After a decade working in workplace mental health and wellbeing, I believe the next
challenge is not another intervention. It is building a system capable of creating healthier work.
In 2016, I was working at Mind as part of the team developing and delivering the government-funded Blue Light Programme for emergency services in England.
The evidence showed particular risks linked to demanding roles, trauma and stigma. Our response focused on awareness, champions, manager training, senior leadership engagement
and better access to support.
I remain proud of that work. Ten years later, I see the challenge differently.
At the time, workplace mental health was largely treated as an organisational culture issue. I do not think policymakers necessarily misunderstood workplace wellbeing; I think it simply had not yet become the system-level policy issue it is today.
Now workforce ill health, economic inactivity and work-related mental ill health have pushed workplace health much higher up the policy agenda. The question is whether we learn from
the last decade.
We have been good at solving the tame problems
In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber distinguished between “tame” and “wicked”
problems.
Tame problems can usually be defined well enough for expertise and established methods to be applied. Wicked problems are interconnected, experienced differently by different stakeholders and rarely have one definitive solution.
This helps explain workplace wellbeing.
Need more awareness? Run a campaign. Managers lack confidence? Provide training.
Employees need support? Introduce an EAP. Need peer support? Train champions.
Useful? Often. Enough? No.
The harder questions sit underneath them: Why is workload unmanageable? Why do people feel unable to speak up? Why is work contributing to ill health? Why does workforce-health evidence carry less weight than financial or operational risk? And who has authority tochange those things?
These are not programme problems. They are system problems.
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A legal duty does not create capacity
We already have an important warning.
Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from work-related stress, and HSE expects
employers to assess the risk and act on it. Yet I still regularly meet managers who have never heard of stress risk assessment, senior leaders who do not understand the extent of their organisational responsibilities, and employers without effective processes for identifying and controlling psychosocial risk.
This is not about blaming HR, health and safety or any one profession. It demonstrates
something more important:
A legal duty does not create the capability required to discharge that duty.
Policy can create expectations. Legislation can define responsibilities. Regulators can set standards. But somebody inside an organisation still has to know how to translate them into practice.
That is the implementation gap we cannot afford to repeat.
Capability. Capacity. Authority. Accountability.
As expectations on employers increase, we must ask: who is actually going to do this work?
In many organisations, wellbeing has been added to an existing HR, occupational health or health and safety role, or handed to somebody with a passion for the subject.
That can work, but only when the person has capability, capacity and authority.
Responsibility for strategic wellbeing one day a week does not create capacity. Training without access to organisational data does not create capability. A wellbeing title without influence over workload, job design or organisational change does not create authority. And
new expectations without clear ownership do not create accountability.
The next generation of workplace-health policy must consider all four together.
See the whole system
Social-ecological thinking helps explain why.
Health is shaped across interacting levels: the individual, relationships, organisations, wider
society and public policy.
Employers cannot control every factor affecting somebody’s health, nor should they. But they are responsible for the conditions they create and control: job design, workload, working time, management, resources, autonomy and culture – good work.
Government, in turn, shapes the environment in which organisations operate.
Policy should therefore create the conditions for good organisational problem-solving, not prescribe one wellbeing solution for every employer.
Every organisation is different, and even employees in the same business can experience
work and how it impacts their health and wellbeing very differently.
Policy should define what good needs to achieve without pretending there is only one way of getting there.
Government can set minimum standard, define accountability, strengthen measurement, use incentives, improve SME access to expertise and require appropriate governance. Organisations must then be capable of diagnosing their own workforce-health risks and responding to them.
That is wicked-problem leadership.
Human sustainability should be the next evolution
This is where I believe workplace wellbeing needs to go next.
Human sustainability asks a different question:
Does the way this organisation operates sustain or deplete the energy, health, capability
and participation of the human beings on whom its success depends?
That is fundamentally different from asking what wellbeing benefits an employer provides.
I believe human sustainability should become the next evolution of organisational duty of care: not making employers responsible for every aspect of an employee’s life, but making them responsible for understanding and managing the human consequences of the conditions and decisions they create.
Just as boards consider financial, operational and environmental sustainability, they should understand human sustainability.
People being at work, functioning well and feeling good is one of the foundations of organisational performance. Work, health, organisations, society and the economy are
interconnected.
Keep Britain Working creates an important opportunity
The Keep Britain Working Review matters because government is now recognising that
employers, employees, health services and policymakers sit within the same wider system.
But one question must remain central:
Who inside organisations has the professional capability and authority to turn those ambitions into reality?
If policy raises expectations without developing those people, we create a policy-to-practice gap.
If I had five minutes with policymakers, I would ask for three things: make human
sustainability the north star; design policy from the experience of those carrying the greatest workplace-health risk; and build the implementation infrastructure alongside the policy.
Because we can change policy all day long. Unless somebody inside the workplace can
translate it into strategy, influence leadership, identify workforce-health risks and change organisational systems, the experience of the person at work may remain exactly the same.
The first era of workplace wellbeing taught us how to raise awareness and support
individuals.
The next must teach us how to change systems.
That is a much more wicked problem. But if the goal is healthier people, productive
organisations, a stronger economy and a society in which more people can thrive through work, it is one we now have to solve.
Want to assess where your organisation is now?
Wellbeing Lead Academy® has developed a free 28-page practical guide to creating a
mentally healthy workplace culture, including our Culture Change Framework, to help
organisations identify systemic gaps and decide what needs to change next.
Download the free eBook here
About the author
Emily Pearson is Founder of the award winning Wellbeing Lead Academy®, author of Solving a CEO’s Blind Spot: Human Sustainability and board advisory at the Policy Laison Group for Workplace Wellbeing.
