Association for Behavior Analysis International

There are socially compelling reasons for organizational leaders who value safety to also be concerned about employee health and wellness. For example, co-morbid obesity is associated with an 80% increase in cost and lost work time for compensated injuries. In response to such issues, the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health created the Total Worker Health research initiative, and has funded four Centers of Excellence in the area. Total Worker Health is broadly defined as the simultaneous attention to both protecting (injury prevention) and promoting (health promotion) worker health. While there are previously published theoretical, physiological (for some types of exposures), and economic rationales for interventions to improve Total Worker Health, little attention has been paid to the distinctive organizational levels of possible implementation, nor to behavioral logic for integration at the individual level of analysis. To address these gaps and provide guidance to leaders and scholars, the author proposes a multi-level and behavioral logic for Total Worker Health. This includes rationale for changes at organizational, process, leadership, and line levels in companies, as well as behavioral theory relevant to predicting when the integration of health protection with health promotion could magnify (or maim) intervention acceptability and effects.

"Holding people accountable" is a term heard widely within organizational cultures in the past year with the Harvard Business Review even headlining the phrase, "What Ever Happened to Accountability?" on one of its 2012 publications. CLG has been working with a Canadian mining organization to help make this "accountability system" work. According to the Saskatchewan Mining Association, "Without an expectation of effective consequences, accountability is not believable and has no credibility. No consequences--no accountability," and that is where behavior analysis comes in. By using something called visual management, we were able to work with the client to create a system for consequence delivery that was easy, salient, used at every level of the organization, and most importantly, worked to modify behavior in the direction needed to get the results intended. Visual Management involves the use of line graphs and other behavior and results tracking methods to display trends over time to help see the direction of performance for both leading and lagging indicators and provides a platform for consequence delivery based on performance. Finally, with behavior contingency management in place, meaningful impacts emerged throughout the organization in a variety of ways.