Work-related circumstances have consistently been found important for mental health. Yet, most research is variable-oriented, ignoring individual variations. This study used a complementary person-oriented approach to investigate associations between work-related psychosocial factors and health-related indicators among white-collar workers in a large Swedish public organization. The overall aim was to identify distinct cluster profiles of psychosocial work circumstances and examine differences in health-related indicators across these cluster profiles. Online questionnaires were distributed to all employees, with 1,692 volunteering anonymous participation. Measures included mostly single-items of psychosocial factors (autonomy, work demands, social support, and social climate), and health-related indicators (self-rated health, recovery from work, and work/life balance). Cluster analysis yielded four distinct cluster profiles: the supporting cluster profile with nearly 50% of employees; the challenging and the demanding cluster profiles, each including about one third of the employees; and the constraining cluster, the smallest group. Overall, the supporting cluster profile had the highest levels of self-rated health, recovery, and work/life balance, followed by the challenging and the demanding cluster profile. The constraining cluster profile exhibited the poorest health. Taken together, most employees had supporting psychosocial circumstances with opportunities to do a good job while maintaining long-term health, whereas other employees may face poor health over time. This underscores the need for tailored interventions to improve the psychosocial work environment for different groups. Although the cross-sectional design is a limitation, the person-oriented approach provides insights into the variability of work-related psychosocial circumstances, regardless of demographics, and their implications for organizational sustainability.

Job insecurity is a work stressor associated with various health-related impairments. As concerns about the ubiquity of job insecurity in academia have become increasingly prominent, the potential implications of job insecurity for the health and well-being of faculty require attention. Specifically, these implications may vary between groups within academia, yet little is known about such variations, particularly with respect to different indicators of health and well-being. This study aims to identify and examine profiles of job insecurity (including quantitative and qualitative dimensions) in relation to exhaustion, depressive symptoms, well-being, and work–family conflict among faculty in Sweden. Self-reports in questionnaires were collected in 2021 from a representative sample of faculty, with a doctoral degree, working in Swedish public higher education institutions (N = 2,729 respondents; 48% women; average age: 50 years; 82% born in Sweden). Latent profile analysis was conducted to identify profiles of job insecurity, followed by statistical comparisons on demographic covariates and health-related indicators across profiles. The latent profile analysis revealed five job insecurity profiles: the moderately insecure (n = 215), the secure (n = 1777), the secure; quality-concerned (n = 406), the insecure; employment-concerned (n = 177), and the insecure (n = 154). Twelve percent of the sample was identified as vulnerable, particularly the insecure profile, where these individuals may be most at a risk for exhaustion disorder and depression. Among faculty in Sweden, quantitative and qualitative dimensions of job insecurity appear to be closely connected, with the qualitative dimension seemingly more informative for health-related indicators.

Background: During the COVID-19-pandemic, Swedish higher education institutions shifted to remote teaching to reduce contagion. Among the students, this shift may have involved mental health changes. Such changes in mental health may, in turn, influence academic success. Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the effects of mental health changes on academic self-efficacy among university students in Sweden over the course of the pandemic. Method: Self-reports were collected through online questionnaires. Baseline questionnaires were distributed in May 2020 with follow-ups at 5-months and 10-months post baseline. The longitudinal sample included 2796 students (89,5% of baseline respondents). Taking a Bayesian approach, multilevel multinomial regressions were used to estimate effects, with adaptive intercepts for universities as well as respondents in the longitudinal models. Results: Reporting worse mental health at baseline, rather than no change, resulted in an observed higher odds of reporting worse academic self-efficacy rather than no change in academic self-efficacy at both follow-ups. Also, reporting a change to worse mental health, rather than no change, at the 5-month follow-up resulted in observed higher odds of reporting worse academic self-efficacy at the 10-month follow-up. A similar pattern was found for students reporting both positive and negative mental health changes, as compared to those reporting no mental health changes. Conclusions: These findings have implications for the development of easily accessible services that support mental health in order for students, particularly those who experience negative effects on their mental health, to keep up their studies in times of uncertainty.

