What's Well & Good at Work

What's Well & Good at Work explores research on workplace wellbeing, mental health, burnout, engagement, safety, and the policies that shape healthier working lives.

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Wellbeing Gets Context Specific

This week’s workplace-wellbeing papers examine mental health and wellbeing in relation to job demands, resources, culture, and work arrangements. The studies stay close to specific settings: aged care, schools, remote work, local government, oil services, and healthcare.

Several papers frame workplace wellbeing through the interaction of job demands, resources, support gaps, burnout, and psychological distress.
Remote work can bring both gains and losses, making employee wellbeing a matter for work design and sustainable HR practice, not just a location choice.
Sector-specific studies underscore why workplace-wellbeing research needs to account for the pressures shaping mental health in actual workplaces.

Stress in caring and teaching work

From Compassion to Crisis: A Qualitative Synthesis of the Determinants of Mental Wellbeing Among Aged Care Workers.

This qualitative synthesis maps factors influencing mental wellbeing among aged care workers across roles and system levels, highlighting widespread and complex challenges.

Teacher stress and support gaps: a mixed methods study of the resource paradox in K-12 schools

This mixed-methods study links teacher stress and wellbeing to how educators experience workplace demands and available resources in K-12 schools.

Mental health interventions for occupational stress and burnout among special education teachers: a scoping review.

This scoping review surveys mental health interventions for occupational stress and burnout among special education teachers, a group facing professional, organisational, and systemic challenges.

Wellbeing depends on work design

Sustaining employee well-being in remote work: a sustainable human resource management perspective

This interview study of UK-based counsellors shows remote work shaping wellbeing through perceived resource gains and losses, with implications for sustainable HRM and organisational practice.

Employee Mental Health and Workplace Well-Being Programs in Oil Services Firms: Evidence from Port Harcourt, Nigeria

This study brings evidence on workplace wellbeing programs and employee mental health to Nigerian oil services firms, a sector the abstract describes as underexplored.

Emotional State and Workplace Wellness among Employees of a Local Government Unit in Ifugao, Philippines

This public-sector study examines depression, anxiety, stress, and PERMA-based workplace wellness among local government employees in Ifugao, Philippines.

Support models in practice

Learning from the world's oldest continuous culture — the circle of leadership: a new way to support the healthcare workforce

This perspective proposes an Aboriginal-inspired Circular Leadership Model to support healthcare workforce wellbeing, retention, and leadership capacity in culturally grounded ways.

Bright Light Therapy for Psychiatry Residents: A Pilot Study of Feasibility and Perceived Impact on Wellbeing.

This pilot study examines psychiatry residents’ attitudes toward bright light therapy in clinical workspaces and its perceived impact on wellbeing.

Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.