If you are feeling stressed at work, you are not alone. According to Headspace’ sixth annual Workforce State of Mind report (published in 2024), 86 percent of workers have experienced moderate, high, or extreme stress in the past year.
For those who have experienced extreme stress levels, 83 percent of those respondents said that their stress primarily comes from work. Those are sobering numbers for employers.
May is mental health month in the United States. Here are some typical actions employers use to improve mental health during this month:
- increase employee awareness of mental health symptoms,
- offer more access to mental health professionals (especially at work and not just on-line),
- conduct mental health screenings, and,
- promote flexible work arrangements.
These are all excellent ideas, but I am going to tell you to consider something else that’s even more powerful: create a more collaborative and less toxic work culture.
Consider this: in 2022, MIT researchers uncovered that toxic organizational cultures drive employee turnover ten times more than being poor pay. Pay is often thought to be the leading cause of turnover by employers. Yet toxic work culture can drive turnover and be a leading cause of stress.
MIT researchers examined 34 million online employee profiles on Glassdoor to identify US workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021. They found that attrition rates ranged from less than two percent to more than 30 percent across companies for the six months they studied. The industry was responsible for some of this variation, with retail, management consulting, internet, software, fast food, leisure, and healthcare industries leading the way.
MIT researchers found that although much of the media discussion about the Great Resignation (coming out of COVID-19 in 2022) has focused on employee dissatisfaction with wages. How frequently employees mentioned compensation, however, ranks 16th among all topics in terms of predicting employee turnover.
This result is consistent with a large body of evidence that pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover.[i]
A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. The MIT researchers found that the leading elements contributing to toxic work cultures include the following:
- Failing to promote civility and fairness in the workplace
- Allowing workers to feel disrespected
- Behaving unethically
- Failing to provide adequate job security
- Forcing frequent reorganizations
- Demanding too-long hours
- Failing to recognize performance
Certainly, allowing employees more confidential access to mental health professionals, increased flexible work schedules, and teaching the warning signs of mental health conditions are all great ideas for the month of May. But remember to consider improving your organization’s culture, especially if there is evidence that it is a toxic one.
About Victor
Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting and Managing Partner of InnovationOne, LLC. He works with organizations to transform HR and recruiting, implement remote work, and develop extraordinary leaders, teams, and innovation cultures. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Hack Recruiting: The Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization. He is quoted in business journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Workforce Management, and CEO Magazine. Victor, with his partner Dr. Brooke Dobni, has partnered with The Conference Board and the US Department of Energy on innovation research. Subscribe to his weekly blogs at http://www.VictorHRConsultant.com
[i] A.L. Rubenstein, M.B. Eberly, T.W. Lee, et al., “Surveying the Forest: A Meta-Analysis, Moderator Investigation, and Future-Oriented Discussion of the Antecedents of Voluntary Employee Turnover,” Personnel Psychology 71, no. 1 (spring 2018): 23-65; and D.G. Allen, P.C. Bryant, and J.M. Vardaman, “Retaining Talent: Replacing Misconceptions With Evidence-Based Strategies,” Academy of Management Perspectives 24, no. 2 (May 2010): 48-64
