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AbstractBackground:In 2013, the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) released national, comprehensive guidelines for psychological health in the workplace. Nevertheless, follow-up surveys report poor uptake of the guidelines, particularly within the manufacturing sector, despite recent Workplace Safety and Insurance Tribunal (WSAIT) decisions that place greater responsibilities on employers to protect employees from psychological injury. Hence, this program of research has focused on the context of the work environment with a goal to better understand and inform current application of healthy workplace practices and policies. The overarching premise is that the full potential of a healthy workplace is optimised when set within a specific climate that values the health of workers. Therefore, Phase 1 reported the development of a workplace scale measuring a domain-specific climate for healthy practices in the workplace. Phase 2, reported here, tests the differential influence of culture, leadership and social climate on workers' perceptions of healthy workplace practices and occupational bond.Method:Self-reported measures of culture, leadership social climate, healthy workplace practices and occupational bond from 162 participants were analysed to test the organisation's culture, climate, leadership and practices as internal processes that influence the development of a healthy workplaceResults:Adequately powered (N= 162), the mediational analyses demonstrated the significance of the proximal work environment of climate over the distal influence of culture and leadership. The key results demonstrate that the proximal environment has a significant influence on how workers perceive their workplaces. This has implications for the implementation of the guidelines for healthy workplaces.

Although the concept of healthy workplaces has historical roots in the extant literature, it remains an elusive concept to define and apply in the workplace. Nonetheless, the literature does suggest that it is a challenging and continuously improving process of supporting, protecting and promoting the health of the employee. The aim of this study was to devise a user-friendly, climate-specific assessment tool to evaluate employees' perceptions and knowledge of the practices and procedures in the workplace that prioritise the development of a healthy, supportive workplace. After extensive literature review and early stage pilot-testing of several independent sites within an organisation, a 31-item Likert-type scale — The Workplace Scale (WPS) — was brought forward to test its psychometric properties using an independent international sample that was gathered using email distribution. These initial distribution contacts were two of the author's professional colleagues and thereafter the scale was cascaded electronically to respondents in several countries. The factor analysis conducted on the data obtained from 108 respondents yielded a solid five factor solution that was consistent with earlier test administrations and revealed interpretable and distinct factors that strongly loaded on pertinent dimensions relevant to a healthy workplace. The tangible product is a user-friendly tool to baseline the development of a healthy, supportive workplace, while providing employees with an efficient upward communication mechanism to enable management to monitor progress. Devising the WPS was undertaken as part of wider study that subsequently compared the WPS against measures of climate, leadership and culture and is reported elsewhere.

AbstractThe objectives of this retrospective study were to (1) examine the predictive value of employer's disability management (DM) perceptions and DM policies in return-to-work outcomes for the injured worker, (2) examine factors that influence employer's DM perceptions, polices and return-to-work outcomes, and (3) examine the relationship between demographic factors of the individual and return-to-work outcomes. Employers from a northern British Columbia, Canada community were randomly selected to participate. The findings of the study supported the hypothesis that company perception towards DM is a significant contributing factor to the presence of DM policies in the workplace and that DM polices are predictive of return-to-work outcomes for injured workers.