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#80: Is Work Stress an Epidemic?
76 Plays3 years ago
Jill James talks with Dr. Marnie Dobson about work stress and how it relates to workplace health and safety. She is the Director of the Healthy Work Campaign as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology.
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Transcript
Introduction to Key Figures
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded August 24th, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Dr. Marnie Dobson. Dr. Dobson is Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology. She has a PhD in Medical Sociology and has been an Occupational Health Researcher for the past 15 years.
00:00:36
Speaker
involved in work stress research as well as workplace intervention development with several skilled labor working populations, including firefighters and urban transit operators. Dr. Dobson is joining us today from Los Angeles. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
Importance of Addressing Work Stress
00:00:54
Speaker
Well, I asked you here today because of your work
00:00:57
Speaker
and research on work stress. I talk with so many of our listeners from the podcast who are stressed for various reasons and I talk with employees who are additionally stressed. Much of it complicated or compounded by outright stress caused by the pandemic and or family illnesses or other stressors of balancing life and for that reason I really wanted to dig into this subject
00:01:27
Speaker
and hopefully be able to discover some resources that we can pass on to the listeners, which is why I asked you here today. So thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure.
Understanding Medical Sociology
00:01:39
Speaker
So before we dig into the topic of work stress, what is a medical sociologist? That's a good question. You know, medical sociology I think of as kind of a distant cousin of public health, although
00:01:54
Speaker
The sociologists wouldn't necessarily like to think of it that way, but I think medical sociology is really a subsection of sociology that's interested in sort of the social causes of illness and how the social world impacts people's health and wellbeing. So it's not too far off from public health.
00:02:19
Speaker
where we know that, you know, illness occurs to and with communities, you know, within communities. So, you know, it was not much of a sidestep for me to go from, you know, the sociology of medicine to public health, which is where I've ended up, and particularly in occupational health and safety as well, which is, as we know, a subset of public health.
Journey into Work Stress Research
00:02:45
Speaker
So how did you get into this work? What's your path?
00:02:50
Speaker
Well, you know, I met a colleague of mine who I worked closely with now for 15 plus years, Dr. Peter Schnall and Dr. Paul Landsberg and others who are social epidemiologists.
00:03:06
Speaker
And I was really fascinated, I think, in their particular knowledge about the workplace and work factors that contribute to some of the chronic disease epidemics that we know really well. And so it was really working with Peter and Paul and other colleagues that grew my interest in thinking about work as a source of stress.
00:03:34
Speaker
and to understand better how people are impacted by their social environments. We know that socioeconomic status, things like poverty, different social statuses impact on people's longevity, how long they live, as well as the kind of illnesses that they may end up being exposed to. And this was another kind of aspect of that.
00:04:01
Speaker
the work environment and how it plays a role in people's health.
00:04:07
Speaker
So what do we know about work stress and what is it? I'm assuming you've given a definition to it as well. Well, we know stress. Stress in general is a ubiquitous human physiological thing. We all experience stress. It's part of our makeup. The fight or flight response is a natural biological response we have to threats.
00:04:33
Speaker
you know, in the distant, distant paths, past, you know, humans were, you know, symbolic, well, threatened, particularly by, you know, nature and wildlife and, and, you know, their responses were to fight or, or flee actual threats. And now we're, we're much more likely to be surrounded by symbolic threats, you know, to our well-being, to our security, whether it's financial or work security.
00:05:02
Speaker
So, we still have these fight or flight stress responses. And, you know, in normal times, we would experience, you know, a fight or flight response where we get an increase in our heart rate, you know, our muscles are getting ready to run or fight, our breathing increases, and, you know, then the threat is over and, you know, our bodies return to normal.
00:05:29
Speaker
In an environment where there is a lot of sources of stress, they may all be symbolic, our fight or flight response continues and it continues to kick in and it can become chronic when we're exposed to sources of stress in our daily lives.
