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Workforce, Well-being and Mental health

Addressing workforce challenges by creating ecosystems of healthy communities focusing on workplace (mental and physical) health and wellbeing.

About the theme

Mental health alone has a cost of £56bn per year to businesses, a 25% increase since 2020, with 2.6m people currently unable to work through illness. The aim of this cluster is to develop the work and health research community and generate robust evidence on workplace well-being by undertaking challenge-led, transdisciplinary research and innovation, eventually impacting on reduction of health inequalities in the UK.

We will capitalise on the Midlands as a place-based asset to test out interventions that reduce health inequalities in the workplace.

Our research will focus on co-creation and user-centric design, keeping the workforce and employees at the heart and will seek to demonstrate impact at both population and organisation levels.

Research topics include:
• Sustainable workforces of the future
• Resilience and mental health
• Mental health and productivity
• Remote, hybrid and agile working contexts
• Coaching for leadership and management

Project list

  • This project aimed to fill a gap in understanding the impact of remote e-working for disabled and neurodivergent workers (DNW).

  • Remote working is here to stay so it is now very important that employers can develop effective strategies to gain the best from remote working practices. By helping employees to work effectively and to balance and integrate their own work and life arrangements can lead to a win-win for both employees and employers.

Theme lead / Co-leads

Dr Christine Grant

Dr Christine Grant, Occupational Psychologist and Associate Professor, is a leading applied researcher in the field of remote working. Her work explores the psychological factors and behaviours that affect remote workers including, work-life balance, job effectiveness and wellbeing. Christine also develops psychometric measures in this area including the globally renowned and trademarked E Work-Life scale that enables individuals and organisations to measure the quality of remote working. She has contributed to Government POST notes on the ‘invisible worker’.

 Queen’s Award for Enterprise Logo
University of the year shortlisted
QS Five Star Rating 2023