Ensuring Organization-Intervention Fit for a Participatory Organizational Intervention to Improve Food Service Workers’ Health and Wellbeing

Abstract

Objective: Food-service workers' health and wellbeing is impacted by their jobs and work environments.Formative research methods were used to explore working conditions impacting workers' health to inform intervention planning and implementation and to enhance the intervention's 'fit' to the organization.Methods: Four qualitative methods (worker focus groups; manager interviews; worksite observations; multi-stakeholder workshop) explored in-depth and then prioritized working conditions impacting workers' health as targets for an intervention. Results: Prioritized working conditions included: ergonomics; work intensity; career development and job enrichment. Data revealed necessary intervention mechanisms to enhance intervention implementation: worker and management communication infrastructure; employee participation in intervention planning and implementation; tailored worksite strategies; and ensuring leadership commitment.Conclusions: These targeted, comprehensive methods move away from a typical focus on generic working conditions, e.g. job demands and physical work environment, to explore those conditions unique to an organization. Thereby, enhancing 'intervention-fit' at multiple levels within the company context.

Designing a Participatory Total Worker Health® Organizational Intervention for Commercial Construction Subcontractors to Improve Worker Safety, Health, and Well-Being: The “ARM for Subs” Trial

“…This finding, that context matters, has been identified across other industries [36]. For example, in a TWH ® organizational intervention in the food service industry, several cafeterias owned by the same company but situated within different client organizations were found to have different safety and health issues, even though they provided the same service [37].…”

A Systematic Review of Workplace Interventions to Rehabilitate Musculoskeletal Disorders Among Employees with Physical Demanding Work

“…Further, MSD is a complex outcome measure and it can take time to see any meaningful change. Importantly, every organization is different and interventions need to fit the company/ workplace [92], which can be complicated by the fissured, multi-employer structure of some workplaces e.g. construction.…”

The Impact of the Direct Participation of Workers on the Rates of Absenteeism in the Spanish Labor Environment

“…In this sense, the following external determinants can be identified: macrocontextual factors, related to policies and systems of legal regulation of occupational health [28,29], such as the capacity of representatives and workers to paralyze productive activity in the face of serious or imminent risk [30]; the promotion of regulations that reward the integration of the prevention management system through its own means to facilitate participation [31]; the promotion of participation through the requirements of the labour inspection [32], regulations that do not systematically make technicians responsible for the prevention of accidents in companies to prevent expert knowledge from blocking participation [33]; or the promotion of policies for the representation of interests that facilitate decentralised self-regulation through the participation of autonomous trade unions [27,34]. The internal factors that influence the effectiveness of participation are business leadership and willingness to promote a participatory culture [35][36][37][38][39][40]; training and empowerment of workers and their representatives to collectively challenge unsafe situations [37][38][39]; the size of the workplace and the sector of activity to the extent that participation is greater in larger workplaces and in industries where occupational risks are more evident [18,27,41]; in addition, greater capacity for participation will exist when specialized occupational health representation is unionized [42] or has strong external support from the union [43,44].…”