00:05:45
Speaker
So when that happens, you know, that really can impact a person's physiology on a short-term and long-term
Symbolic and Cultural Stressors
00:05:52
Speaker
basis. So symptoms of stress are things like headaches, fatigue, you know, these short-term symptoms that we've all felt when we're under stress. But what many people don't know is that if you're exposed to these kinds of stressors, as we call them, which are the sources of stress in our daily life and in our workplaces, that over time,
00:06:14
Speaker
that chronic exposure can impact our health in more permanent ways. Yeah. So when you, you know, you're talking about symbolic stress or the stressors, you know, for people who are listening, particularly in our American culture, right? Where maybe we're always comparing ourselves to one another or something else that, well, maybe mine isn't that bad, or you just take something for granted.
00:06:44
Speaker
Would you mind maybe naming some of those typical stressors or these symbolic stresses to just try to base that for us? Yeah, of course. Well, in sociology also, we look at stress and stressors as well as in epidemiology and other
00:07:04
Speaker
disciplines. It's really a cross-disciplinary study stress. You can experience stress from life events, especially things like divorce or loss of a loved one. These are acute kind of events that may not be chronic. They may get better over time.
00:07:24
Speaker
We can experience stress from uncertainty in terms of whether we are going to be able to pay the bills. So financial stressors like that. And then there's certain kinds of job characteristics or what we call work stressors that we've learned about over almost 40 years of research that these aspects of the way work is organized actually impact people
00:07:50
Speaker
in, you know, in profound ways in terms of provoking the stress response on a chronic basis. So things like workload, if your workload is really high, what we call we call that high job demands. And we also call these psychosocial stressors, because they're a combination of
00:08:10
Speaker
psychological, you know, how people perceive the kinds of stresses they're experiencing. But they're also social, they're part of the way in which the workplace in this case is organized. So you put them together, you understand that it's kind of an interaction between people's psychological experience and also the social reality that they live in. So job demands is a good example of that. I mean, you can
00:08:39
Speaker
feel like you're overloaded. In reality, there may be a lot of understaffing going on. You don't have enough people working at the counter, for example, in a deli in Walmart.
00:08:54
Speaker
And you've got a lineup of people waiting for you, getting more and more irritated, and you're rushing back and forth between sites of the deli because someone's not there to help with the load. So that is an example of an objective workload issue.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, right. I was, you know, I was I was mentioning when we when we first began that I've been talking with many employees who are identifying stress, and, you know, just in like the last 48 hours.
00:09:29
Speaker
the people that I've spoken with, that have reached out to me, and I'm guessing these are all work stressors. One was a teacher who's preparing for the school year and the regular stress that goes along with that, but was reaching out and asking questions like, how do I buy an air fill purifier for my classroom? What's the difference between a face mask and a respirator? What do you think I should wear? How would I redirect air in my classroom?
00:09:59
Speaker
And then another school employee who's the parent of small children who's asking me similar questions, all of that regarding the pandemic. A college professor talked to me about first day back in a classroom after not being with real human, you know, in-person teaching.
00:10:16
Speaker
for well over a year and talked about like the makeup of the students and then like her computer didn't work right away when she was doing something and then you know plus like wearing a face mask and was she thirsty while she was teaching and then what were the students like this semester and I talked to a police officer yesterday who said my work has just been so busy I haven't been taking time for myself
00:10:43
Speaker
and a way to detach from my work. And we were talking about he has a yoga practice. And he said, I haven't done it in so long. And it's the one way I can unplug. And another employee in health services who has got a really ill family member who was talking about balancing that kind of stuff. So I'm guessing those are all examples of. Oh, yeah.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, and the COVID pandemic, unfortunately, has created a veneer of stress or stressors over top of what people always have experienced in stressful jobs. So not only are the teachers dealing with potential workload issues or feeling like they don't have enough
00:11:36
Speaker
say in health and safety in the classroom, they're not getting their voices heard about concerns about PPE and how to manage students in the classroom. Those kinds of things are stressful on top of what is already a very difficult job, partly because there's lack of resources. We know that
00:11:58
Speaker
The number of students in classes has been increasing over time, so teachers are expected to do more with less, which is just objectively really stressful. And then to add the pandemic to it, which is the concerns, the uncertainty of being exposed to a virus that might make you or someone you love sick,
00:12:23
Speaker
is a major stressful experience.
