Attitudes of Company Executives toward a Comprehensive Workplace Health Management-Results of an Exploratory Cross-Sectional Study in Germany.

Achim Siegel,Anna T Ehmann,Aileen C Hoge,Peter Martus,Monika A Rieger

doi:10.3390/ijerph182111475

Abstract

Workplace health management (WHM) in Germany aims at maintaining and increasing the health and well-being of employees. Little is known about company executives’ attitudes toward WHM. To gain more insight, we conducted a large-scale survey in companies in the German county of Reutlingen in 2017. We sent a standardized questionnaire to 906 companies, containing inter alia 26 self-constructed declarative statements depicting company executives’ opinions on various WHM aspects; 222 questionnaires could be evaluated. By exploratory factor analysis we assigned the 26 items to six factors reflecting different attitudes toward WHM. Factor values were standardized to a scale from 0 to 10. The attitude ‘positive view of general health services in the company’, for example, achieved by far the lowest mean agreement (3.3 points). For the attitude ‘general skepticism toward WHM’, agreement and disagreement were balanced (5.0 points). Using multiple regression analyses, we searched for variables that could partially explain respondents’ agreement with attitudes. In conclusion, a general WHM skepticism was widespread, but not dominant. The idea that general health services should be offered in companies was predominantly rejected. Older respondents and respondents from smaller companies and craft enterprises were more skeptical than average about WHM and its possible extensions.

Highlights

The widespread general skepticism toward workplace health management and the low positive attitude toward general health services in companies which we found in this study might suggest that this kind of skepticism is probably even more widespread in other regions with less favorable conditions
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the attitudes of managers of almost all company sizes toward comprehensive workplace health management on the basis of an exploratory factor analysis
Seem to be at least controversial if not overwhelmingly opposed; the latter is true when it comes to the attitude ‘positive view of general health services in the workplace’

Summary

Introduction

The term ‘workplace health management’ encompasses the integration and management of all operational processes in a company with the aim of creating healthy working conditions and promoting the health of its employees [1,2,3,4] As this definition suggests, workplace health management is a holistic approach, and there is a strong similarity between workplace health management and the ‘Total Worker Health’ concept that has been promoted in the USA [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Workplace health management can be differentiated into the following four subcategories [4]:

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Discussion

Conclusion