White Papers

Blueprint for Building Business Success by Becoming a ‘Healthcare Business’

Cristina Banks, PhD
2023

More than ever before, U.S. Businesses must prioritize creating healthy workplaces where people want to go to and do their best work. To do so comprehensively and holistically, U.S. businesses need to become a ‘healthcare’ business.

Quiet Quitting and a Pathway to Better Work

Cristina Banks, PhD
2023

What is “quiet quitting” really about (Goldberg, 2022)? Quiet quitting has been described as a person’s unwillingness to perform their job above and beyond their job description. In other words, they just do their job as hired. It has also been described as bordering on laziness—doing only the minimum. I think both descriptions miss the mark.

What We Have Learned During This Pandemic

Cristina Banks, PhD
Ed Yelin, PhD
2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has created the need for extensive change in how we live, work, parent, get involved in recreation activities, and affiliate with others in our society. Our research and observations over the last six months, combined with discussions with experts, friends, colleagues, and strangers have been enlightening with respect to how people are responding to the pandemic and what strategies for controlling human behavior as a way to control the virus are proving to be effective while others are not--and why. We summarized what we learned below, followed by insights we gained...

Sedentary Behavior - How Sitting Is Killing Us

Caitlin DeClercq, PhD
Victor Villalobos
2018

A library on campus recently advertised their new standing-height workstations with a catchy sign proclaiming that “sitting is the new sugar.” The word is out: sitting is bad for us; worse, even, than the sugars and fats we have long vilified, and more harmful than cigarettes. Recent studies have linked prolonged sedentary time with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, back pain, and psychological distress. Simply put, sitting is killing us. Sedentary behavior researcher Travis Saunders cautions that, “all things being equal (body weight, physical activity levels, smoking,...

Finding Fit: Implementing Wellness Programs Successfully

Cristina Banks, PhD
Carolyn Winslow, PhD
Isabelle J. C. Thibau, MPH
2018

The Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (ICHW) has developed an Employer Guide that will enable organizations (with an emphasis on small and medium-sized) to find a workplace wellness program that fits their specific constraints. Small and medium organizations face a number of limitations given their size and financial reserves, but employees’ health and well-being needs are a constant regardless of organization size. Employees need a safe, socially supportive, and health-promoting work environment that not only supports their wellness but also enables them to do their best...

Health Technologies in the Workplace

Helen Lee
2018

Technology is becoming an increasingly prominent part in the lives of modern workers. A simple search of “well-being” in any app store can yield thousands of results, with each application claiming to improve different facets of users’ daily behaviors to lead a healthier lifestyle. To understand more about the value of health technology in organizations, HealthyWorkplaces conducted a literature review of existing health technologies in the marketplace and their corresponding scientific support. By combining academic and commercial sources, we explored the efficacy of different technologies...

Designing For The Healthy Office: How Students Define And Envision Healthy Workplaces Focus Group Research

Caitlin DeClercq, PhD
2017

This white paper summarizes the novel methodology and preliminary findings of two focus groups the Center for Healthy Workplaces conducted in Fall 2016 to understand how undergraduate students, members of Generation Z, define seven drivers of need satisfaction—comfort, connection, equity, flexibility, privacy, predictability, and safety—and envision workplaces that support these qualities. In each focus group, participants were assigned to a single driver and worked individually and in teams to define the driver in their own words and then brainstorm, using words and images,...

Work, Sleep, and the Circadian Cycle

Pauline Simes
2016

As an interdisciplinary team, HealthyWorkplaces reaches out to collaborators to better understand how the variety of disciplines can come together to improve the workplace. This month, biomedical engineer Elizabeth Nelson of University of Twente provided her input about lack of sleep causing burnout in an ever increasing number of employees. Further, architect Antony Kim of University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Built Environment shared his knowledge about circadian rhythms and their regulation with proper lighting. We explore how the lighting architecture and biology of...