Results of Study into Well-Being in the Workplace
This reports on the results of our study into well-being in the workplace conducted in German speakers in 2023-4
What was the study?
We measured emotional needs – our SCOAP model - against various other measures. This included measures of physical and emotional health, burnout, engagement, and sleep patterns. This was also to validate the German version of the SCOAP assessment.
First off, I’m happy to say that the assessment has passed all validation criteria – meaning we have a scientifically valid tool to use in the workplace. Yay!
We had formal responses from 794 people for the German version. Our previous validation on the English version has a dataset of 491. This gives a total of 1285. So, here’s the questions I will answer for you in this exclusive preview of the data:
How does SCOAP relate to measures of burnout, engagement, and mental health?
How engaged are workers?
Where can we improve mental health?
What do employees want most?
Are there cultural differences?
What does this mean for leadership?
Reminder of what SCOAP is:
SCOAP stands for the basic needs of Self-Esteem, Control, Orientation, Attachment, and Pleasure. This is based on an extensive review of behavioural literature. Review here:
14’000-word justification here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dkbqa
Basically, our theory goes, if SCOAP is fulfilled you will be in a good place, have a healthy brain, and also be able to perform well. If your SCOAP is unfulfilled you will have a decrease in mental wellbeing, higher risk of stress and mental disorders, and lower functioning over time.
1. How Does SCOAP Relate to Measures of Burnout, Engagement, and Mental Health?
What may be surprising is that we don’t ask questions directly related to burnout or depression. Our base theory is that emotional needs are fundamental to human functioning and if these are unfulfilled or violated then this will strongly impact emotional wellbeing. The questions are directed at workplace experiences only.
The data shows that SCOAP incongruence (incongruence = mismatch to personalised ideal) correlates very strongly with:
Emotional wellbeing (r 0.622, p<.001)
Fatigue and energy (r 0.523, p<.001)
Social functioning (r 0.400, p<.001)
Emotional role functioning (r 0.359, p<.001)
This correlation of up to 0.622 (Spearman’s Rho) is very high considering we do not ask questions about personal life. For those non-statisticians amongst you: 1 would be a perfect correlation so this is a large effect size. As I said this is only asking questions on current state of SCOAP in the workplace – nothing else: no past issues, genetic factors, personal life factors, socioeconomic factors, etc., etc.
For us this shows that simply measuring current SCOAP can give very strong indictors of mental state and mental wellbeing. On analysis of our items, we also know we can do this accurately with as few as five items. For more accuracy and reliability, we have identified 40 items for a shortened questionnaire.
There are also weaker but statistically significant correlations to:
General health (r 0.355, p<.001)
Pain (r 0.254, p<.001)
Physical role functioning (r 0.263, p<.001)
We also compared to one popular and commonly used questionnaire on burnout at work (r 0.674, p<.001) , and one on work engagement (r 0.554, p<.001). As you can see SCOAP showed strong correlations to both of these also, though correlations were not quite as high as expected, SCOAP proved to be better correlated with general mental well-being than either of these other questionnaires. This suggests that SCOAP is a better general predictor of mental health.
This therefore proves our basic hypothesis that measuring SCOAP is an effective method for measuring emotional wellbeing in the workplace.
Based on our data you may also wonder what is the current mental state of employees? Is it the case that, as some report, that up to 30% of employees are actively disengaged?
2. How engaged are employees?
A lot of these headline reports are a bit dodgy. They are often based on short questionnaires and often set unrealistic expectations of engagement. Though we may consider high energy and high engagement as desirable, please name a place where people are 100% enthused all the time. I don’t know it – I’m not, and I work for myself in what I love!
And no, these figures often reported do not match our data. We, in our data, can only talk about “incongruence” the mismatch between the ideal fulfilment of one’s needs and how these are actually fulfilled in the workplace. As the world is not perfect and very few workplaces are perfect, we would expect that there are some mismatches, incongruence, but these would fall into “normal” i.e. the workplace is not perfect but still ok. The higher the levels of incongruence, the higher the “disengagement”. Remember our SCOAP data correlates strongly but not perfectly with the one measure of engagement we compared it to.
On top of that, though our questionnaire has been shown to be accurate, there is also some variation. We are just looking at averages: it could also be the case that some people have one particular severe frustration in the business – this sometimes can have a surprisingly large impact on engagement. However if this one frustration is averaged over all needs it may appear to be low incongruence on average. However, we have also seen that incongruence, dissatisfaction, rarely comes alone.
So, here’s what our data says:
33% of participants reported being in a positive and satisfied state
67% of people report at least mild dissatisfaction
31% report moderate dissatisfaction
15% report high dissatisfaction
7% report very high dissatisfaction
3% report excessive dissatisfaction
We don’t have hard data on what the cut-off points are for these at the moment – that will be for future research.
The summary is that this shows that most people are in a reasonable place in the workplace. About 15% are probably “actively” disengaged, or highly dissatisfied, and 7-3% are at risk of stress related disorders and mental health issues. This falls in line with more serious studies into this in the workplace.
