Tracking Changes in US Organizations' Workplace Health Promotion Initiatives: A Longitudinal Analysis of Performance...

Area of Science:

• Occupational Health
• Health Services Research
• Organizational Behavior

Background:

• Workplace health promotion (WHP) initiatives are crucial for employee well-being and organizational productivity.
• Regular self-assessment is a common strategy for organizations to evaluate and improve their WHP programs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how repeated self-assessment using the Well Workplace Checklist (WWC) impacts the evolution of workplace health promotion (WHP) initiatives over time.
• To identify specific WHP benchmarks that show the most significant changes with repeated assessments.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from 577 US organizations that completed the Well Workplace Checklist (WWC) at least twice between 2008 and 2015.
• Employed multilevel modeling to analyze changes in overall WWC scores and seven individual benchmark scores, controlling for organizational characteristics and assessment year.

Main Results:

• Significant increases in overall WWC scores were observed with repeated assessments (β = 2.93, P < .001).
• All seven WHP benchmarks demonstrated significant score improvements following reassessment.
• Operating plan (β = 6.18, P < .001) and evaluation (β = 4.91, P < .001) benchmarks showed the most substantial increases with repeated WWC use.

Conclusions:

• Continuous reassessment using tools like the WWC can foster greater commitment and investment in WHP initiatives, potentially leading to enhanced program quality.
• Organizational factors such as company size, access to external resources, and prior WHP implementation experience may positively influence performance improvements.