Amount Awarded: $25,000
The nature of the work environment has a major impact on employee health and well-being, on job performance, and on other organizational outcomes such as absenteeism, turnover, and healthcare costs. However, there is no comprehensive model of which work environment factors produce healthy workplaces in which employees can flourish and perform their best work, and which factors produce conditions that render employees stressed and ineffective. Our proposed research will enable us to develop and test the viability of: (1) a model of healthy workplaces, based on new and existing research findings; and (2) a new measure for assessing employees' responses to critical workplace factors. The new measure will be created from preliminary tools already developed in Norway (KIWEST survey) and at UC Berkeley (Healthy Workplace Index). We will pilot this new measure within several university work settings (including both NTNU and UC Berkeley, as well as the University of Tampere in Finland). Based on that initial pilot test, the revised measure will then be utilized in other kinds of work environments (e.g., health care, technology companies) to provide guidance on organizational changes that, based on scientific evidence, will significantly improve employee health, well-being, and productivity.