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Organisations influence the health of society through three major paths: the health of their employees through working conditions, the health of their customers through the quality of their products or services and the population’s health at large through their socio-ecological impact. This chapter focuses on the first path of organisations’ impact on employee health through working conditions. It complements the chapter on salutogenic work by expanding the level of analysis to organisational characteristics. The chapter aims to be particularly applicable to for-profit organisations, in which it is exceptionally challenging to introduce a health agenda.

OBJECTIVES: Practitioners and organizational leaders are calling for practical ways to explain and monitor factors that affect workplace health and productivity. This article builds on the well-established Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and proposes an empirically tested ratio that aggregates indicators of job resources and demands. In this study, we calculate a ratio of generalizable job resources and demands derived from the JD-R model and then translate the ratio into the language of company stakeholders. METHODS: We calculated a ratio based on measures applied in a large stress management intervention study (n = 2983) and report the findings from cross-sectional analysis with health and productivity outcomes from same-source and separate-source data. RESULTS: Findings showed a strong and unambiguous increase in health and productivity measures with each step of increase in the ratio. Loss in explained variance due to aggregation of two factors into a single ratio is small for measures which are known to be predicted by both factors simultaneously. CONCLUSIONS: A translation and visualization of the ratio that is accessible to practitioners and organizational leaders is presented and its use in companies discussed.

This article focuses on organizational analysis in workplace health promotion (WHP) projects. It shows how this analysis can be designed such that it provides rational data relevant to the further context-specific and goal-oriented planning of WHP and equally supports individual and organizational change processes implied by WHP. Design principles for organizational analysis were developed on the basis of a narrative review of the guiding principles of WHP interventions and organizational change as well as the scientific principles of data collection. Further, the practical experience of WHP consultants who routinely conduct organizational analysis was considered. This resulted in a framework with data-oriented and change-oriented design principles, addressing the following elements of organizational analysis in WHP: planning the overall procedure, data content, data-collection methods and information processing. Overall, the data-oriented design principles aim to produce valid, reliable and representative data, whereas the change-oriented design principles aim to promote motivation, coherence and a capacity for self-analysis. We expect that the simultaneous consideration of data- and change-oriented design principles for organizational analysis will strongly support the WHP process. We finally illustrate the applicability of the design principles to health promotion within a WHP case study.