Pandemic's Impact on Work Stress
00:12:30
Speaker
We also know that parents of young children, school-aged children, in the last year and a half, while kids have been at home, reported major increases in stress and anxiety to try to continue working from home while managing small children and trying to keep them on Zoom.
00:12:50
Speaker
you know, was what we call work-family conflict, you know, on steroids. Yeah, right, right. So with regard to work stress, you had alluded to physiological impacts, but what is the impact to human beings?
00:13:09
Speaker
Well, there's been a lot of epidemiological research, so research on populations, and there have been various stress models that have developed to try to explain certain circumstances in the workplace that increase people's risk for stress and then increase their risk for poor health. And you can study
00:13:35
Speaker
population and over time and assess whether, you know, if you're exposed to high demands and low job control, which is not really having much of a say over the timing of your tasks or over when you can take breaks or how fast you're expected to work, the combination of having very high demands and very low control is what we call job strain. And this model has really been shown in many, many, you know, longitudinal studies to
00:14:04
Speaker
have a negative impact over time on people's mental health, so it's associated with increased risk of depression, as well as increased risk for hypertension and high blood pressure, and also increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
00:14:24
Speaker
for cardiovascular mortality as well. So there's been a lot of studies over the years that are now accumulating this evidence that these kinds of work stresses have an impact on these chronic diseases that we know are a heavy burden on individuals and on society as a whole.
00:14:45
Speaker
So that's just one model there's, you know, other models as well we know things like bullying, for example, which has been on the increase is significant stressor for people in the workplace. And it's been increasing in the last, you know,
00:15:00
Speaker
15 years. Now annual reports where they ask questions about bullying show about 30% of Americans personally experience bullying up from about 17% in 2007. So you know we're seeing an increase in bullying which also has effects on mental health as well as
00:15:22
Speaker
Sick leave, people are more likely to take sick leave when they're being bullied because it does affect their mental health and their well-being and that affects the overall productivity of organizations.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I think I may have mentioned you when we spoke before I was an investigator with OSHA for over a decade before I went into private practice, private industry rather. And I remember one investigation I was on where employees had filed a complaint about workplace bullying.
00:16:03
Speaker
And it was specifically, I remember the employees were talking about, you know, being in the bathroom and someone coming into the stall next to them and bullying them and saying things to them while they were trying to use the bathroom about whatever it was that they were doing with their job and then using a nail gun while they were working to shoot nails at them.
00:16:25
Speaker
Oh, that's lovely. Right. And so when people think about bullying, like what is, I mean, it can manifest itself in many different ways. Yeah. And the important thing to understand about bullying is that it's not necessarily just an offhand rude comment, which is rudeness or meanness, but it really is a targeted and repeated abusive, you know, treatment of another person. So it has a fairly
00:16:55
Speaker
important definition in that way, that it has to be repeated and targeted kind of mistreatment. It can include verbal abuse. It can include work sabotage, where people are trying to undermine people's work for whatever reason. And it can even rise to the level of physical or other kinds of harassment.
00:17:23
Speaker
So yeah, it is a major concern in workplaces. And I think it's still not quite being dealt with as fully as it needs to be, you know, because of the effects on people's health and well-being and because people leave jobs, you know, and turnover is a major cost to organizations. And so is work stress an epidemic?
