Background: The 134,000 member American Psychological Association (APA) has a division called the Center For Organizational Excellence. That entity sponsors the APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program, whose purpose is to “raise public awareness about the value psychology brings to the workplace and to enhance employee well-being and organizational performance.”

One way it seeks to accomplish that goal is to showcase examples of what the APA deems to be psychologically healthy workplaces. It did so this year by granting awards to six organizations. The premise of the entire project — as explained by Dr. David Ballard* of the APA — is that you can’t hope to create a high-performing organization with a standard wellness program and generous employee benefits.

Baked into Your Culture

Instead, “psychologically healthy workplace principles” must be ingrained into your culture. “Core to this approach,” Dr. Ballard explains, “is a multi-dimensional view of employee well-being that includes good physical and mental health, strong interpersonal relationships, financial stability and a meaningful life with positive experiences at work.”

Note that this is a broad vision of health, rather than an employer’s to-do list. Of course, you have no control over whether your employees have what they consider to be meaningful lives. But by taking a holistic view of health you can get helpful insight for choosing a range of workplace practices that can promote your strategic goals. If your strategic goals are supported, you can also support your mission and drive employee performance.

Beyond any purely emotional reward to you for promoting the health of your employees, the pay-off is quantified by the APA using multiple criteria. The key human resource metrics of the 2014 “healthy workplace” winners are contrasted with the national averages. For example, the rate of employee turnover at the winning workplaces is generally much lower — seven percent vs. 38 percent.

Another notable finding: Only 15 percent of employees at the award-winning companies report an intention to scout out alternative employment opportunities, vs. 27 percent for the national average.

Some additional survey findings are highlighted in the accompanying table.

Assessment Criteria

The Psychologically Healthy Workplace Award candidates were assessed using the following criteria, each a key lever to increase workforce psychological health:

• Employee involvement

• Health & safety

• Employee growth & development

• Work-life balance

• Employee recognition

Following are some characteristics of individual award winners highlighted by the APA, as described in its write-up of the 2014 winners.

Framework, a management consulting firm, employs a “strengths-based approach” to employee growth and development. That means getting the most out of a job “may involve redefining the job itself to suit the person performing it.” The basic idea is to “align people’s job duties and responsibilities with their talents, passions and preferences to the greatest degree possible.” Achieving that goal requires incorporating the vision into the recruiting process, to avoid any serious misalignment of job duties and talents.

Tasty Catering has adopted a non-hierarchical “culture-based leadership model” in which all company performance data, including financial results, is shared with employees. The company places a heavy emphasis on creating training opportunities that allow employees to assume increasing responsibility, as much work schedule flexibility as is possible for a catering company, and public praise for employee accomplishments.

Certified Angus Beef places a high priority on employee involvement in management processes. The company has “an open-door policy from the top down, with supervisors holding weekly or biweekly meetings to keep the lines of communication open.” In addition, employees regularly participate in “brainstorming sessions,” breakfast meetings, team-building training, workshops and community outreach activities.

Beach Cities Health District, a Southern California “wellness agency,” practices what it preaches with a broad-scope wellness program. Wellness committees were established within each department that sought to pair up employees with similar interests. The idea is to help them motivate each other to meet the goal of completing five wellness activities over a three-month period. In addition to standard physical health activities, the challenges included some aimed at helping employees enhance their emotional well-being both in their own dealings with personal challenges, and in the social context.

These employer examples were not given with the idea that other organizations would reproduce them precisely. Elements required to promote a psychologically healthy workplace must be devised in the context of the employer’s unique characteristics and circumstances.

*Dr. David Ballard oversees organizational excellence initiatives for the APA