Keynote: Well-being and Work

Well-being and Work

Paul Schulte
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, USA

Abstract

The workforce throughout the world is aging, workers are changing jobs voluntarily and involuntarily, and the nature of work is evolving at a rapid pace. Work is being impacted by technology, globalization, urbanization and climate. These changes are interrelated and need to be considered from a comprehensive perspective. The concept of well-being of workers may provide an overarching view of changes in the nature of work, the workforce, and the workplace. My colleagues and I have pursued a multifaceted approach to consider well-being as a concept that could be useful in occupational safety and health (OSH). For the seminal conference “Towards health work and well being” held in Finland in 2010, we framed five critical questions (i) is there a robust and usable definition of workplace well-being? (ii) have the variables that influence well-being been aptly described and can they be measured and used in risk assessments? (iii) what is the nature of the evidence that well-being is linked to productivity? (iv) what is the state of knowledge on the effectiveness of interventions to promote workplace well-being?, and (v) should interventions aimed at improving well-being at work focus on more than work-related factors?

In 2015 we conducted a survey of the literature on well-being in a paper, “Considerations for incorporating “well-being” in public policy for workers and workplace”. The published literature abounds with many definitions of well-being. These definitions may be objective, subjective (focusing on satisfactory happiness, flourishing, thriving, engagement, and self-fulfillment), or some synthesis of both. Well-being may be thought of as a factor that has an impact on various outcomes, or in other contexts, well-being is the outcome. For well-being to be a useful concept in research and public policy it has to be defined and operationalized so that its social and economic determinants can be identified, and interventions can be developed so that inducements to “ill-being” in the activities and relations in which workers participate can be addressed.

To that end we partnered with the RAND Corporation to develop a conceptual model of well-being as a first step towards operationalization and measurement of the concept. Then in 2015, we worked with RAND to develop a worker well-being survey instrument, and subsequently in 2016 pilot tested the instrument and analyzed survey results using standard psychometric approaches. Further refinement of the instrument is currently under way. Critical questions that arise include how useful is the well-being survey instrument for research, for use by employers, and as a target of authoritative guidance. Additionally, lack of well-being can be considered as a measure of burden of occupational injury, illness and distress. Clearly, since well-being is a broad construct it is influenced not only by work, but also by nonwork factors. This raises the question of who is responsible for the well-being of workers. Historically it has been the employer but nonwork determinants may influence that view and put some of the responsibility on the worker and other stakeholders. This is a controversial issue that will require much deliberation.

In this presentation these efforts will be described and the potential future use of the concept of well-being in OSH will be discussed. Given the seismic shifts occurring in the global economy, there is a need for exploring and using a concept such as “well-being” to capture the broad range of factors that affect the health of workers as well as the quality of their working lives. Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.