00:17:54
Speaker
I believe it is, and we have data to suggest that it is. There are national surveys that ask the same question and have asked it for years and years now about how often people feel
00:18:11
Speaker
stressed or tense during the workday. And, you know, the people that answer very often or often, it tends to be about 30%. So about one in three Americans do say that they on a, you know, a pretty consistent basis on these annual or every four year surveys in terms of the quality of work life survey that's administered every four years is, you know,
00:18:38
Speaker
It's one in three, so one in three Americans experience pretty frequent stress at work. Other surveys have shown even more, like three out of five Americans say that work is a significant source of stress along with money. The top two sources of stress are money and work.
00:19:01
Speaker
generally. So, you know, that's, that's quite a, you know, a lot of millions of people, right in that situation, you know, right. So tell us more about this quality of life, quality of work life survey rather.
00:19:17
Speaker
Well, NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which I'm sure you and your audience know about. NIOSH works with the General Social Survey to include a module they call the Quality of Work-Life Survey. They've been including it in GSS since 2002, I believe, and the last one was 2018.
00:19:40
Speaker
And it asks a lot of questions about the kinds of job characteristics we talked about, like demands and control and social support, work-family conflict questions, as well as these more general questions on stress and so on.
00:19:57
Speaker
that survey is of a nationally representative sample of US working people and you know this around usually around 1500 people so in each survey so it can it's kind of a small sample so it's it's also not analyzed very often it's not the findings are not published you know very often you have to kind of
00:20:26
Speaker
wait for a researcher to get excited and pull the data out and dig into it and publish. So unfortunately we don't get good reliable reports on the levels of some of these work stresses that we probably need.
00:20:44
Speaker
So when it comes to work stress and the cost to the employer, can you can you talk about that? Yeah. And, you know, I think this is something that we really need a shift in thinking about because there is a tendency to think that everyone experiences stress, you know, stress is ubiquitous. And, you know, obviously, we don't want it, you know, negatively affecting people and it can
00:21:13
Speaker
have an impact on employee productivity and so on and that can be a cost you know in terms of with how stress impacts people's ability to concentrate or handle workloads and so on but really there's short-term effects like that that can be measured but also the long-term effects are the the costs of
00:21:38
Speaker
of healthcare to treat the kinds of illnesses that people are more likely to experience if they're exposed to these chronic stressors for a long period of time. We know, for example, depression
00:21:56
Speaker
you know, is the leading cause of disability worldwide. And yeah, it's at 300 million people, according to the World Health Organization, experience depression. So it's a major concern. One in five, I think Americans experience a mental health problem in a given year.
00:22:21
Speaker
So, you know, people with depression are more likely to have sickness absences and may be more likely, obviously, to go on disability. And both of those cost employers, you know, a lot of money. Now, we know that depression is what we call multi-ediological, so it has multiple causes that could be related to the individual.
00:22:47
Speaker
genetics, family history, past trauma. But we also know from research that these kinds of job stresses I've been mentioning, like high demands and low control, work-family conflict, bullying, job insecurity, also increase the risk for depression. And some researchers out there
00:23:08
Speaker
done a great job and figured out what the contribution of these workstresses is to the overall amount of depression. And in these studies, they've shown that about 15% of all depressive disorders may be related to because of work stress.
00:23:28
Speaker
So the idea is if you could reduce work stress, you could reduce up to 15% of the incidence of depression. When you think about the amount of depression out there, that's a pretty large number of people that could be helped. That's staggering. Did you say it's the leading cause of disability? It is the leading cause of disability worldwide.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, so it's even becoming a problem in developing countries, especially with industrialization, you know, we see, you know, we see more mental health concerns at work, particularly. Yeah. Does that lead us into?
00:24:12
Speaker
It's kind of a depressing picture, I know. It is, right? Right. And so I'm wondering.