With Sweden seeing increasing sick-leave figures due to mental disorders including exhaustion, particularly in the public sector and among women, the balancing of work and personal life spheres has received renewed attention. Yet, while employers can influence and manage organizational factors and the repercussions of these on the work environment with respect to factors promoting and hindering such a balance, possibilities to influence and manage the personal life spheres of employees are restricted. Still, with long-term sustainability being important for organizations, employers have an interest in employees maintaining long-term health. A key factor in this includes employee opportunities to balance work and personal life spheres over time. Thus, identifying work-related factors that promote and hinder such a balance is key. However, organizational resources for identifying such promoting and hindering factors are limited. This means that it is important to investigate possibilities to make use of existing data within organizations to identify such promoting and hindering factors, and particularly so in public sector organizations. This study focuses on a specific part of the public sector, namely regions. Regions are tasked with the responsibility to ascertain that its population has access to health care and public transport. Moreover, regions are involved in coordinating long-term development and in contributing to its cultural arena. While much research has targeted the health care sector and transport, including organizational and working conditions within these contexts, considerably less is known of the circumstances of the employees who are to enact the decisions of the governing bodies in a region. These employees typically hold a degree from higher education, can be considered administrative staff doing various types of digitized office work, and are key actors in the long-term management and planning relating to the conditions of health care, public transport, development, and culture. Considering this, the present study aimed at investigating how organizational and individual circumstances at work were related to the promotion and hindering of work/life balance among employees in one of the bigger regions in Sweden.Organizational data covering employee self-reports from the systematic monitoring of the workplace and work environment were retrieved for three consecutive years. This included reports from both women and men, including both managers and employees, totalling around 4300 individuals (year 1: 1413 employees including 811 women and 143 managers; year 2: 1576 employees including 911 women and 161 managers; year 3: 1348 employees including 736 women and 149 managers). Since the successful systematic monitoring of the circumstances at work require the collaboration between different organizational levels, completing the questionnaire is considered as a work task to be completed by all employees. This means that the vast majority responded. To maintain confidentiality, the content of this questionnaire and the results were processed by an external company specializing in these processes. The questionnaire, which was administered online during the same season each year, covered about 50 statements about the organizational and psychosocial circumstances at work. Ratings were made along an 8-point response format ranging from (1) Do not agree at all to (8) Fully agree. In addition to work/life balance, autonomy, demands, competence, and support at organizational and individual levels were analyzed here. Besides descriptive statistics and initial group comparisons checking differences between years, women and men, as well as managers and subordinates, separate hierarchical regressions were carried out for each year. First, gender and position were added to the model while organizational circumstances were included in a second step. The third and final step included adding individual working conditions.Group comparisons showed no consistent variations between women and men. However, managers had poorer work/life balance than the others. Despite adding significantly to the model, organizational autonomy, demands, competence, and support had no significant associations to work/life balance. However, individual level autonomy, demands, competence, and support were associated with work/life balance. In particular, having reasonable demands and getting support when needed were identified as promoting factors associated with better work/life balance.Overall, there were no consistent differences in any of the study variables between women and men. Managers seemed to have higher autonomy, demands, and competence than non-managers, although there were slight variations between different study years. Importantly, the findings show that both promoting and hindering factors characterizing the work of the individual employee add beyond that of comparable organizational level factors to work/life balance. Although organizational level factors can be considered important in shaping the work of the individual, the findings seem reasonable in considering that the promoting and hindering factors of the work tasks of an individual employee are most likely to influence possibilities to balance work and private life spheres.

Aims Spending time in natural environments has been linked to mental health benefits, and may have been an important resilience factor during the COVID-19 pandemic, but longitudinal studies are limited. This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the development of nature-related habits and their relationship to different mental health outcomes before and during early and later phases of COVID-19 (2019–2022). Furthermore, the buffering potential of nature-related habits on effects of major life events on mental health outcomes was investigated.Subject and methods A subsample of the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH) was studied during 2018–2022, including follow-ups in early 2021 (n  = 1902) and 2022 (n = 1580). Visits to various types of nature, mental health outcomes (symptoms of depression, anxiety, loneliness, sleep difficulties), and major life events were analyzed across the study period while controlling for confounders.Results Greater overall engagement in nature visits, particularly visiting forests or using one’s garden, was associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and sleep problems in early 2021 and 2022.Importantly, changes in nature visits were consistently negatively associated with investigated mental health outcomes across the study period. All nature visits, except for garden time, increased in the long term (2019–2022). Visiting forests also increased in the short term, while overall nature visits initially decreased (2019–2020).Conclusion Generally, nature visits increased longitudinally and were associated with better mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. This underscores the importance of green- and blue-space accessibility for facilitating outdoor recreation in natural environments, to support resilience and public health during pandemics.