Achieving Sustainable Workplace Wellbeing

Too often workplace health and wellbeing practices initiatives fall short of delivering sustained improvements in worker wellbeing. Implementation failure is often identified as the reason. How do we move beyond localized explanations of the failure of specific interventions to create theoretical frameworks that explain how wellbeing at work is improved and sustained? In this ground breaking inter-disciplinary work, the organization becomes the focal unit of analysis. This contrasts with the focus on previous research on the individual worker or intervention. Using evidence from systematic and comprehensive surveys of the literature as well as new empirical research, the book presents an explanatory framework of the processes through which organizations change to implement and accommodate workplace health and wellbeing practices. Three processes: Learning, adaptation and continuation explain successful implementation of workplace health and wellbeing practices. Three other processes: Gestalting, fracturing and grafting explain how organizations resolve or negotiate conflict between health and wellbeing practices and existing organizational procedures, systems and practices. The framework provides an explanation of how workplace health and wellbeing practices are implemented, organized and sustained. In a concluding chapter, the authors reflect on the implications for research of reframing the unit of analysis as the organization and how studies of organizing workplace wellbeing practices can provide a conceptual platform for thinking about how organizations can create social value in a broader sense.