Strategies for Managing Work Stress
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, I promise there's solutions. Okay, so let's talk about those. Specifically, you know, what does the healthy work campaign do? And, and or maybe we can flip into the Center for Social Epidemiology as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, um,
00:24:36
Speaker
My colleagues and I, in the Center for Social Epidemiology, which is a nonprofit organization that's really dedicated to furthering the education and the research about these kinds of social factors, work factors that contribute to these chronic diseases, like depression, other mental health issues, as well as cardiovascular disease, which you can imagine cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death
00:25:06
Speaker
worldwide. And we know that these work stressors are impacting people's cardiovascular health and may contribute between 10 to 20%
00:25:21
Speaker
of cardiovascular disease deaths. So there's a whole other burden there and cost to society in terms of work versus impacts on cardiovascular disease. So here's a noble thought, if we can intervene and prevent or reduce
00:25:40
Speaker
the work environment from contributing to these burdens, chronic disease burdens, then we may be able to reduce the burden of these chronic diseases substantially by considering work as a location for improving the health of individuals. What an awful pot. So anyway, as I was saying, the Healthy Work campaign
00:26:09
Speaker
As the Center for Social Epidemiology, we were finding that we were often speaking to the choir. We were talking to each other, which is great because we want to broaden the research community's understanding about these issues.
00:26:25
Speaker
We created a clearinghouse for information and research on work stress and health. But what we realized is that as researchers, we have a certain language that can be pretty inaccessible to
00:26:41
Speaker
to a lot of people and you know Peter Schnall and myself and others really believe that it's part of the job of academics and research is to translate the knowledge that we're generating into
00:26:56
Speaker
usable and accessible information for the general public and for other interested stakeholders, occupational safety and health professionals. So we launched the Healthy Work campaign in 2018 with a grand website.
00:27:15
Speaker
I'm looking at it now. Yeah. Healthywork.org. Healthywork.org. And we really wanted to create a space where there was more accessible resources for organizations, individuals and worker advocates and unions to
00:27:36
Speaker
access this information about the importance of thinking about work stress and thinking about what healthy work might look like. So the healthy work campaign really is, our goals were to increase education and produce educational material. So we have been publishing articles that are more lay friendly language about some of these topics on medium.
00:28:04
Speaker
We have a blog that we publish our thoughts and ideas on regularly. Social media of course is a really important conduit for getting information out there and connecting to others who are also interested in these ideas.
00:28:21
Speaker
And we also created statistics and infographics that organizations can use, some of which I've talked about today, to raise awareness about the importance of addressing work stress and healthy work.
00:28:38
Speaker
So that was our number one goal. Our second goal was to offer organizations and also individuals a tool to assess whether they were experiencing these kinds of work stressors. And I think you have to kind of know where the problem is, especially as an organization.
00:28:58
Speaker
you know, yes, we know that there's stress. But if we can find the source of that stress, then I think we have a better job of attending to it or addressing it. And that was why we created the Healthy Work Survey. Yeah, tell us more about that. Yeah. So the Healthy Work Survey was our
00:29:18
Speaker
attempt to create a tool that would allow people easily to go online and fill out a survey. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Well, maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
00:29:33
Speaker
And after you fill it out, you have the option to, as an individual filling it out, to receive a report that can be emailed directly to you and it's confidential, anonymous, secure. And it gives people an idea of whether they have high job demands and whether they have low job control and these other work-family conflict. And it compares their score to the national
00:30:04
Speaker
population scores. So you can tell whether you're at higher risk than the US population, at intermediate risk or at low risk. So if you're at high risk, then you know that this could be a concern for your health. Because we know that the greater the stress, the more likely you are to experience health problems. So yeah, that was our first step is offering it to individuals.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic. So individuals can do their own benchmarking. Like how stressed am I? Yeah. And what are these stressors? Yeah, right. And validate what's happening with them. Yeah. And it's not just that it's, you know, we all know when we feel stressed and we're not telling people anything they don't know that way. But what we're trying to get people to see is that it's not just in their head, you know, and in their bodies, it's also in their workplace, in the work environment. So it can actually be, um,
00:31:00
Speaker
Attended to you know that people can work together Collectively, hopefully usually that's the best way to go about it to begin to address the source You know now it is important to have a yoga practice and meditate and I know a lot of companies are offering offering wellness programs to help people cope with the symptoms of stress which I think is is important but of course, you know, you can meditate and you can
00:31:26
Speaker
Do your yoga practice, you're going into the same workplace with the same stressors day after day. It's kind of a band-aid. People can take this assessment for themselves and then do you have another assessment for groups of individuals? An employer could essentially assign to their employees?
