Sustainable Workplace Mental Well Being for Sustainable SMEs: How?

Ayse Basak Cinar and Stephane Bilodeau
Additional contact information
Ayse Basak Cinar: Dundee Dental Hospital and School, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK
Stephane Bilodeau: Smart Phases Inc. (dba Novacab), Plattsburgh, NY 12901, USA

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-9

Abstract: Sustainable mental health and wellbeing (MHW), as addressed under SDG3, is crucial for achieving sustainable development, notably for sustainable SMEs growth. MWH is specifically interlinked with SDGs 8, 9 and 11: Economic growth and prosperity, sustainable communities, innovation, and jobs. Studies show over 200 million workdays are lost due to poor MHW each year, referring to the global cost of $1 trillion/year in lost productivity and it is increasing every year. Poor workplace MWH is almost an epidemic after COVID-19. It will be a significant challenge for a long time, in particular for SMEs which are hit hardest by the pandemic, as MHW problems have been shown to be a COVID side effect among 1:5 people. Despite the multifactorial aetiology of MHW (individual, social, environmental, and organizational), interventions for workplace MHW mostly refer to ‘one size fits all’ and top-down solutions, primarily asking for the commitment and behaviour change of employees; that has shown to be ineffective. The main assumption underlying the present work is the need for a proactive and tailored MHW frameworks that can be blended to organizational policies. The objective which corresponds to the main purpose of the paper is to provide a 5-staged MWH model, stemming from our evidence-based studies, that may speak for the identified need. We also discuss how the Model can provide a route map on how SMEs can implement and measure SDGs relevant to their business in synergistic interaction with SDG3.

Keywords: workplace; mental health; wellbeing; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); COVID-19; Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs); mental health and wellbeing policy; mental health and wellbeing; 5-staged model; SDG3; SDG8; SDG9; SDG11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/5290/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/5290/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:9:p:5290-:d:803860

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().