Human Resources

Can an Employee Participation Initiative Improve Mental Health?

Martha E. Mangelsdorf

Feb 4, 2026

Can giving low-wage workers more of a voice on the job improve their mental health?

A just-published paper in the American Journal of Public Health finds signs that the answer may be “yes.”

In this study, a team of researchers that included MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Erin L. Kelly, who is Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, and MIT Sloan Professor Hazhir Rahmandad, compared the experiences of employees in warehouses that launched a new employee participation initiative called Health and Well-Being Committees (HaWCs, for short) with colleagues working for the same company in control sites that didn’t launch HaWCs. The study used a group-randomized controlled trial method within a company with multiple e-commerce fulfillment center warehouses.

HaWCs serve as a new voice channel where frontline workers can give input on topics such as safety, work organization, and how employees feel treated at work. The committees then develop and implement improvement projects to address employee concerns. In another working paper, researchers found that establishing HaWCs significantly reduced employee turnover, but the new American Journal of Public Health article reports on some positive effects on employees’ mental health.

Specifically, six months after a HaWC program was launched, warehouse workers in locations that had launched HaWCs showed a small but statistically significant decrease in self-reported levels of psychological distress compared to workers in warehouses that had not launched a HaWC. Male workers, in particular, showed more pronounced decreases in psychological distress in warehouses that had launched HaWC programs.

But these effects did not persist 12 months after the HaWC initiative was rolled out. The researchers suspect that lack of significant impact after 12 months may have had to do with difficulties they observed in maintaining consistent implementation of the HaWC program across various warehouse sites over time—something the authors note is “a common challenge in sustaining workplace interventions.” In addition, the researchers point out that, in the later period, the company launched other initiatives that included a focus on worker engagement and workplace safety— perhaps improving the mental health of workers in the fulfillment centers that did not launch HaWCs and thus reducing the differences between the control group and the employees in warehouses with HaWCs.

Despite that limitation, the authors write that the effects on psychological distress are “notable,” given that the HaWC initiative was a low-cost program that did not focus on mental health. “These are promising results for a low-cost workplace intervention and point to the value of additional research on voice interventions,” they write.

“Our findings suggest that providing opportunities for workers to share their concerns with a committee of their peers who seek to identify solutions can provide mental health benefits, even if workers are not members of the committee,” the researchers conclude. “Our study

contributes important experimental evidence on workplace interventions that improve well-being of low-wage US populations.”

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