Employee well-being is a growing concern in the workplace. Frazao Studio Latino—Getty Images
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The quest to achieve work-life balance is as old as time. The workplace has undergone a sea change in recent years with the adoption of remote work, elevated levels of employee burnout, and mass layoffs. Amid all these forces, employee well-being is taking a hit. Most workers have reported that their health either worsened or remained the same during the last year, according to a survey by audit and consulting firm Deloitte. And employers, the report finds, are not doing much to address the problem.
“Organizations are just not doing enough to improve working conditions and employee health,” Christopher Kayes, a management professor at the George Washington University School of Business, told Fortune. “The fact that well-being is showing a small dip shows that things are really getting difficult for workers and that managers don’t have the right tools to even move the needle even an inch in a positive direction.”
Deloitte’s report, in collaboration with research firm Workplace Intelligence and published last week, is based on surveys of over 3,000 executives, managers, and employees in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia. It asked participants about well-being in four categories: physical, mental, financial, and social. The results showed that managers with the ability to effect change in the workplace are not being empowered by companies to do so. There’s also a large mismatch in how employees and the C-suite view well-being.
“More than three out of four executives inaccurately believe that their workforce’s well-being improved, illustrating that leaders don’t have a firm grasp on how their teams are really doing,” the report said.
Data collected by the consulting firm shows that while roughly 80% of high-level executives believe their employees’ well-being has improved in the last year, in reality, only an average of 32% of employees over the four categories truly feel that way. And notably, on the other end of the spectrum, 37% of employees have seen their financial well-being worsen last year, but only 5% C-suite executives thought so. There’s one main reason for this stark difference in perspective, according to Deloitte’s chief well-being officer, Jen Fisher.
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