I stress this is only based on current emotional needs satisfaction and does not take into account other life factors, and genetic predispositions.
3. Where Can We Improve Mental Health?
We class the SCOAP needs as basic human needs and the consistently high rating by participants supports this. However, there is also quite a lot off individual variation. Different people have different needs, and this can vary by person, and company dramatically. Your workplace could be very different.
One advantage of the SCOAP-Profile is how personalised it is. But you may be interested nonetheless to learn about where the data says the largest satisfaction or violation is by need or sub-dimension of these needs, SCOAP. You would need to measure your Company/Department/Team separately to get a true reflection of what is happening in your context.
Note also that this German dataset differs to our English dataset. But for what it’s worth these are sub-dimensions of the needs (in brackets) that have the highest incongruences (dissatisfaction and violation).
Variety & monotony (Pleasure) 23.3%
Fairness (Self-Esteem) 23.2%
Satisfaction (Pleasure) 23.1%
Corporate direction (Orientation) 22.1%
Fun (Pleasure) 20.6%
This may be surprising and could be related to the type of jobs that people have. It shows that Pleasure is what is lacking in most people’s jobs followed by being fairly treated and understanding where the business is going.
More interesting is the direct correlation between emotional well-being and incongruence of sub-dimensions. What we do know is that the average of incongruence is much better predictor than individual items - but some items are also predictive:
Being in Control (r 0.498, p<.001)
Having Influence (r 0.450, p<.001)
Relationship to Boss (r 0.422, p<.001)
Having Authority (r 0.416, p<.001)
Security (r 0.415, p<.001)
These show sub-dimensions that seem to have a large influence on mental health - but as our data shows these are generally not reported as being as low as the others above.
So, this suggests that as a leader you should ensure people can enjoy their jobs, be fair, and give clear communication on direction of the business. This needs to sit on a basis of being in control in job, having influence, and security.
That’s only an average - your business may be very different.
Out of interest here is the list of SCOAP needs in order of highest dissatisfaction to lowest.
Pleasure (av. 19.5% incongruence)
Orientation (av. 18.6% incongruence)
Control (av. 17.2% incongruence)
Self-Esteem (av. 16.7% incongruence)
Attachment (av. 15.5% incongruence)
4. What Needs are the Most Important?
The next question is what did participants in this study rate as their most important needs or the respective sub-dimensions of these? This gives an indication of what employees value the most and hence should be the focus for organisations and leaders.
SCOAP needs are ranked by importance thus:
Self-Esteem (81.83%)
Pleasure (79.25%)
Control (75.29%)
Attachment (74.51%)
Orientation (73.63%)
This is at the need level but at the sub-dimension level, we get a more granular look at what people value most:
Fairness (88.21%)
Resources (83.23%)
Ability (82.66%)
Appreciation (82.50%)
Pleasure (82.39%)
That shows that we simply need to be fair, give resources and enable people to perform, show appreciation, and enjoy it. Repeating what I’ve already said above multiple times.
Simple!
5. Are There Cultural Differences?
This is more difficult to answer – we have two datasets. However, they were taken 10 years apart, so it is difficult to compare. Also, the types of roles and organisations are different. The English dataset has a large proportion of international people working in English in multi-nationals and normally well-educated. This German-Speaking dataset is majority German, but in smaller business on average, with different education levels.
For what it’s worth, general motivation is lower in the German speaking group and incongruence, is noticeably higher: violation levels in the German group are double that of the English group! Though still not at shocking levels. This could be a reflection of the business size, education, nationality, or time period.
There are simply too many variables to draw any conclusions here – future data might be able to tease something out.
6. What Does This Mean for Leadership?
I will stress again that this is always individualised but there are some key learnings when looking at the data in more detail we have a few interesting insights:
The vast majority of people are motivated to perform (based on responses to items on performance)
Most employees, on average, don’t like a competitive environment at work and are not motivated to outperform others
Fairness is a big thing for most people
Most people have mild dissatisfaction but only a few have serious issues
Nevertheless 3-7% are suffering at work and would need some support
People don’t go to work to have friends but having friends at work helps a lot!
We can summarise with SCOAP – which is the beauty of the model and why it is so effective:
Self-Esteem
Be fair and show appreciation
Don’t make the workplace internally competitive (there is, however, a small sub population of “competitors” who love competitiveness internally)
Control
Make sure people have the resources and abilities to perform and listen to them
Don’t take away freedom
Orientation
Keep employees informed, giving clear directions and goals.
Don’t keep secrets, if at all possible
Attachment
Build trust first, enable social aspects
Don’t overdo social aspects
Pleasure
Make sure work is pleasurable, give variety
Don’t leave pleasure to chance
And don’t forget:
Be individual: understand your people and make it work for them, so they make it work for you!
What’s next?
We have also identified follow up studies some of which will be starting shortly. This should give us more evidence but also more juicy insights into business, engagement, wellbeing, performance, and leadership.