00:31:49
Speaker
Yes, we do. And we just finished tweaking and we have a location on the website for employers. We also have a location for unions and worker advocates on occupational safety and health professionals.
00:32:06
Speaker
And we send a unique link to an organization that's interested in working with us. And they send that link to their employees and they can go online. It's completely anonymous, so there's no names collected. And the information, once we get to a good participation rate,
00:32:30
Speaker
are able to automatically translate those survey results into a report for the organization within a day or two of finishing the survey. It's been a long haul and we worked with a computer programmer
00:32:49
Speaker
and good colleague who actually does this in another country, in a country that requires employers to look at the psychosocial work environment as we call it, work stress. So he really helped us put together the system and it works really well and people can have data in their hands within a day or two of their organization completing the survey.
00:33:14
Speaker
So it gives people, organizations, a starting point, you know, and again, it allows you, the survey allows organizations to see where their group, you know, their employees as a whole, sit relative to the national average, and also the national, you know, high risk levels of stress. So
00:33:36
Speaker
It will tell you whether your group is at high risk or intermediate risk or low risk for these common stressors like social support levels and workload and work-family conflict, safety climate.
00:33:52
Speaker
And a number of things. And are these surveys free? They are right now being offered free. The Healthy Work campaign is a project sponsored by the Center for Social Epidemiology. It's a nonprofit. And we want to offer this as a service to employers and to other groups that really want to begin to address and deal with this work stress epidemic.
00:34:20
Speaker
Um, so right now, yeah, it's, um, completely free. Wow. Thank you for, thank you for that. Donations are always welcome, but you know, it's, it's not required. So we, you know, we're really committed to furthering this as a, as a tool and a resource for as many organizations as possible.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, if someone, an organization or an individual takes the survey, they've got their results, you also have a healthy work toolkit. And is that something that after they see their results, maybe they can deploy some things from this toolkit?
00:35:00
Speaker
That is our hope. Really, the most important thing about the survey is that it's an educational tool to help organizations and workers know where the problems live. Then the next step has to be, what do we do about them? The toolkits are set up to help organizations, particularly to
00:35:25
Speaker
find various ways other organizations and other groups have found to address some of these major concerns. So we have a step-by-step process that organizations can follow to use the results of the survey to talk with leadership, with stakeholders in an organization, and especially with employees.
00:35:51
Speaker
because we really believe and push the idea that it's really employees that need to be involved in the process in order to find the solutions. So if you just institute changes from above without talking with employees and having employees and workers really
00:36:11
Speaker
talk about what the problems mean in the workplace, you're going to miss the boat. And I think there's a lot of knowledge among frontline workers about how you can address things like workload and how you can address things like social support. And so we really think that, and the research into intervention, work stress intervention is
00:36:36
Speaker
really has really shown that involving employees in the process is a really important part of a successful and effective intervention campaign. I mean, that resonates with health and safety professionals, our audience here for this podcast, because we've all been saying that for so long, you know, like involve the employee, involve the employee.
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think you have to, and there's ways of doing it. It's not always easy. Some companies might not have the resources to spend money on employees being involved in health and safety committees or being involved in a work stress committee.
00:37:19
Speaker
Obviously, if they have representatives that can help when management and labor work together, you know, that can often be a more effective way of implementing these changes and seeing that they work, you know, and that there's consensus. Yeah, you just said work stress committee.
00:37:44
Speaker
I mean, what a great idea. And also one that some employers may find that sounds stigmatizing or counter-cultural for what they want to do. And at the same time, I think we're at a point in history with the pandemic where it feels like we're more open to having those conversations about stress.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah. This might be the time to seize the moment, right?
