2019 Work, Stress, and Health (WSH)
Topic: Development of a Healthy Workplace Assessment
UC Berkeley and two Norwegian universities, NTNU and BI Business School Stavanger, worked collaboratively to create a cross-culturally relevant assessment tool that can assess the degree to which a workplace embodies organizational elements proven to promote employee health and well-being. Through an iterative process, both US and Norwegian teams identified validated items to include in the new tool. The US team developed new items based on need theories (Maslach & Banks, 2017) where employees are asked about need fulfillment in the context of an organizational element. For example, when examining the need, autonomy, we examined organizational factors that would give employees control over their work such as “Employees have control over their time in order to enhance their productivity” and “Employees’ suggestions for improvement are not taken seriously.” The English version of survey items was translated into Norwegian for Norwegian samples and tested for accuracy. This assessment tool was designed to help organizations identify specific workplace factors to build or enhance in order to improve employee health and well-being.