Delivering your daily dose of well-being to the workplace: a randomized controlled trial of an online well-being programme for employees

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a newly developed brief, cost-effective, flexible, and broadly accessible online programme designed to enhance employee well-being. Considering the demands of the working world, the development of the positive intervention (PI) programme was based on empirical findings and latest theoretical advances from the field of positive psychology, namely the PERMA model of well-being. The new PERMA-based programme’s effectiveness to increase employee well-being was evaluated with a longitudinal field experiment, including a wait list control group and an already established PI programme (i.e., gratitude programme) for comparison (three-armed randomized controlled trial; n = 303, N_male = 99, N_female = 203, M_age = 41.16, SD = 12.26). Repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) supported that on average, participants of the gratitude programme and the PERMA-based programme reported significant increases in employee well-being after the intervention, as compared to no increases in the wait list control group. The significant increases yielded small effect sizes for general subjective well-being and medium effect sizes for work-related subjective well-being. Post-hoc analyses controlling for baseline well-being also supported the efficacy of the PIs. Contrary to the prediction of the PERMA-based programme’s superiority, participants of both online PI programmes reported similar gains in employee well-being components. Practical implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• positive psychology
• PERMA
• gratitude

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. However, some argue that also more research is needed on gratitude interventions, especially in the organizational context (Mills, Fleck, & Kozikowski, 2013). While this is an important consideration to keep in mind, gratitude interventions still rank highly among the most successful PI programmes, and they are probably the most established PI that is available so far (Wood et al., 2010). Therefore, even though gratitude interventions still deserve research attention on their own (Wood et al., 2010), in the humble opinion of the authors, there was no better option for the role of the established “gold standard” treatment at the time of the study.

2. More details regarding the instructions of the seven exercises and the research indicating their impact on the five PERMA dimensions can be requested from the authors via email.

3. Literature research yielded three recently published studies that have measured components of PERMA (Coffey et al., 2014; Kern et al., 2014a, 2014b). However, these measurements were relatively long (i.e., 24–36 items) and not sufficiently validated.

4. Although Page and Vella-Brodrick (2009) cautiously suggested to also include psychological well-being (see Ryff, 1989) in their model, and the authors of the study at hand acknowledge that psychological functioning can be considered an aspect of employee well-being, the current study focussed on the SWB components of employee well-being, since the psychological well-being dimensions proposed by Ryff (1989) were not directly targeted by either of the well-being programmes, and moreover, the dimensions have been questioned on both psychometric and conceptual grounds (Christopher, 1999; Linley, Maltby, Wood, Osborne, & Hurling, 2009; Springer, Hauser, & Freese, 2006; Van Dierendonck, 2004).

5. It is conceivable that the difference in effect sizes for GSWB (small effect size) and WSWB (medium effect size) might be attributable to the fact that the content of both interventions referred to the workplace and the positive behaviours, cognitions or emotions induced by the exercises of the programmes took place during work. This might make a positive change in work-related well-being more likely.