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.
The mission of the Center is to re-invent our workplaces by integrating and applying interdisciplinary sciences to achieve worker health and psychological well-being. We do this by focusing our activities around four roles: aggregator of known science and its applications, convener of experts for knowledge sharing and collaboration, researcher conducting cutting-edge multi-disciplinary studies, and advisor to organizations and the public to share the knowledge gained. We want to help people think differently about how to create work environments that promote employee health and well-being so that employees enjoy their work experience, are more productive, and are able to do their best work.
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. Specifically, our model recognizes how the employee is embedded in multiple, overlapping work environments, and these environments affect an employee’s basic physical and psychological need satisfaction. Positive need satisfaction results in positive health and well-being, and the absence of need satisfaction or dissatisfaction results in negative health and well-being. Thus, promoting employee health, well-being, and ultimately performance and productivity is best achieved by creating physical and psychological conditions within the work environments that promote basic need satisfaction. The solution, then, is to implement changes in the workplace that have the result of satisfying important employee needs.
Elaborating our understanding of the role of need satisfaction in healthy workplaces, we extracted from the scientific literature nine basic needs that, when satisfied, contribute positively to health and well-being. Likewise, when satisfaction of these needs is impeded, the employee avoids that environment or it contributes negatively to health and well-being. The basic needs are: positive emotions, belonging, meaning/purpose, autonomy, competence/mastery, engagement/achievement, personal growth, safety, and physical vitality. The Healthy Workplaces Model is a novel extension of existing needs-based models. Christina Maslach and Cristina Banks published their findings connecting psychological needs to health, well-being and productivity in the Routledge Companion to Wellbeing at Work (2017).
The Model inspired us to develop a framework for identifying qualities in work and the work environment that “drive” need satisfaction. This means that the presence of a particular quality in the work environment creates an environment where an employee’s needs can be met. For example, having flexibility in the workplace (e.g., where and when tasks can be performed) provides a sense of control over work demands and resources, and feeds the need for autonomy. We identified seven such qualities (called “drivers” of need satisfaction): comfort, connection, predictability, flexibility, safety, equity, and privacy. The importance of these “drivers” is their ability to translate the satisfaction of needs directly into specific things—physical objects, workstation design, compensation and benefits, programs, policies, practices, and cultural attributes—in order to create a work environment that satisfies important employee needs. The “drivers” also enable the development of assessment tools for evaluating the degree to which a work environment meets employees’ needs.
We developed research projects based on the model and framework that investigate various aspects of the relationships between work environment factors, need satisfaction, and health and well-being. Example research projects are:
- Designing for Well-Being (Caitlin DeClercq). Focus groups in which participants integrated “drivers” into drawings of future work spaces and produced novel configurations and design hypotheses.
- Survey of the Relationship between Graduate Students’ Work Environments, Need Satisfaction, and Academic Success (Isabelle Thibau). Survey administered to 500+ graduate students at UCB across departments. Results identified physical and psychological environmental factors that were associated with important needs and with academic performance.
- Factors Affecting Wellness Program Adoption and Participation Rates in Wellness Programs (Cristina Banks, Carolyn Winslow, Isabelle Thibau). We researched factors in organizations that serve as facilitators and barriers to the adoption of wellness programs, and factors that affect employee participation in them. We developed an Employer Guide based on our research for employers to identify wellness programs that fit their unique constraints and opportunities and ways to increase employee participation in and commitment to a wellness program.
- Relationship between Need Satisfaction and Positive and Negative Health in Norwegian Universities (Siw Tone Innstrand, Christina Maslach, Cristina Banks). A survey measuring faculty and staff engagement (need satisfaction) from seven major Norwegian Universities showed clear connections between need satisfaction and health status.
- The Impact of Sound and Projected Nature Images on Employee Health, Well-being, and Productivity (Carolyn Winslow, Isabelle Thibau, Cristina Banks). A field test is planned of a product designed by Plantronics installed at Microsoft to determine how it may positively impact a variety of work-related outcomes, including cognitive performance, mood stress, and productivity.
- Predictors of Job-Satisfaction over the Career Span (Carolyn Winslow). Use of an archival dataset covering a 35-year time period to uncover how changes in a variety of extrinsic intrinsic, social, and organizational factors predict changes in job satisfaction over the course of a career. Results indicated that intrinsic job features (i.e., those associated with work tasks) and workplace friendship contribute most to within-person changes in job satisfaction. By comparison, changes in extrinsic factors (i.e., pay and prestige), personal (e.g., tenure), and organizational factors (e.g., organization size) had minimal impact.
