Taking Action: Tips and Resources for Employers and Employees Create a Healthy Work Environment

culled from:health.gov.bc.ca

Taking a comprehensive approach to workplace health is an effective way to create healthy work environments. The basic idea is “healthy people in healthy and safe workplaces.”  A healthy work environment has organizational cultures, systems, and management practices that support employee health and wellness goals.

Workers in B.C. will be better able to achieve optimal health when they work in a healthy environment that they have played an active role in creating and sustaining. The process of creating healthy and safe workplaces is itself healthy.

A one-size fits all approach to creating a healthy work environment doesn’t work because of the diversity of workplaces. General guidelines can help you understand the key ingredients you’ll need and prompt you to develop an action plan that fits your unique characteristics.

Guiding principles outline the path that managers and employees need to take together if they want to achieve a high quality, healthy work environment.

• Supportive culture and values: Creating and maintaining a healthy workplace requires a supportive culture that clearly values employees and is trust-based. Ideally, the process of creating a healthy workplace should be designed to strengthen trust.
• Leadership: Commitment from top management is critical and must take the form of visible leadership on health issues. Employees judge commitment by the actions of senior management. Leadership must also be exercised throughout the organization, especially by line managers.
• Use a broad definition of health: Good mental and physical health means more than the absence of illness, injury, and disease. It also means leading a balanced life, developing one’s potential, making a meaningful contribution to the organization, and having a say in workplace decisions.
• Participative team approach: Implementing a healthy workplace strategy requires an integrated approach, guided by teams that include representatives from management, health and safety, human resources, employees, and unions. This is not just a health issue. Direct employee involvement in all stages is especially critical to success.
• Customized plan: Collaboratively develop a workplace health policy and action plan with clear goals. The policy and plan must be tailored to the business context, workforce characteristics, and documented gaps in the work environment. Learn from each change introduced and refine the plan accordingly.
• Link to strategic goals: Clearly link health issues and outcomes to the organization’s strategic goals. Integrate health and well-being objectives into the organization’s business planning process, so that over time, all management decisions take health into account.
• Ongoing support: Allocate resources that ensure continuity to healthy workplace actions. Provide training, especially to managers at all levels, to sustain the initiative and embed health into how the organization operates.
• Evaluate and communicate: Open and continuous communication is a key success factor in any organizational change initiative, and health is no different. Consistently evaluate outcomes and keep top management informed about the impact of healthy workplace issues on business results.