Promoting workplace health and well-being through culture change. An evidence review.

Under the auspices of Healthy Ireland, the Department of Health is leading the development of the National Healthy Workplace Framework in partnership with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The framework aims to drive engagement and identify effective approaches to health improvement in all workplaces.

A review of the evidence (carried out by the Research Services Unit) and an extensive public consultation process by the Institute of Public Health identified a need for change in workplace culture. In particular, workers believed that organisational culture was one of the most important factors that could influence workplace health and well-being. This review was carried out to support the development and implementation of the National Healthy Workplace Framework, by providing an evidence base to support this important work.

In this review, we used standard systematic methods to investigate the influence of workplace culture on employee health and wellbeing. Searches of four electronic databases were supplemented with journal hand-searching, Google searches and reference and citation chasing, yielding a total of 60 studies that met inclusion criteria. A number of key cultural drivers – job control, information flow, job demands, organisational support, work climate, work–family conflict, supervisor support, line managers’ attitudes and actions, justice of leadership, and feedback – were found to mediate the impact of workplace interventions. Workplace interventions can be designed with these cultural factors in mind in order to achieve health and well-being outcomes.