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This week the Healthy Work Campaign is proud to announce that the online Healthy Work Survey (HWS) for organizations, including special content for Employers and for Unions/Worker Advocates, is now available at our website, www.healthywork.org. The HWS project has been two years in the making, and is the result of a collaboration of university researchers and occupational health and safety experts with funding from the non-profit Center for Social Epidemiology, a 501(c)(3).

The HWS for organizations measures work stressors (sources of stress at work, also called psychosocial hazards) including high job demands/workload, long work hours, low job control, supervisor/coworker support, work-family conflict, bullying, harassment, non-standard employment, health and safety climate, and rewards. These stressors are causes of many common mental and physical health problems such as anxiety, burnout, depression, high blood pressure and heart attacks and cost individuals, businesses and society billions of dollars in healthcare costs, sick leave, disability and lost productivity. 

Assessing the workplace for these kinds of stressors is an important first step to developing programs and policies to improve the health and well-being of workers and the workplace.

The HWS is online, free, and takes about 20 minutes for individuals to complete. It is anonymous and confidential. Organizations can request access to the HWS for organizations by completing a short form and a unique link will be emailed to the contact person for the organization along with documentation about how to administer the survey. After all participants have completed the survey, an automated, free confidential report of personal results can be emailed directly to each participant (if they choose) and an aggregate/group-level report (without any personal identifiers) is generated and emailed to the organization requesting the survey. The report shows how the results for a participating organization compare to scores on the same major work stressors in a large, national U.S. population survey (NIOSH Quality of Work Life).

The free HWS report is a tool to open workplace communications, with all levels of an organization, about sources of stress at work that might be affecting health and well-being. Participation by employees in understanding the survey results is key to improving health and safety in the workplace. The HWC also offers free tools and resources to take action to address the work stressors identified in the HWS.