How We Started

The Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (“HealthyWorkplaces” or ICHW), founded in 2012 by Cristina Banks, Senior Lecturer at the Haas School of Business, and Sheldon Zedeck, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology, was created in order to respond to the growing health crisis among members of the US workforce.  Both independently observed through their work with hundreds of organizations over the years that the workplace was making people mentally and physically sick, and there did not appear to be clear and effective approaches to addressing this problem.  They believed that by gathering all known science across disciplines regarding employee health and well-being, they could create an integrated, holistic solution for employers to implement in their organizations that would result in improved employee outcomes.  With $15K from Graham Fleming, the Vice Chancellor for Research, and space within the Haas School’s rented offices off campus, they began the hard work of creating something out of nothing.

We began by bringing experts together from a wide spectrum of disciplines to share their knowledge and to note where their expertise and interests overlapped.  Participating disciplines included business, economics, public health, public policy, nutrition, human factors/ergonomics, real estate, architecture, interior design, industrial hygiene, technology, psychology, law, medicine, occupational health, and human resources.  Building on insights from each of these fields, we developed a new conceptualization of healthy workplaces through meetings, “sandboxes,” “mixers,” and conferences, which provided the fuel for understanding where sources of ill health resided and how advances in workplace design, operation, policy, and culture could help to mitigate or reverse ill health and promote health. 

We noticed when reading relevant literature and talking to experts that often interventions or changes were introduced into the workplace in the hope of achieving positive health effects without an explicit discussion of why the employees facing these changes.  Prior to 2013, the research literature was dominated by studies that showed very limited or weak results of workplace interventions.  Many scholars concluded that single-pronged approaches were not effective and pointed to the need for holistic solutions.  They also concluded that understanding the experience of the individual employee was key to finding the right solutions.  In response, we set out to articulate a theory of change that linked individual experience with broader contextual factors.   

We looked at the literature and realized there was a plethora of evidence that connected health and well-being to important personal and organizational outcomes, and connected need satisfaction to health and well-being.  Some literature suggested that certain environmental and work factors were connected to need satisfaction, as well as personal and organizational outcomes.  We integrated these findings into a Healthy Workplaces Model that was built on an understanding of the interaction between the employee and his/her work and workplace.