Healthy lifestyle interventions across diverse workplaces: a summary of the current evidence.

Abstract

Workplaces provide a unique opportunity to deliver health promotion interventions to their workers. This review summarizes evidence from the most recent studies (September 2019 to April 2021) of workplace healthy lifestyle interventions and identifies gaps in the literature and key aspects for successful future workplace lifestyle interventions. Recent intervention studies have focused on four health domains: (1) multicomponent wellness programs, (2) healthy diet interventions, (3) physical activity interventions, and (4) mental health/sleep interventions. Within each group of studies, there was significant heterogeneity in study length, intervention components, and worker populations. Nonetheless, most studies across all categories showed positive associations between healthy lifestyle interventions and improved worker health. Although recent literature has shown an overall positive trend between healthy lifestyle interventions implemented at the workplace and improvements in markers of health and wellbeing, further research should include longer follow-up periods, more objective measures of wellbeing, evaluation of worker performance, and analogous interventions between studies to identify the most effective interventions to improve worker health and wellness.