Reframing Work Stress as Organizational Issues
00:38:16
Speaker
You know, I think so. And this is a problem with the way we think about stress. I mean, we do think about it as an individual problem. And that's why we use the word stressor. It's kind of awkward. Yeah. It's much more awkward than saying work stress, but work stressor really puts the focus on the source stress, which is the way work is organized. Not the human being. Not the human being. And that's why we talk about healthy work.
00:38:43
Speaker
not just healthy workers because we think that, you know, if attention, a little bit more attention is paid to changing the way we work, then, you know, we may help to prevent some of these, you know, the effects of stress on workers and on the costs to organizations and it will improve, you know, health and safety.
00:39:07
Speaker
to look at some of these things because we know that certain aspects, especially high demands at work workload, understaffing, job insecurity, these kinds of things, we know that they also impact on injury rates, musculoskeletal problems, as well as, you know, mental health, which
00:39:30
Speaker
because of the pandemic and even before the pandemic, you know, mental health has been a growing epidemic that is affecting the workplace, but may also be arising from the way we work.
00:39:45
Speaker
So you had mentioned that you launched the Healthy Work campaign website in 2018. Yeah, do you have people who've implemented aspects of the toolkit that have some successes that you can talk about and or
00:40:04
Speaker
Are there other studies or campaigns in different countries like you had alluded to who have seen a benefit? Yeah, so we haven't. We're just sort of rolling out our organizational survey. We've had our individual survey up and running for about
00:40:24
Speaker
I think about six months, eight months. The whole process has taken a while but we do have, we are pilot testing our healthy work survey for organizations with some organizations now and we actually just finished one this last weekend and sent it out within two days of closing the survey to our
00:40:51
Speaker
the organization that we're working with, so we're looking forward to moving ahead and helping them translate those findings into actionable goals. The Healthy Work Strategies page has case studies and case reports from organizations and also from researchers that have worked with organizations to
00:41:16
Speaker
successfully implement what we call work organization interventions, which is basically, you know, how you create healthier workplaces. So the Quebec hospital workers study, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but a group of researchers in Canada
00:41:32
Speaker
began working with a hospital system in Quebec, Canada. The hospital system was really concerned about burnout among their nursing staff and other health problems that healthcare workers were experiencing.
00:41:52
Speaker
So the researchers and the management of the hospitals worked within labor management committees and they involved different employees at different levels of the organization in these committees. They created a whole set of interventions to
00:42:12
Speaker
impact on things like improving social support. They found that there were communication and leadership issues among supervisors and subordinates that they thought could be improved upon. They also looked at staffing shortages.
00:42:29
Speaker
They also implemented health behavior changes to encourage healthier eating, more exercise, but it was a combination and so it also included efforts to address work stressors.
00:42:44
Speaker
And then the researchers were able to assess everyone at time one, and then three years later, as these interventions had been rolled out across the hospitals, there was also a control hospital because there are researchers in the mix. And so they were able to compare the effects of these interventions against the hospital that didn't get any of the interventions.
00:43:09
Speaker
And they were able to find at the end of it that there were increases in social support, there were decreases in job demands, there were increases in job control, and also decreases in burnout over that three-year process. So it really was a successful study, and we wrote up a short kind of description of the study in our Healthy Work Strategies page that
00:43:37
Speaker
people can go on and look at. There's about 30, I think, case studies there of various, you know, on various topics. Some are on bullying, organizations that have been successful at addressing bullying.
00:43:54
Speaker
So we do have a lot of great stories. There needs to be more. And there can always be more written up about where organizations and
00:44:10
Speaker
worker advocate groups have been successful at improving working conditions for organizations. So we're going to continue to update that and keep that as a resource for organizations that once they have their survey results might want to know what other groups have done to address them.
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah, the resources tab on your website looks very rich. If people aren't enticed enough already to go to your website, you have a spot for stats and infographics and business costs and the work tools we've been talking about and strategies and a healthy work agenda and articles and research.