- Link between Discrete Positive Emotions (e.g., pride, interest, and gratitude) and Specific Work Outcomes (e.g., creative performance, satisfaction with work, and motivation) (Carolyn Winslow). Field study to examine the importance of cultivating different positive emotions in the workplace.
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Positive Organizational Intervention for Improving Employee Well Being (Carolyn Winslow). An experimental field intervention study to understand the efficacy of interventions such as practicing gratitude and enhancing social connections for improving positive emotions, reducing job stress, and other organizational outcomes in order to understand how to tailor programs to better meet employee needs.
We have undertaken several literature reviews to broaden our understanding of the range of factors that are likely to affect health, well-being, and productivity because of their link to “drivers” of need satisfaction. Examples of these reviews are:
- Environmental Factors Related to Important Organizational Outcomes (Max Pittman, Caitlin DeClercq). The research literature on environmental psychology and the built environment was reviewed from 2000 to the present to extract major, reliable factors that are predictably related to outcomes such as absenteeism, attention, stress, burnout, creativity, health/well-being, organizational commitment, and performance. This information will be used to generate recommendations for how to design, modify, and assess workplaces for specific outcomes.
- The Efficacy of Health Technology for Improving Employee Health and Well-being (Helen Lee, Cristina Banks, David Lindeman). Various forms of health technology (e.g., tablets, devices, software, wearables, and messaging) were evaluated based on published studies of their efficacy. Results of the review can inform employers and the public as to which technologies have a reliably positive impact on health and well-being, and which ones are not supported. A theory of effectiveness can be deduced by determining why certain technologies work and others do not.
- Criterion Measures for Evaluating Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) Interventions and Programs Value (Cristina Banks, Carolyn Winslow). This review focused on measuring HF/E interventions and programs in ways that show business value. Criterion measures used in psychology and related fields were examined to identify reliable and valid instruments that would be appropriate for use in HF/E studies. Measures identified reflected constructs of greatest interest to employers: cognitive performance, concentration, work and life satisfaction, team effectiveness, performance, productivity, job satisfaction, engagement, absenteeism, and turnover.
- Sedentary Behavior (Caitlin DeClercq, Isabelle Thibau, Galen Cranz). This forthcoming review will combine two strands of research to demonstrate the need for and value of workplace interventions that reduce sitting time. We will perform a review of the most recent literature in the field of sedentary physiology to outline what is currently known about the pathways by which prolonged sitting affects health and performance outcomes and the efficacy of various interventions to mitigate these negative outcomes. We will complement this literature review with a survey of programs and policies that a range of companies have initiated to interrupt the sedentary norm of office work.
With the Healthy Workplaces Model and a framework for examining the health and productivity of workplaces, we implemented a strategy to communicate the Model and framework as broadly as was practical and to multiple audiences. The purpose was to test the acceptance of this approach and to attract researchers and practitioners who wanted to participate in Center activities to move this approach forward. Since 2013, we have delivered 16 presentations to professional conferences, 26 presentations to academic audiences, and 6 presentations to employers and service providers. We gave a total of 18 presentations in 2017 alone. Because of this activity, we have increased our national and international visibility substantially in several key professions (example organizations are listed in parentheses):
- Architecture and Interior Design (Gensler, Woods Baggot, HKS, HGA, Perkins & Will)
- Human Factors/Ergonomics (HFES, OERC)
- Industrial Hygiene (AIHA, CIHC)
- Psychology (American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Occupational Health Psychology, Environmental Psychology)
- Healthcare (United Health Group, Kaiser Permanente)
- Furniture Manufacturing & Retail (Herman Miller, Teknion)
- Compensation and Benefits (NBGH, MBGH)
- Occupational Health (COEH UCB, UCSF, UCLA & UCI; NIOSH Total Worker Health Affiliate)
- Computer Science/Technology (CITRIS, Google)
- Space Architecture (NASA)
We have attracted a wide spectrum of experts from academia as well as practitioners, and many of those affiliated with our Center are actively engaged in projects, which hold promise in shedding new light on our understanding of health, well-being, and productivity in the workplace. Examples are:
- John Swartzberg, MD, MPH. Dr. Swartzberg and a Center student researcher investigated the physiological effects of daily working conditions in order to reveal high-risk conditions that over time can cause serious illness, disease, and death. Of particular interest was the role of the physical environment and contagious disease, sedentary behavior, and stress.
- Ed Yelin, PhD. Dr. Yelin and Center researchers developed a proposal for developing and administering a survey investigating the relationship between contemporary working conditions and worker health. The proposal was submitted to NIOSH as a R01 grant for funding, and it earned a low score, i.e. good score (22) and may be eligible for funding this four-year project. Also, Dr. Yelin and Dr. Banks developed an international expert conference concept and submitted a U13 (Support for Conferences and Scientific Meetings) proposal to NIOSH for funding. The proposal received a favorable score (38), and may be resubmitted with minor changes.
