Most of us spend most of our waking hours at work. Executives and owners, let’s face it, are Type-A sorts of people who tend toward workaholism. They either take pleasure in the work itself, or they are good at delaying gratification in the name of responsibility. For these types of people, creating a positive work environment may seem extraneous or unnecessary. You get the best performance, they might argue, from a high-stakes, high-pressure environment.

Ultimately, though, a high-pressure workplace only leads to unhealthy competition for status and recognition, which leads to stress, resentment, burnout, workers taking more sick days, and, in the end, turnover. No amount of amenities can mitigate the amount of damage this kind of workplace can do to your bottom line. The solution is to create a positive work environment.

The Costs of Poor Working Conditions

“Poor working conditions” might conjure images of Victorian children crawling behind power looms or soot-caked miners rising out of the depths packed shoulder-to-shoulder on an elevator, but it’s not just a lack of physical safety that contributes to poor working conditions. Psychological safety must also be considered. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that 60-80% of doctor visits were the result of stress. We spend most of our waking hours at work, and work is a major source of stress for many people.

The results of the stress caused by a lack of psychological well-being are lower-quality output and decreased productivity. This 2021 study, published in the Kansas Journal of Medicine, found an inverse relationship between stress and productivity: as stress goes up, productivity goes down. That’s because stress is a heavy cognitive load. When your dissatisfaction with your working conditions are weighing heavily on your mind, you have less mental bandwidth to devote to your work. And even if you can muddle through your daily tasks, you have no more capacity to think about your work. It’s that capacity for metacognition—thinking about thinking—that leads to improved business outcomes.

A culture of continuous improvement requires workers to not only carry out tasks but to think about their position, its relationship to other positions, and its relationship to the business as a whole. They need to devote some attention to the processes that guide their work. Beyond stress affecting their ability to devote mental bandwidth to this aspect of their jobs, there’s also the fact that taking this extra step often requires motivation. If workers are so unhappy that they are showing up simply to collect a paycheck, they’re not thinking about making the business better.

Pay and Amenities Are No Substitute

Some business leaders might see high pay for a stressful environment as a tradeoff that employees should be happy with. We all need money to live, and people will put up with a lot at work when they have bills to pay. But a workplace in which workers are showing up and putting up with a toxic environment is not a productive workplace.

Good pay is not a substitute for good working conditions. The same goes for amenities. In the workplace of the 2010s, offices were suddenly full of rec rooms, vending machines, gyms, fridges stocked with craft beer, and all the stuff that made work feel like home. But “home” isn’t just where your fun stuff is; it’s a place where you feel safe and feel like you belong (or at least, that’s what home should be). Amenities are nice to have and can contribute to workers feeling more relaxed and more satisfied with their jobs, but unless you’re also doing the work to create a truly welcoming, inclusive, respectful atmosphere, you’re not seeing the full benefit of those investments.

A Positive Work Environment Starts at the Top

Business leaders have the power to make their companies great places to work, but it takes some commitment. Every day, you have to model honesty and transparency and be that boss you always wish you had. You have to stay true to your stated values. You have to create structures in which resources and information are shared freely between employees and departments, in which employees have opportunities for professional development, and the trust and agency to solve problems without micromanagement.

The benefits you reap—lower turnover, higher productivity, greater commitment to business goals—is backed by ample evidence. This research published in Frontiers in Public Health is just one of many such articles that conclude that workers in positive work environments were more committed to their jobs than other workers. How do you make this dream workplace a reality? Take a look at this article to get started.