You might not think that forming a committee where frontline workers can share their work-related health and well-being concerns would have all that much effect on a workplace.
But it can. That’s what the research team led by MIT Sloan Professor Erin L. Kelly (pictured above), who is Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER), found in a recent multiyear study in e-commerce warehouses. In an article in the Spring 2025 issue of the MIT publication Spectrum, Kelly explains that the study in warehouses found that establishing Health and Well-Being Committees that allow employees to give input on workplace issues had substantial positive effects in two important ways: by significantly reducing employee turnover and by improving employees’ mental health.
Specifically, employees in warehouses that established these health and well-being committees were 20% less likely to leave their jobs than in the year before the committees were established. In addition, six months after the committees were formed, employees in those fulfillment centers were 33% less likely to report symptoms consistent with moderate or severe mental distress than their counterparts in warehouses without a committee. However, the differences in mental health between workers in the company’s sites that formed the committees and those that didn’t shrunk after a year—a finding Kelly and her colleagues are now analyzing.
Why might these health and well-being committees have such surprisingly powerful effects, at least initially? Kelly explained to Spectrum that workers saw some of their concerns—whether a desire to have input into the music played in the warehouse or a need for ready access to brooms to clean their work areas— being addressed by management via the committees, which consist of employees from a number of departments, plus a supervisor or two.
That, she suggests, makes employees feel more respected. “Seeing your peers be actively involved in problem-solving—that signals that the organization appreciates the perspective and wisdom of frontline workers,” she told Spectrum.
To learn more about this research project’s findings read the Spectrum article, “Listening to Frontline Workers.” To learn more about the design of the warehouse study, see a recent journal article by Kelly and her coauthors, “The Fulfillment Center Intervention Study: Protocol for a Group-Randomized Control Trial of a Participatory Workplace Intervention.”
