dollars—due to higher levels of employee absences, as well as lower levels of employee engagement and commitment.
The report, based on interviews with more than 4,200 employees from a variety of industries, looked specifically at psychosocial safety climate, a measure of how much an organization values psychological health, says Maureen Dollard, PhD, one of the report's authors and a professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of South Australia's Asia Pacific Centre for Work Health and Safety. "It's fundamental to capitalism that there is a constant focus on growth and productivity, but there has to be some limit because humans have a finite capacity for how much they can produce in a day," Dollard explains. "Psychosocial safety climate looks at the balance of worker psychological health versus productivity, and the priority that management has for worker psychological health."
Workplaces that rate high in psychosocial safety have managers who are committed to prioritizing the well-being of their workers, including their emotional health. In addition, they design worker roles that are not overly demanding and that provide the opportunity for autonomy and social support.
Organizations low in prioritizing psychosocial safety often design roles with high demands and low control. Research by Dollard and her colleagues has shown that workers in such environments are significantly more likely to call in sick or be present but not productive than those in environments high in psychosocial safety. According to the report, workers in the less psychologically healthy environments took 43 percent more sick days per month and were significantly less productive when at work, equating to $1,887 per employee per year—which converts to about $1,400 in the United States—in cost to employers, she says.
In a separate study, Dollard and colleagues also found links to increased work injuries among health-care workers operating in low-psychosocial-climate work groups (Stress and Healthopens in new window, online January 2017). Much of the increase can likely be attributed to the increase in emotional exhaustion among workers in the less psychologically healthy teams.
"We've been trying to use this economic argument to show organizations that if they really are interested in productivity, they are going about it the wrong way because if you don't care for your workers, they will burn out," she says.
To increase psychological safety and improve employee mental health, employers can design jobs that give employees more control over their work and encourage senior management to establish manageable demands and working hours, the research suggests. Also key is promoting communication from managers that reminds workers of employee-assistance programs and other services they can tap for help, as well as having senior managers who support those who do experience mental health problems, she says.
While most of the world lags behind Australia when it comes to establishing a national effort to improve worker psychological health, other researchers are catching up. In the United States, organizational psychologists are expanding their studies on how work stress affects other aspects of a worker's life, including eating behaviors, sleep quality and aggression. In a study published online in April in the Journal of Applied Psychologyopens in new window (2017), Wang and his team examined how work-related stressors affect employee eating habits in China. They surveyed 125 IT workers daily for three weeks about their job demands and food consumption and found that when employees experienced more job demands in the morning, they ate less healthfully at night.
Greater dissemination of such research is needed to help organizations take notice, says James Grosch, PhD, a senior research psychologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. "We have a pretty good understanding of these issues, but now we really need to transfer this knowledge and the information published in these research journals out to organizations so that they better understand the best practices in this area," Grosch says.
Some of this is already happening, he notes, through such programs as the APA Center for Organizational Excellence's Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards and Organizational Excellence Award, which all honor employers that have implemented workplace practices that foster employee well-being and enhance organizational performance.
"We really need to provide more of this hands-on, practical advice to people," Grosch says. "That's the ultimate goal of a lot of the work we do."
