Healthy Work Assessment Tool - Confirming positive aspects of work
The Healthy Work Assessment Tool - Confirming positive aspects of work - provides ways of assessing the ‘healthiness’ of work. Its uses might be to:
- Get a picture of the nature of the work being done by a person or in your organisation;
- Gather information about a person’s difficulties in a job;
- Identify stressors in a person’s job;
- Explore the extent of agreement between an employee and a supervisor about a person’s work;
- Gather information to spot trends across an organisation;
- Gather baseline data for later comparison with evaluations.
The tool can be used to highlight the healthy features of work. There are many ways of using such a tool – with people working singly or in groups – to list individual concerns or to agree about a group conclusion. A worker and a supervisor could complete the table together to better understand its opportunities and difficulties. One point of the tool is to emphasise the idea that while it is healthy for a worker to feel a sense of control at work, employers may very well feel a strong lack of control over the way they are constrained to conduct their business.
Care should be taken to view the job as a whole and to avoid fixing on single items and allowing them to dominate the discussion.
When using this tool the practical realities faced by employers and employees and their possibly limited abilities and opportunities to respond need to be acknowledged.
The tool should be used in a setting of dialogue. Some notes about the differences between dialogue and debate are shown here.
| Feature of healthy work | What is the evidence for the presence or absence of this feature in the workplace? | Extent to which this feature can be controlled by the | Actions needed to promote this feature – | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employer | Employee | Employer How can employees be supported? | Employee How can I support the employer and my colleagues? | ||
| There is a balance of effort and rest | High Low | High Low | |||
| There is a variety of tasks, interest and stimulation | High Low | High Low | |||
| There is a sense of personal control | High Low | High Low | |||
| Mechanisms exist to address poor workplace relationships | High Low | High Low | |||
| There is good communication | High Low | High Low | |||
| Workplace hierarchies promote confidence | High Low | High Low | |||
| Workplace collaboration is effective | High Low | High Low | |||
| Healthy and safe workplace design and environment | High Low | High Low | |||
| There is good change management | High Low | High Low | |||
| There are appropriate rewards | High Low | High Low | |||
| The workplace is supportive | High Low | High Low | |||
| There are opportunities for personal progress | High Low | High Low | |||
From 'Healthy Work Managing Stress and Fatigue in the Workplace', Table 7.1 (page 56)
