Balanced Workplace Health

Balanced workplace health (also known as Comprehensive Workplace Health) is much more than a focus on health and safety. It is the interrelationship of healthy lifestyle choices and organizational culture along with health and safety that needs to be addressed.

Categories of Employee Health

The Organizational Culture of a workplace can be defined as factors that affect the interaction between people, their work and the organization and may include:

• Communication
• Social support
• Beliefs, values and norms
• Management practices
• Worker attitudes and perceptions
• How work is organized
• Job satisfaction
• Job control and decision making
• Leadership style
• Work-life balance
• Benefits plans/programs

Healthy Lifestyle Choices are defined here as reducing the risk and incidence of worker illness by addressing individual lifestyle behaviours such as:

• Physical activity
• Healthy eating
• Healthy weights
• Tobacco product cessation
• Drug and alcohol use
• Immunization
• Preconception health
• Sun safety

Occupational Health and Safety is defined as reducing work-related injury, illness and disability by addressing ergonomics, air quality, as well as environmental and chemical hazards in the workplace such as:

• Ergonomics
• Physical and chemical hazards
• Disability case management
• Protection from environmental tobacco smoke
• Violence

Stress, one of the most common workplace ailments, is best addressed through a Balanced Workplace Health approach using all categories of employee health.

• Healthy lifestyle choices may include providing physical activity opportunities and nutrition education.
• Occupational Health and safety may involve dealing with a hazardous work environment or noise levels.
• Organizational Culture may mean identifying and creating solutions for unwieldy workloads, lack of control, and poor communication. In fact, the psychosocial work environment, the organization of work and the management culture of the workplace have the most dramatic impact on employee stress and health outcomes.

Strategies for a Balanced Healthy Workplace

Providing educational opportunities, developing policies, and creating supportive environments are key strategies used to address a Balanced Workplace Health program.  The following chart demonstrates the strategies using stress as an example: