Workplaces are evolving to face complex pressures and new stressors. Four disruptive trends—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (“VUCA”)—require employers to better engage employees, and develop organizational agility (Baran & Woznyj, 2020). Worker mental health problems are also affecting businesses at an unprecedented rate, with fervent calls to action from corporate executives and occupational scientists. The recent publication, “Dying for a Paycheck,” (Pfeffer, 2018) and the research behind it (Goh, Pfeffer, & Zenio, 2016) revealed what research has suggested for decades: workplace stressors and managerial practices unnecessarily kill 120,000 workers annually and cost businesses billions in healthcare.
There is a paucity of coordination amongst many professionals who, were they to work together, could potentially address this growing mass of stressors. We, along with positive organizational scholars (e.g., e Cunha, et al., 2020), believe the answer lies in having a holistic and human-centered vision of organizations composed of allies who work as a team and across multiple levels. Current solutions are limited partly due to over-specialization across disciplines, resulting in the proverbial blind men and the elephant. Occupational health practitioners, consultants, trainers, and vendors are focused sub-optimally on one area—either the trunk, the tail, or a leg—without actively addressing the whole. OHPs need a view of workplace health—and its contributors—that reaches beyond academic ideas and a myopic focus on specific topics.