Monthly changes in well-being among Danish employees from 2018 to 2022. Was there an influence of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Abstract

Background and aims: The COVID-19 pandemic affected life for a large proportion of the global population. In this study, we examined changes in well-being among employees in Denmark before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We used secondary survey data collected by a private company that had developed and provided a smartphone app to monitor employees' well-being using the WHO-5 questionnaire. We included 6758 employees from 77 workplaces, yielding 111,705 observations of well-being scores. We investigated time trends in well-being by comparing well-being scores in the years before (2018 and 2019), during (2020 and 2021) and after (2022) the COVID-19 pandemic. We further compared well-being scores during the months of three distinct COVID-19 waves with the corresponding months before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: We observed a clear seasonal variation, with higher well-being scores during the summer months (July and August) in each year, regardless of the COVID-19 situation. In both men and women, annual well-being scores were lowest during the COVID-19 years (68.6, and 67.3, respectively) compared with annual well-being scores before (68.9 and 69.3) and after (70.1 and 68.7) the COVID-19 pandemic. During three distinct COVID-19 waves in Denmark, women, but not men, showed statistically significant lower well-being scores compared with the corresponding months before the COVID-19 pandemic (all p<0.01).

Conclusions: The study results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a slight decrease in employees' well-being that was more pronounced among women than among men. Independent of the COVID-19 situation, well-being scores showed clear seasonal variation.

Keywords: COVID-19; Denmark; WHO-5; app; health monitoring; mental health; occupational health and safety; seasonal variation; smartphone; wellbeing.