Total Worker Health® and Small Business Employee Perceptions of Health Climate, Safety Climate, and Well-Being during COVID-19.

Carol E Brown,Natalie V Schwatka,Lynn Dexter,Miranda Dally,Liliana Tenney,Lee S Newman,Erin Shore

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189702

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created workplace challenges for employee safety and health, especially in small enterprises. We used linear mixed-effects regression to examine changes in health climate, safety climate, and worker well-being, prior to the pandemic and at two timepoints during it. We also examined whether employees at organizations that had received a TWH leadership development intervention prior to COVID-19 would better maintain pre-pandemic perceptions of climates and well-being. The final study cohort consisted of 261 employees from 31 organizations. No differences were observed in mean outcome scores between the leadership intervention groups at any of the survey timepoints. We combined intervention groups to examine the difference across timepoints. Perceptions of health and safety climates remained stable across all timepoints. However, employee well-being scores declined between the pre-pandemic period and subsequent COVID-19 timepoints. These findings suggest that while small organizations continued to be viewed as supporting employees’ health and safety over the course of the pandemic, well-being scores declined, indicating that other factors contributed to decreased well-being. The findings from this study have implications for small business leaders as they navigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health, safety, and well-being on their organizations and employees.

Highlights

We examined how the pandemic impacted perceptions of safety and health climates and employee well-being in the SSWell cohort of small businesses at two timepoints: during the early wave of COVID in May 2020 and in September 2020 as rates of illness in the U.S began to rise again
Our hypothesis that Total Worker Health® (TWH) leadership training would enable businesses to better maintain their pre-pandemic perceptions of safety climate and health climate, and for their employees to maintain their well-being scores during the pandemic was not supported by the results
Employee perceptions of health and safety climates remained relatively stable from the pre-COVID-19 baseline period to May and September of 2020

Summary

Introduction

There has been a fundamental shift in working environments because of the global coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Research examining the impact of COVID-19 on the workplace is coming from a number of distinct fields—occupational safety and health [1,2,3,4], public health [5,6], psychology/psychiatry [7,8,9,10], business/management [11,12,13], and others [14,15]—demonstrating the multidisciplinary interest in understanding the impact of the pandemic on issues relevant to the workplace. Workplace challenges due to COVID-19 have been highlighted in the recent literature—fear of infection or disease transmission [6], Int. J.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion