Viewing archives for Dr. William Fleming

Volunteer days are vital to employees’ wellbeing…and your business—this CEO explains why

Fortune

And this isn’t just anecdotal evidence. According to a University of Oxford study, volunteering is the only workplace wellness offering that has a positive effect on employees’ well-being.

“My study analyzed data from about 50,000 employees from over 250 companies in the U.K. Volunteering was the only one of these interventions which showed…improved well-being,” says study author William Fleming, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Oxford.

So if volunteering makes your employees feel good, more engaged at work and more productive—how could you say no?

The human resources reckoning

Financial Times

The area of wellbeing exposes some of HR’s weaknesses. “Many HR teams pay for services from a variety of vendors that aren’t bringing positive effects,” says William Fleming, research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre. Last year, he found that programmes and apps to sooth stress and teach mindfulness made no difference.

The problem, he notes, is that many HR departments are stuck between having too little and too much influence. This may become more of an issue in the coming years, as AI begins to play a bigger role in the workplace, taking on more of the tasks people do.

“We recommend organisational change and improving job quality,” Fleming says. “How many HR managers decide how many hours people work, how much autonomy people are given in their team, how many staff are assigned to tasks, how technology is introduced? These are the types of things that really drive wellbeing at work. Yet they can fall outside the remit of HR and instead [are] based on executive decisions or line manager discretion.”

Do wellness interventions actually make employees feel better?

Irish Examiner

Yet, a question remains: Do wellness interventions make employees feel better?

William Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, attempted to answer this question in a study published last year.

[…]

His study looked at a wide range of wellbeing interventions and controversially concluded that almost none had a lasting impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction.

“While these findings do not entirely discount positive effects for some individual workers, any such effect may be averaged out by a negative effect elsewhere,” he concluded.

The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work: A Socio-Historical and Cultural Analysis

William Fleming

In recent decades, mental health has grown into a fraught and explicit public issue with considerable public and corporate policy attention. Mental health problems are reported to be both very prevalent and increasing, no more so than in the rising rates of work-related mental illness like burnout. What explains the ubiquity of mental health discourse and the growth of work-related mental illness in contemporary society? There is a vast scholarship in the social and health sciences seeking to explain these trends with national and international datasets, but the full answer remains elusive. For Ari Väänänen in The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work: A Socio-Historical and Cultural Analysis (TRoMVaW), we must look to transformations in the dominant modes of production and employment, especially the changes in the subjective experiences of work and life.

Väänänen comprehensively reviews the currently dominant theories why work-related mental well-being is such a growing problem (Chapters 3 and 4). The first explanation comes from positivist research in labour sociology, economics and psychology, claiming work is just more cognitively demanding and intense than it used to be (e.g. Green, 2006). The second explanation, in a similar paradigm, suggests the standard employment relationship developed in the Fordist, post-war era has degraded to produce new forms of ‘precarity’ (e.g. Standing, 2011). The other group of dominant theories are from critical and constructivist sociologists, both generally developed from Foucauldian ideas of governmentality, that argue society and subjectivity has been psychologized (e.g. Rose, 1999) and medicalized (e.g. Armstrong, 1995). For Väänänen, all four positions have strengths, but omit personal, cultural and political explanations, while also relying on a ubiquity and universalism that is neither sufficiently substantiated, nor provides a complete explanation. Väänänen’s summaries of these research streams on the relationships between work and mental health are excellent; any reader, regardless of familiarity with the topic, will benefit from engagement. Yet Väänänen’s criticisms of these research approaches are the real theoretical hook for TRoMVaW, opening the door to proceed.

How volunteering boosts employee morale and productivity

Fortune

A recent large-scale systematic review, in fact, found that a range of workplace wellness offerings had no positive effect on employees’ well-being. But there was one clear exception: volunteering.

“My study analyzed data from about 50,000 employees over 250 companies in the U.K. Volunteering was the only one of these interventions which showed…improved well-being,” says study author William Fleming, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Oxford. “It instills a bit more social meaning…into people’s jobs, especially if you’re working for a big corporate global organization [where] it can feel like you’re just making money for the man and spinning paper sheets around.”

Workplace wellbeing: Stop focusing on individual ‘fixes’ and address the elephant in the room

HR Zone

Before employers throw their hands up in the air and cancel their subscriptions to digital wellbeing apps and mental health platforms, let’s be clear on one thing: wellbeing is a crucial investment in the workplace.

According to a recent study by the Wellbeing Research Centre, organisations with higher subjective wellbeing outperform the stock market. And not just by a small margin. They saw an 11% greater return than the S&P 500 in the first half of 2024.

Given that investing in wellbeing is a business and people imperative, that still leaves us with the question of how to make workplace wellbeing work for your organisation. Earlier this year, a new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examined the impact of various wellbeing interventions such as mindfulness classes and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these solutions had any statistically significant impact on employee wellbeing.

Book Review: Sarah Waters, Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France

William Fleming

Sociologists have long been concerned with the harm wage labour inflicts on workers. The causes of this harm are various: through working conditions set by law and managers, or bullying and exclusion from colleagues and coworkers. Its effects can be severe, even fatal. Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France details the epidemic of work suicide across French workplaces in recent decades, examining its causes, cultural depictions and contested narratives.

Work suicide is a highly controversial topic, often receiving significant mainstream media attention when it occurs. Readers may recall dark rumours of safety netting around Apple–Foxconn facilities in China, or in the UK more recently the Post Office Horizon scandal or Ofsted’s acknowledged contribution to Ruth Perry’s death. In France, where workplace suicide is legally classed as a workplace accident, rates are estimated to be far higher than elsewhere. Waters’ aim is to explain why, contextualising the deaths of hundreds of workers in a story of marketisation, work intensification and the erosion of labour resistance. For Waters, workplace suicide is, simultaneously, the most extreme instance of work-based harm caused by brutal marketisation of former public service companies, and a final act of resistance left to workers amid the decline of collective labour. Suicide Voices narrates the hopelessness of work exploitation in neoliberal corporations through suicide notes, written testimonies of deceased workers, as well as documentation from the legal and media fallout.

Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

Harvard Business Review

An Oxford University study of 46,336 workers in 233 organizations compared employees who did and did not engage in a range of common individual-level well-being interventions, including resilience training, mindfulness, and well-being apps. Across multiple subjective well-being indicators, intervention participants were no better off after engaging in these interventions.

Work-related stress tops employers’ health and wellbeing concerns

HR Magazine

Additionally, HR should involve leaders in reforming their organisation’s approach to stress, explained William Fleming, Unilever research fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

Speaking to HR magazine, he said: “There might be some systems that HR can influence, like performance review or learning and development. But unfortunately, structural change can be beyond the reach for most HR personnel.

“They need to be empowered to help reform the major stressors at work, or have serious buy-in from senior leaders to make big changes happen. There are reactive systems like EAPs, with variable quality, but it’s important we’re moving towards a preventative approach by identifying and solving the big problems.”

Workplace well-being takes more than apps and stress management

The Straits Times

Imagine a workplace that has various mental well-being programmes. Now imagine being an employee, giving those programmes a try – and realising that your well-being has hardly changed.

That’s apparently the reality for many in the UK, according to a study published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre in 2024. It is believed to be the largest of its kind, involving more than 46,000 workers from over 200 organisations there.