00:44:57
Speaker
And there's one I want to ask you about, because I'm interested to know what this is if you can talk about it.
Exploring 'Working on Empty' Documentary and Resources
00:45:03
Speaker
Is it pronounced woe, documentary, W-O-E? So this was really what prompted us to move in this direction. We really wanted to make a documentary about the impacts, to raise awareness about the impacts of what we're talking about today, work stressors on health, and especially on the chronic disease burden.
00:45:24
Speaker
And so we have produced a short 11 minute documentary called Working on Empty. And it is accessible on our website. There's actually a button right on the front page, which is a play button. And it will take you straight to our Working on Empty website and play the short 10 or 11 minute video that we developed. We would like to eventually turn it into a
00:45:52
Speaker
a grander documentary, you know, about the impacts of work and what different groups are doing, like we've talked about, to improve work stressors and improve health. So, you know, eventually that's where we hope to go, but it's a neat little clip, takes 10 or 11 minutes to watch, and it really does kind of give you a synopsis of, you know, what we mean by work stressors.
00:46:17
Speaker
Fantastic. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. I'm hoping that people who are listening today are interested in the survey, not only for themselves, but for their companies. And maybe our listeners to the podcast will be able to supercharge getting some data into what it is that you're doing and spreading the word and making an impact for their workplaces.
00:46:41
Speaker
I hope so. A lot of it does require some convincing and you have to sit down and talk about the importance of this. That's how you have resources for occupational safety and health professionals that want to make a business case, for example, to their company about why they should
00:47:03
Speaker
Be aware of the impact harmful impacts of work stressors on employee health and well-being so you know because sometimes it takes the bottom line to motivate some companies to attend to you know these kinds of impacts on their employees.
00:47:21
Speaker
And there's ample evidence now that it does have a real financial cost as well, of course, is the effects of health problems on individuals and their families.
00:47:36
Speaker
Well, Dr. Dobson, as we're wrapping up our time together today, is there a suggested first step for people when they come to your website? Is it what you just laid out, looking at the business strategies, or what would you say would be step one and maybe step two?
00:47:57
Speaker
Well, I think definitely looking at the film, because it will give you a little short 10 minute, you know, summary of what we've just been talking about, you know, hopefully describing what we mean by these job stressors that we know impact health. And, you know, looking at that, there's also an interactive graphic called Principles of Healthy Work.
00:48:20
Speaker
which kind of explains in a little bit more detail, and I was able to, the different kinds of stressors that we know from research have been evidenced in terms of their impacts on depression and burnout and blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. So understanding that element of it, because what we realize is that
00:48:45
Speaker
we sort of took for granted that people understood our work. And honestly, I think a lot of people don't think about stress in this way. I agree with that. In terms of the sources of stress. So we really did want to make it more accessible, make it available, and sharing it with others, creating an interest in sort of a movement around this was one of our goals.
00:49:13
Speaker
And then the second thing you know would be to you can go to the tabs for employers and there's a healthy work survey page. You click on the request access button and it will allow you to fill out a short form with your contact information.
00:49:33
Speaker
And if there are specific questions, we have a contact page. You can contact us at contact at healthywork.org. And we'll be happy to get back to you with a lot more information because we have developed a lot.
00:49:53
Speaker
You sure have in a short period. Well, I mean, your body of work has produced, has culminated to come to this. And a big community of a very large community of researchers that have been working in this field for, you know, 30 or 40 years before, you know, before us. So, you know, we really do. We really are part of a big community of, you know, psychosocial work stresses, like work stress researchers. So much gratitude for all of them.
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I really appreciate you coming today and sharing this with us and sharing these resources. I hope that many people listening really, really use the tools to identify and tend to those work stressors. I hope so, and it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Jill.
00:50:47
Speaker
Hmm, thank you. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you're not subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe at iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals.
00:51:16
Speaker
Special thanks to Naeem Jarisi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.