Evidence-based health promotion at work

The subproject carried out at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University:  

1. investigates the behaviour change techniques utilised in current workplace health promotion policies and based on this analysis, produces guidelines for promoting employees healthy lifestyles at workplaces,  
2. analyses the elements of effective counselling practices and interaction between group members in both face-to-face and video-mediated counselling sessions aiming at promoting healthy lifestyles and work ability, and  
3. contributes to the development of mobile app intervention by gathering social psychological evidence on effective elements of counselling interaction and behaviour change techniques.

Our group contributes on four levels:  1)For professionals: We analyze authentic group counseling situations that aim to support healthy lifestyles and work ability, and produce information and tools for professionals working in the field of health promotion.  2) For entrepreneurs: We are involved in the development of a mobile application for micro-entrepreneurs, and contribute with the perspectives of social psychology and behavioral sciences.  3)For policymakers: How is health promoted at work? We provide guidelines for promoting employees healthy lifestyles based on, for example, analyses of policy documents  4)For academics: We analyze group-based lifestyle counseling and professional guidance counseling using conversation analysis of video-recordings of authentic situations.

Workplace is one of the priority settings for health promotion in the 21st century. In this project we focus on workplace health promotion (WHP), integrated with occupational health and safety at work. Our aim is to develop evidence-based guidelines for WHP. We investigate evidence-based techniques for lifestyle change and the possibilities to apply these techniques in workplace health promotion as well as practices of effective counselling interaction. The project develops and tests an evidence-based mobile app intervention which focuses on promoting workplace health of micro entrepreneurs.

The research base is visible in the development of the intervention in two ways: 1) the intervention promotes contents that are based on research results about occupation-related optimal lifestyles that are associated with work ability and recovery from work, and 2) the intervention uses behaviour change techniques and applies them in such ways that take into account behaviour scientific and social psychological understanding of change processes and effective counselling techniques. Promo@Work -project aims at societal and economic impact through implementing the research results in practice.

Academy of Finland

Johanna Ruusuvuori

PI

Johanna.Ruusuvuori [at] uta.fi

+358 50 318 6151