Healthy Workplace Strategies: Creating Change and Achieving Results

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of Health Canada. Healthy jobs and workplaces benefit workers and employers, customers and shareholders, citizens and society. This report focuses on the organizational change processes, strategies and tactics that can bring about healthier and more productive working conditions. Successful interventions must target underlying workplace and organizational factors. Most promising in this regard is the link between healthy work environments and improved health outcomes for individual employees and improved business results. This widens the agenda to the entire organization: its values, people practices, work systems and performance. Organizational change research distinguishes transformational change from superficial change. Creating a healthy organization exemplifies transformational change. Introducing a fitness program or a policy on flexible work schedules are examples of superficial change, if they are not part of a larger strategy. The shift to a new culture and work systems takes time – easily 3 to 5 years. Often, it results from a sequence of small steps that are guided by a compelling vision. However, most transformational change initiatives fail. Estimates suggest success rates between 25-33% for reaching the intended goals of change. This makes it imperative that champions of workplace health learn from a wide range of organizational change experiences. Viewed as organizational change, healthy workplace strategies must follow strong guiding principles, which this report enunciates, based on a synthesis of current research and practice. While a fitness or smoking cessation program easily can be run by health promotion staff, a different approach is required to transform the values, management practices and work systems of an organization. Health promotion and human resource professionals must team up, and there must be support from managers and supervisors at all levels, employees, and unions. Stakeholders must engage in discussions about the role of the entire organization in " creating health. " This report, therefore, offers an action model as a tool for achieving healthy organizations. The model highlights the importance of establishing enabling conditions in order to make the organization change-ready, then designing a process that engages all stakeholders in actively shaping a healthy workplace. The process is iterative, with lots of reflection and readjustment built in. There is no one best way to create a healthy organization and no neat list of best practices that define such an organizational state. The Action Model can guide …