Evaluating mental health in the workplace; Crafting an 18- item mental health scale for knowledge workers

Purpose. This study aims to develop a holistic, short mental health at work scale to quickly monitor employees’ mental health.
Theory. According to the Salutogenic Theory, health and disease are not separate entities, but health moves along a health-disease continuum. A salutogenic orientation to health focusses on strategies to solve health issues and promote positive outcomes. Unlike existing research that mainly focusses on mental illness or the experience of poor mental health, the current study investigates how both positive and negative aspects of mental health can be measured by just one scale with a limited number of scale-items.
Methods. A cross-sectional survey has been distributed among both private and public organizations the Netherlands. This survey measures ten mental health indicators, namely stress, mood, well-being, concentration, productivity, fatigue, sleep quality, burnout, engagement, and depression, based on previously validated scales. These indicators include short-term and more chronic consequences, and positive and negative states and feelings. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is performed on this dataset (N=1219) to explore the latent structure of a set of items. This approach enables to reduce the number of scale-items without losing valuable information.
Findings. With only 18 items (instead of the original 54 items) first insights in employees’ mental health at work can be gained. These items load on the underlying factors stressful mood, fatigue, exhaustion, concentration, sleep quality, and disengagement, which include almost the entire width of the original mental health indicators. Originality. The novelty of this study is that it provides an easy-to-be-used scale for workplace managers to monitor mental health and determine whether additional inquiries on specific mental health indicators are necessary. The scale is independent of organizational factors, which makes it a highly usable scale in any context.