Perhaps you’re back in the office four or five days a week. Possibly you’ve resumed your 9-5 grind , the leniency of working around your busy home life lost. And maybe Zoom meetings wearing a blouse with pajama bottoms feel like a lifetime ago.
But whether or not you’ve fully reverted to pre-COVID work life, chances are your well-being on the job has suffered in recent years, a new report suggests. As employers have scaled back the flexibility they offered during the height of the coronavirus pandemic , workplace well-being has diminished nationwide, according to a report published last month by the Human Capital Development Lab at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in partnership with Great Place to Work . The annual survey of more than 1.
5 million people at over 2,500 firms showed that from 2019 through 2023, workplace well-being peaked in 2020 before dwindling in the last three years. “The COVID pandemic heightened employers’ awareness of the importance of well-being, and many of the best organizations worked to create a positive work climate,” Michelle Barton, PhD , an associate professor of practice at Carey and coauthor of the report, said in a news release . “The challenge now will be to integrate those practices into everyday work life, rather than simply as a crisis response.
” Researchers used the following five criteria to measure each company’s “climate of well-being”: Financial health Meaningful connections Mental and emotional support Perso.