Assessing Employee Wellbeing in Real-World Physical Work Environments: A Bibliometric and Systematic Review

Employee wellbeing is increasingly investigated in relation to physical workplace environments, yet assessment approaches remain heterogeneous across disciplines and research contexts. This review examined how employee wellbeing is operationalised and assessed in real-world workplaces and how different types of measurement are used together. A combined bibliometric and systematic review was conducted using Scopus and Web of Science, and the systematic component was reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020. The bibliometric corpus comprised 306 publications, while 19 empirical studies were included in the systematic synthesis. Self-report assessment was used in all included studies (100%), physiological measurements in 36.8%, environmental measurements in 47.4%, and formal cognitive task-based assessment in 5.3%. Ten studies (52.6%) reported more than one type of measurement; nine (47.4%) included at least two types referring to the same employees or an overlapping subgroup during concurrent or explicitly linked periods. Six studies (31.6%) reported at least three types of measurement. Considerable heterogeneity was found in the constructs, instruments, and modality combinations employed. Environmental measures primarily characterised workplace conditions or exposures, whereas physiological indicators captured complementary employee responses rather than direct measures of wellbeing. The findings highlight the need for transparent assessment approaches that distinguish measures of wellbeing from contextual, physiological, environmental, and performance-related measures and clearly report how different modalities are combined.