Workplace wellbeing is more than just pizza Fridays
A recent report by LCP has found that after the UK experienced the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a significant rise in anxiety - 63% of survey respondents to be specific - across all ages, which has resulted in people needing to take more time off work to cope with personal issues. This could be costing businesses around the UK up to £1.6million per year.
Since February 2020, 49% of people aged 25-34 said they had experienced mental health problems or concerns, and a further 37% of 35-44 year olds experienced the same.
It is becoming clear that it’s no longer enough to just offer employees pizza Fridays and ping pong tables as wellbeing initiatives, so we must all ask ourselves both as employees and employers, what do we need to incorporate into our company wellbeing initiatives that will actually make a positive difference where it’s needed most?
You won’t be surprised to find that there is an abundance of research supporting the hypothesis that volunteering can increase the mental wellbeing of those who get involved in it. But don’t take my word for it - see for yourself:
A recently published article in the Journal of Happiness found that people who volunteered had experienced better mental wellbeing throughout their lives, and those who volunteered more regularly were even more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered less regularly. They also wanted to make sure that their results were accurate, and it wasn’t just that happier people are more likely to volunteer. So, after some more research they did in fact find that that you don’t need to be a happier person to engage with and feel the benefits from volunteering either, the benefits are still the same!
This recent article also lists some of the many benefits of volunteering with some research to back them up. They discuss the mental wellbeing benefits of volunteering and how it can reduce anxiety, depression, can increase self confidence, and provide you with an additional sense of purpose. They also discuss how volunteering can advance your career through gaining experience - whether that be directly related to your skillset, or soft skills like management, communication, teamwork, and problem solving.
Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology Yale University reiterates ‘Research shows that we are happiest when we’re doing for other people’ and discusses how this form of pro-social behaviour has unlimited benefits amongst most cultures in this article. It also mentions that there’s actually a neurological ‘Warm Glow’ that we experience when volunteering - when we help another person, we experience a reward related activation in the brain!
So we have seen a small fraction of the research supporting the wellbeing benefits that volunteering can offer, but how does this link back into workplace wellbeing, specifically looking at changing the statistics that I mentioned above, to improve wellbeing in the workplace?
The happy-productive worker hypothesis explains that happy employees are not just more productive than unhappy employees, but they also have greater career success, earn more money, and are more helpful to other employees within the workplace. Other studies on volunteering link to this and have found volunteering to have an equivalent wellbeing value of a huge £911 per volunteer per year - most volunteering platforms or initiatives as you can imagine are way less expensive than this (including ours!), so the added value of employee volunteering will actually save your organisation money, on top of boosting employee wellbeing, productivity and overall success!
Hopefully this gives a lot of food for thought, and explains why we need more meaning behind the ways that organisations choose to support their employees' mental wellbeing. Pizza Fridays and ping pong tables are a lot of fun, and a great way to bring forward a more community focused work culture, but there’s so much more that organisations can be doing to really combat the mental wellbeing struggles so many of us have been experiencing both pre and post pandemic. Employee volunteering initiatives are a great way to start…!
ABOUT MATCHABLE
At Matchable we work with companies and their employees to match them with high impact and innovative skilled volunteering projects at non-profits and impact startups.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how your employees can upskill through our social impact projects, get in touch here.