- Christina Maslach, PhD. Dr. Maslach and several Core Members of the Center (Sally Augustin, PhD; Cristina Banks, PhD; Lindsay Graham, PhD; Michael Pearn, PhD; Melissa Jancourt and John Bartling from HGA Architects & Engineers) teamed up to create a research project for designing the internal habitat of long-duration spacecraft for NASA. A proposal was submitted to NASA under a “new investigators” opportunity for a one-year grant with a second year option. Notification of award is expected in April 2018.
- David Lindeman, PhD. Dr. Lindeman and a Center student researcher conducted a literature review of health technology designed to promote employee health and well-being in the workplace. The student, Helen Lee, conducted an extensive review of technology applications, devices, wearables, software, and other products to identify technology that has demonstrated effectiveness in the workplace. A paper based on this research will be submitted for publication.
We have also initiated a “Science to Practice” Conference Series, with the first conference held May 4, 2017 at UCB. The conferences are designed around a health and well-being-related problem that requires an integrated, holistic solution. The first conference focused on how to physically build the best workplaces for employee health, well-being, and productivity. It featured speakers from furniture design, environmental psychology, medicine, architecture, interior design, sociology, and technology. We created a conference workbook with a decision guide for designing healthy workplaces. We are in the process of turning the conference talks into a book and a webinar. Two other conferences are planned for 2018 and 2019. One will focus on how to keep employees well in the workplace, and the other will focus on health technology that works.
Our outreach is facilitated further by a quarterly newsletter, which features a Core Researcher with each edition and updates readers with our progress and activities. Student assistants majoring in business maintain our Facebook and LinkedIn pages as well. We are revamping our website to upgrade the information provided and broaden audience appeal.
The future of the Center will be dedicated to concentrating on activities that increase the sustainability of the Center and maximizing the value of work produced by Center members. Funding is a priority, as is creating tools for employers and professionals to make it easier for them to implement changes toward healthier workplaces as suggested by our model and framework. We will continue to encourage experts from relevant fields to contribute their knowledge and expertise and to support a diverse set of researchers to continue conducting cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that helps to achieve our mission.
Publications, Manuscripts in Progress, and White Papers
1. Banks, C.G., Winslow, C., and Thibau, I. (2018) Finding Fit: Implementing Wellness Programs Successfully. 2018 Employer Guide, Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Transamerica Center for Health Studies.
2. Maslach, C., and Banks, C.G. (2017). Psychological connections with work. In C. Cooper & M.P. Leiter (Eds.), Routledge companion to wellbeing and work. NY: Routledge, pp. 31-51.
3. Winslow, C. J., Kaplan, S. A., Bradley-Geist, J. C., Lindsey, A. P., Ahmad, A. S., & Hargrove, A. K. (2016, April 21). An examination of two positive organizational interventions: For whom do these interventions work? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000035.
4. DeClercq, C. (2016) Toward the healthy campus. Planning for Higher Education Journal, v44n3, April-June, pp. 86-96.
5. Tetrick, L.E. and Winslow, C.J. (2015) Workplace stress management interventions and health promotion. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, doi10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111341.
6. Declercq, C. and Cranz, G. (2014) Moving beyond seating-centered learning environments: opportunities and challenges identified in a POE of a campus library. Journal of Academic Librarianship.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.005.
7. Banks, C.G. (in progress) Building the Best Workplace for Health and Well-Being: Lessons from the Experts. (Compilation of presentations at the ICHW May 4, 2017 Conference, UC Berkeley).
8. DeClercq, C., Pittman, M., Augustin, S., and Banks, C.G. (in progress) The Relationship between Environmental Design Factors and Organizational Outcomes.
9. Lee, H., Banks, C.G., and Lindeman, D. (in progress) A Review of Health Technology Efficacy in Promoting Health and Well-Being in Workplaces.
10. Banks, C.G. (in progress) Criterion Measures to Use in Human Factors/Ergonomics Research for Demonstrating Business Value.
11. Innstrand, S.T., Banks, C.G., Maslach, C., and Lowenstein, C. (in progress) Healthy Universities: Exploring Basic Psychological Needs and Health among Faculty Members.
12. DeClercq, C. Designing for the Healthy Office: How Students Define and Envision Healthy Offices. ICHW White Paper, 2017.
13. Banks, C. G. Creating Healthy Workplaces. ICHW White Paper, 2014.
14. Banks, C. G. The New Organizational Template: How to Design Work and Workplaces for Employee Health and Well-Being. Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, August 2013.
