Giving employees more control over when and how they work may do more than improve job satisfaction. It could also improve their health.

A study led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Penn State University found that changes in the workplace designed to reduce conflicts between work and employees’ personal lives were associated with significant reductions in cardiovascular risk among employees who were already at higher risk.

For some workers, the improvement was comparable to reversing between five and ten years of age-related changes in cardiometabolic risk.

Changing the workplace instead of changing the worker

What makes the research particularly interesting from a leadership perspective is its approach.

Many corporate health programmes focus on changing employees. Workers are encouraged to exercise more, eat healthier food, sleep better or manage stress.

This study asked a different question:

What happens when we change the way work itself is organised?

The researchers developed an intervention intended to improve work-life balance. Managers were trained to support employees’ personal and family lives while maintaining job performance. Managers and employees also worked together to identify ways of giving workers greater control over their schedules and tasks.

The experiment involved 1,528 employees at two very different companies.

One was an IT company, with 555 participating employees, mainly higher- and middle-income technical workers. The other was a long-term care company, where 973 participating employees were predominantly lower-paid female caregivers.

Some workplaces implemented the programme while others continued working as usual.

Measuring what happened to employees

This was not simply a survey asking employees whether they felt better.

Researchers measured systolic blood pressure, body mass index, glycated haemoglobin, smoking status and cholesterol at the beginning of the study and again twelve months later.

They used those measurements to calculate each employee’s cardiometabolic risk score — an estimate of the risk of developing cardiovascular disease over the following decade.

Across the workforce as a whole, the intervention did not produce a significant improvement in cardiovascular risk.

But among employees who started with a higher cardiometabolic risk, something important happened.

Higher-risk employees at the IT company experienced an improvement equivalent to approximately 5.5 years of age-related change. At the long-term care company, the corresponding figure was approximately 10.3 years.

Employees over 45 with higher initial risk were particularly likely to benefit.

And there was another important finding for employers: Harvard reported that these improvements occurred without a negative impact on productivity.

A lesson for future leaders

The study raises a broader question about leadership.

How much control should people have over their own work?

Traditional management has often associated control with the manager. The manager decides when, where and sometimes exactly how work must be performed.

But leadership does not necessarily require controlling every aspect of an employee’s working day.

Giving people greater autonomy over their schedules and tasks — while maintaining clear objectives and responsibilities — may create a healthier organisation without sacrificing performance.

For future leaders, that distinction matters.

Flexibility should not simply be regarded as an employee benefit, an HR policy or a concession to people seeking a better work-life balance.

The way leaders organise work can itself become a determinant of people’s health.

That makes workplace design a leadership issue.

And perhaps one of the most important questions a future leader can ask is not simply:

How can I get the best performance from my people?

But also:

How can I organise work so that people can perform without work unnecessarily damaging their lives?

Source: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Increasing workplace flexibility associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, 8 November 2023. The underlying study, Employee Cardiometabolic Risk Following a Cluster-Randomized Workplace Intervention From the Work, Family and Health Network, was published in the American Journal of Public Health on 8 November 2023.s een publicatieklare FLI-versie: