Employee wellbeing and performance

The association between employee wellbeing and employee performance is a focal point for researchers and local and national governments. This focus has grown rapidly since the end of the Second World War. The research concerned with this relationship is beginning to catch up with the theoretical discussions and debates surrounding the topic, which have been ongoing since Ancient Greece. Moving beyond the research perspective, the idea that employee wellbeing affects employee performance is beginning to be widely recognised by local and national governments, as is evidenced by the number of local workplace wellbeing charters that currently exist within the UK in addition to the national health and wellbeing charters in place. However, the existing literature provides inconsistent results regarding the potential effect of employee wellbeing on employee performance. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the association between employee wellbeing and employee performance using an original employee-level dataset collected across organisations implementing the Bristol City Workplace Wellbeing Charter (the Charter). This study originated from Bristol City Council seeking to evaluate their own charter and assess the potential benefit for participating organisations. The Charter is comprised of eight standards; healthy eating, physical activity, tobacco use and cessation, alcohol and substance misuse, leadership, attendance management, health and safety and mental health and wellbeing. The Charter and these eight standards form the foundation of this study, informing the data collection criteria and methods as well as the sample of organisations participating in the study. An in-depth analysis and review of the literature reveals numerous gaps which have shaped the core research questions of this thesis. These research questions are: Research Question: Is there a relationship between employee wellbeing and employee performance and, if so, to what extent do employee wellbeing factors affect employee performance? Sub Question: What impact does an organisation’s engagement with the Bristol Workplace Wellbeing Charter have on its employee’s performance and, if so, what are the policy implications? A major issue concerns the measurement and calibration of employee wellbeing and employee performance. Informed by the literature, this thesis grounds its analyses on three measures of employee-level performance: presenteeism, absenteeism (short and long term) and employee turnover. The thesis also extends the literature by capturing and analysing a variety of employee-level wellbeing measures including, but not restricted to, mental health, job satisfaction, engagement, flexible working, healthy eating and physical activity. An unusually comprehensive measure of wellbeing is used that combines typical Human Resource Management (HRM) policies with aspects of individual behaviour. This thesis has a repeated cross sectional multi-level design for a sample of organisations participating with the Charter. Design instruments include two questionnaires that capture manager and employee level data. In the absence of panel data, this approach allowed for a discussion regarding possible changes over time at participating organisations, while examining the evolving importance of managers in influencing employee wellbeing and employee performance. Results suggest that employee wellbeing is associated with employee performance but different aspects of employee wellbeing are associated with different types of employee performance outcomes. Many employee-level behavioural factors were found to be associated with employee performance. These results suggest that health charters should incorporate a wide range of wellbeing issues to better reflect the individual nature of the concept of wellbeing. Moreover, the results suggest that future research needs to broaden its conceptualisation of employee wellbeing and employee performance to include variables that are often omitted. This would allow for more in depth and specific knowledge to be gained which could result in health interventions being better informed and more practical for practitioners.