This blog is a part of our Ask Mind Share Partners series.
The U.S Surgeon General's Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing framework places workers’ voice and equity at the core of its guidance. But what does worker voice mean in the context of mental health and well-being at work? What actions can employers take to integrate worker voice to improve the efficacy of their own well-being strategies?
Mind Share Partners’ Movement Building and Research Lead, Bernie Wong, answers these questions.
What is “worker voice” and why is it important for workplace mental health and well-being?
“Worker voice” describes the experiences and perspectives of your workforce and how they inform the ways in which work, teams, and the broader organization are resourced, operated, and designed.
When it comes to mental health and well-being at work, worker voice includes how your people enjoy work, feel valued, and have a say over how work gets done. Research shows that this sense of autonomy protects against job stress, burnout, depression, and anxiety. It also drives business outcomes, too, like reduced turnover at PayPal or improved operational efficiency at JetBlue.
How can employers uplift worker voice?
Getting input.
This includes strategies like annual employee engagement surveys, quarterly pulse surveys, town halls, or simply asking for input in one-on-one or team meetings. Most employers are well-versed in these strategies, but in our work with employers, we typically see the following pitfalls:
Input is solicited but not urgently acted upon leaving workers in the dark. Ensure a clear and transparent plan of what will (and won’t) happen in the coming weeks or months. Be open, honest, and transparent to maintain trust.
Solutions are superficial. We sometimes see “easier” solutions that target individuals like self-care apps or wellness resources pursued over more impactful efforts around culture, psychological safety, and work.
Not all voices are valued. In our discovery assessments of mental health and well-being at companies, we often see a gap between the experiences of leadership and rank-and-file employees. This is coupled with historical marginalization of voices at work across gender, race, LGBTQ+ identity, disability status, and more. Intentional efforts to surface and empower voices that have long gone undervalued are essential.
Job crafting and working styles.
Work itself is one of the top influences on employee mental health. Because every job and every person has their own unique wants, needs, and ways of working optimally, efforts to build jobs around these preferences drive positive mental health outcomes.
Talk with team members to understand how they prefer to work and communicate, what energizes them, their obligations outside of work, and more. For example, a manager with school-aged children may want more flexibility around work location and in-office obligations. Adjustments like these can be formalized to create company-wide policies informed by workers.
Institutionalizing worker voice.
These are ways in which worker voice is built into the business itself. This can include things like well-being advisory committees, rank-and-file representatives on boards of directors, healthy relationships with unions, or even alternative business models like worker cooperatives. While these vary in their execution, the principle is formalizing rank-and-file workers’ say in the time, people, and financial resourcing of the organization.
Leadership’s role in the future of worker voice
There may be an implicit assumption that empowering worker voice means pushing back against leadership, particularly amid the widespread layoffs, mandated returns to office, and an overall decline in Americans’ trust in big business. The truth is that this junction of leadership and worker voice is fertile ground for innovation and positive change for the well-being of workers and businesses alike. And there are bright spots. H&R Block reversed their return-to-office mandate after listening to employee feedback and IKEA took a localized, regional approach that increased pay and flexibility resulting in a 20% drop in quit rates.
As we look to 2025, one of the key predictions we have is that business and nonprofit executives will have an evolving responsibility for the sustainability of their workforce. Including worker voices is a necessary step to that future.
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This blog is a part of our Ask Mind Share Partners series, where we answer questions we hear frequently in our work, and questions submitted by you. Have a question for our team? Submit it here.
About the Author
Bernie Wong, Movement Building and Research Lead at
Mind Share Partners
Bernie leads the curation, development, and institutionalization of the organization's expertise and perspectives on workplace mental health, and leads full-service training, advising, and transformation projects at organizations like BlackRock, Syneos Health, Tinder, and more. He has led national studies on workforce mental health, and is a widely published author, having written for Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and more.