Food Insecurity Impacts Workers' Productivity

What is it about?

In this research, we found that when employees struggle to reliably access food, their work engagement and performance decline by roughly 20% due to heightened anxiety. In a field experiment, we also found that providing a food package (vs. an equivalent non-food package) meaningfully reduces these negative effects.

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Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Unsplash

Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Food insecurity is often assumed to mainly affect people who are not working, but with rising grocery prices, food insecurity is becoming a prevalent issue in the workplace. For example, half of the U.S. households experiencing food insecurity are actually employed. Taken together, our findings suggest that food insecurity is not merely a personal hardship; it is a workplace issue that has clear implications for worker productivity and organizational effectiveness. With organizations increasingly investing in initiatives that address employees’ higher-level needs (e.g., engagement initiatives, meditation programs), our research suggests that business leaders may want to step back and first ask whether their employees’ most basic needs are being met.