Total Worker Health® in Practice
How do I bring Total Worker Health into my organization?
Adopting a Total Worker Health® (TWH) approach in your organization means a continued commitment to improving workplace safety, health, and well-being in addition to reducing chronic illnesses, workplace stress, and the burden of occupational injury.
To begin, we recommend reviewing NIOSH’s Fundamentals of Total Worker Health® Approaches: Essential Elements for Advancing Worker Safety, Health and Well-Being. Featuring five fundamental elements of TWH, this document provides the rationale behind a TWH approach while offering first steps, practical examples, and worksheets that will guide your effort.
NIOSH identifies five elements that are crucial to bring TWH to your workplace:
- Demonstrate leadership commitment to safety and health at all levels within your organization.
- Design work that is inherently geared toward preventing occupational hazards and promoting employee well-being.
- Engage workers throughout the process of identifying, designing, and implementing a program to address occupational health, safety, and well-being needs.
- Maintain confidentiality of workers to ensure utmost privacy and protection against discrimination.
- Integrate policy, environmental, organizational, and social concerns to tackle employee safety, health, and well-being (e.g., coordinate joint meetings of safety committees, occupational health staff, human resources, and wellness committees).
Next, we recommend reviewing NIOSH's Issue Relevant to Advancing Worker Well-Being Through Total Worker Health. The list of issues relevant to Total Worker Health was published in November 2015 with input from stakeholders. This list reflects NIOSH's expanded focus for TWH recognizing new technologies, new working conditions, and new emerging forms of employment present new risks to worker safety, health and well-being.
We offer two kinds of resources—Tools and Toolkits—Toolkits aim to address global or organization-level change whereas Tools focus more on local or team-level change. As a NIOSH Center of Excellence, the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center develops and tests interventions for Total Worker Health. Our 2011-2016 funding cycle culminated in four evidence-based toolkits, available through our new website, YourWorkpath. We have created a toolkit matrix, based on NIOSH’s List of Issues Relevant to Advancing TWH, to guide you in selecting the toolkit best suited to your needs. We have also curated resources below in our Total Worker Health Resources section.
| Toolkits | Tools | |
|---|---|---|
| What makes the decision to adopt? | Owners and executives | Managers and supervisors, safety and wellness committees, and workers |
| Who needs to participate? | Managers, supervisors, and workers | Managers and supervisors, safety and wellness committees, and workers |
| Who do I need to commit? | Time: sustained commitment and Cost: low cost | Time: short-burst activities and Cost: most are no cost |
| Who is likely to benefit? | Managers, supervisors, and workers | Managers and supervisors, safety and wellness committees, and workers |
| What is the evidence? | Evidence-based | Recommend by experts |
YourWorkpath houses and delivers our robust tools and comprehensive toolkits, to lead and help employers find a path towards a healthier and safer workplace. Visit our new website to access and download our most-free and low-cost safety, health and well-being resources at at YourWorkpath.com. Read more about YourWorkpath in our featured blogpost on Oregon and the Workplace.
Total Worker Health resources
We provide below a list of selected resources pertinent to Total Worker Health. Some are in-house resources and recordings of our events at the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences (home of OHWC) while others are highly recommended external resources from NIOSH, NIOSH TWH affiliates, and other TWH Centers of Excellence, among others.
- OccHealthSci Resource Directory: Comprehensive free-to-public library of occupational safety, health and wellness resources that contains information on a number of relevant to various industries. With regard to Total Worker Health, we especially recommend visiting: Total Worker Health® and Wellness in the directly that outlines best practices, research, occupational health-safety organizations, and Oregon-specific information.
- Recorded free webinars on Health, Safety and Wellness: Watch or listen to recordings of past symposia on workplace safety, health and wellness issues.
- YourWorkpath.com: Designed for ease of access, this user-friendly website houses and delivers the institutes' and OHWC's robust tools and comprehensive toolkits to help employers design a healthier and safer workplace.
- Health Impacts Safety: Guides that help teams integrate safety and wellness into their meetings
- What's Work Got To Do With It Podcast: Shares the public health relevance of workplace safety, health and well-being that digs into some of the science behind the biological impact of our environment, how conditions like work hours, occupational stress, and workplace safety can affect our health and what we can do to promote well-being.
- Resources from our OR-FACE program: The Oregon Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (OR-FACE) program publishes a number of booklets and toolbox talk guides on a range of work safety issues.
- NIOSH Total Worker Health in Action! E-Newsletter: A quarterly electronic newsletter on the latest news from NIOSH's Total Worker Health® program, Centers of Excellence and partners.
- NIOSH Total Worker Health Training Resources: Find training and professional development opportunities in support of Total Worker Health. Many of the conferences, training institutes, webinars, and events are critical to the continued collaboration of researchers, practitioners, and business professionals interested in worker safety, health, and well-being.
- Why should Total Worker Health be important to your workplace? This infographic by NIOSH tells you why.
- NIOSH's Let's Get Started: Thinking of bringing Total Worker Health to your workplace but don't know how? NIOSH's Let's Get Started tool can help.
- r2p: Research to Practice at NIOSH: The Research to Practice (r2p) initiative at NIOSH is focused on the transfer and translation of knowledge, interventions, and technologies into highly effective prevention practices and products which are adopted into the workplace. The goal of r2p is to reduce illness and injury by increasing the use of NIOSH-generated knowledge, interventions, and technologies.
- Take the Wellness@Work Worksite Wellness Assessment to assess and find ways to improve the health of your workplace.
- Promising Practices to Total Worker Health: NIOSH shares examples of how employers are taking active steps to effectively integrate safety and well-being in workplaces.
- NIOSH's Total Worker Health Webinar Series. This free series includes announcements of upcoming and recordings of previous webinars.
- Watch small business leaders share their experiences on how they implement Total Worker Health in their workplace. In a series of short videos, University of Iowa's Healthier Workforce Center of Excellence captures the transfer of evidence-based techniques into small businesses.
- Want more examples of how businesses incorporate Total Worker Health issues? Visit NIOSH affiliate, SAIF's workplace safety directory. Don't miss the "Go Ergo" rap!
- Visit American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) Total Worker Health resources page
- Healthy Work Campaign (HWC) is a public health campaign focused on raising awareness in the U.S. about the health impacts of work stress on working people. The campaign also focuses on the positive actions stakeholders (both individuals and organizations) throughout the U.S. can take to advance #healthywork.