Creating Healthy Work Organizations

This text highlights a number of case studies regarding the creation of healthy work organizations. The contributors concentrate particularly on examples from industry of stress reduction programmes in the workplace and other approaches to improving positive mental well-being at work.

How can you future-proof your organization by making it humanly sustainable? Creating Healthy Organizations answers this question, showing how to forge stronger links between employee well-being and the future success of any organization. The book makes a compelling case for resilient and humanly sustainable businesses by focusing on improving employees’ well-being. Employee stress, burnout, work-life conflict, and disengagement remain significant workplace problems. Yet, there are important signs of progress. The healthy organization concept has begun moving into the mainstream of corporate wellness. Scholarly research has advanced beyond making a business case for workplace health promotion to showing how successful interventions are based on a culture of health and closer ties with occupational health and safety. More companies are addressing mental health issues, striving to make workplaces psychologically healthy and safe. Expanded environmental sustainability frameworks provide an opening for the more sustainable use of human resources. As well, extensive tools are now available in many countries to guide actions aimed at developing healthy, safe, and thriving workplaces. These recent workplace trends and resources highlight the need for an updated, concise, integrated, and practical analysis of the challenges of creating a healthier organization, the hurdles that must be overcome along the way, and the key success factors that can guide the improvement process. Creating Healthy Organizations, Revised and Expanded Edition fills this gap in knowledge and practice, guiding those committed to making their organizations healthier.

The current global economic environment is defined by unprecedented uncertainty, a premium placed on knowledge, and the threat of future talent scarcity. Key to an organization's success under these conditions is its ability to strengthen the links between people and performance. Creating Healthy Organizations provides executives, managers, human resource professionals, and employees an action-oriented approach to forging these connections by creating and sustaining vibrant and productive workplaces. A healthy organization operates in ways that benefits all stakeholders, including employees, customers, shareholders, and communities. Using a wide range of examples from a variety of internationally based industries, Graham Lowe integrates leading practices with research on workplace health and wellness, quality work environments, employee engagement, organizational performance, and corporate social responsibility to make a compelling business case for creating healthy, resilient, and sustainable organizations. Creating Healthy Organizations offers readers, whether CEOs or front-line workers, an innovative framework and practical tools for planning, implementing, and measuring healthy change in their workplaces.

The contributions in Creating Healthy Workplaces include a number of interventions that relate the efforts undertaken by researchers and organizations together, to reduce stress and improve the mental and physical health of employees through positive change initiatives. Those working in the field of occupational stress have received criticism that too much emphasis has been placed on negative issues and that positive initiatives have been largely ignored. With the growing influence of the positive movement, this book explores the implications of using a positive approach as opposed to a stress management one and compares the types of interventions they each require. From a positive perspective, there is a need to understand the characteristics of healthy, thriving, and flourishing people and organizations. This book explores the implications of using a positive approach as opposed to a stress management one. Some of the interventions described in Creating Healthy Workplaces target individuals and their attitudes and behaviours, others target workplace relationships, work units and the wider organization. Outcomes such as reduced occurrences of smoking, obesity, depression, elevated blood pressure, accidents and workplace injuries, presenteeism, absence and staff turnover are reported. The factors associated with the success of these interventions are identified and advice is given as to how interested individuals and organizations might proceed to develop worksite interventions on their own.

The contributions in Creating Healthy Workplaces include a number of interventions that relate the efforts undertaken by researchers and organizations together, to reduce stress and improve the mental and physical health of employees through positive change initiatives. Those working in the field of occupational stress have received criticism that too much emphasis has been placed on negative issues and that positive initiatives have been largely ignored. With the growing influence of the positive movement, this book explores the implications of using a positive approach as opposed to a stress management one and compares the types of interventions they each require. From a positive perspective, there is a need to understand the characteristics of healthy, thriving, and flourishing people and organizations. This book explores the implications of using a positive approach as opposed to a stress management one. Some of the interventions described in Creating Healthy Workplaces target individuals and their attitudes and behaviours, others target workplace relationships, work units and the wider organization. Outcomes such as reduced occurrences of smoking, obesity, depression, elevated blood pressure, accidents and workplace injuries, presenteeism, absence and staff turnover are reported. The factors associated with the success of these interventions are identified and advice is given as to how interested individuals and organizations might proceed to develop worksite interventions on their own.

The latest edition of this classic text provides a comprehensive and internationally relevant introduction to work and organizational psychology, exploring the depth and diversity of the field in an accessible way without obscuring the complexities of the subject. Third edition of a classic textbook offering a complete introduction to work and organizational psychology for undergraduate and graduate students with no prior knowledge of the field An innovative new six part structure with two-colour presentation focuses the core material around issues that are either Job-Focused, Organization-Focused, or People-Focused Each chapter title is a question designed to engage readers in understanding work and organizational psychology whilst simultaneously inviting discussion of key topics in the field The third edition introduces two new co-editors in Franco Fraccaroli from Italy and Magnus Sverke, who join Nik Chmiel and will increase relevance and appeal for European students

This book examines the complex interplay between employees and management, to determine how a psychologically healthy workplace is constructed and maintained.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.