"Health is not everything, but without health, everything is nothing." (A. Schopenhauer)

Mental well-being at work has gained momentum in modern work environments. It’s important to understand the individual, team, and organisational factors that can foster or erode well-being at work. If we think about well-being at work, we have to consider it holistically as it’s not determined by a single factor, rather through several factors that influence how we feel and think about our work.  

The concept of work design has a long history with research spanning back more than a hundred years. Work design is all about the tasks we do, the degree of support we receive from peers and managers, our sense of agency, but also focusses on the demands we face at work.

Work design is considered to be a key factor for motivation, performance, and mental well-being at work.

It’s not a question if we need resilience at the workplace - we do! Resilience can be considered from many different angles such as an outcome, a capacity, or as a process in the face of adversity.

It’s important to understand what fosters resilience in the workplace and what we can do to retain it. Despite many beliefs, an individual’s capacity for resilience is rather state-like and can be modified, trained, and enhanced. A genuine understanding of what drives resilience in individuals and teams is considered a key factor for healthy and resilient organisations.

The concept of psychological empowerment is an interesting one. It focuses and integrates the elements of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact and has been shown to be an important driver of how we feel and think about the work we do.

Thus, it’s important to understand how we can build and foster the elements of psychological empowerment and how to avoid its erosion. For example, in working environments where micro-management is the norm, the sense of psychological empowerment among employees is literally obliterated - it restricts their opportunities for learning and creates a climate of fear. We sometimes have to rethink the way we work and how we can empower individuals and teams to create a sense of ownership, accountability, and to support an organisation’s learning journey.

If we think about Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC), we can consider it as a critical organisational resource to create conducive work environments. PSC focuses on the policies, practices, and procedures that help us to protect workers’ health and safety.

While most organisations have such policies in place, the majority lacks the knowledge and skills on how to implement and enforce them. However, it’s important to understand the psychological mechanisms that drive PSC in organisations as a lack can create chronic job demands and might contribute to poorly designed work.