In order to help employers understand well-being and design interventions to achieve well- being, The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health ( NISOH) announced on April 9 the Worker Well-Being Questionnaire (WellBQ).
“Worker well-being is a unifying concept that characterizes quality of life with respect to a person’s working conditions, circumstances outside of work, and physical and mental health status,” said NIOSH Director John Howard, M.D. in a statement. “NIOSH is excited to offer this new tool that anyone can use to evaluate worker well-being in order to help identify opportunities to advance worker well-being through workplace policies, programs, and practices.”
The NIOSH WellBQ is guided by the worker well-being framework external icon designed by NIOSH and the RAND Corporation. This framework identifies five domains of worker well-being:
- Work Evaluation and Experience
- Workplace Policies and Culture
- Workplace Physical Environment and Safety Climate
- Health Status
- Home, Community, and Society
The questionnaire comprises 68 questions representative of the five domains of worker well-being. Complementing these are 15 optional items about employment and demographic information.
Some of the groups that NIOSH envisions the tool helping include:
- Employers, worker health and well-being professionals, and decision-makers can use the NIOSH WellBQ to inform decisions to advance worker well-being in the workforce as a whole or within various worker subpopulations such as industry and occupational sectors or demographic groups.
- Occupational safety & health and public health experts and policymakers can use the NIOSH WellBQ to monitor changes in worker well-being in relation to economic conditions, societal trends, or changing governmental or organizational policies.
- Researchers and organizational consultants can use the NIOSH WellBQ to assess the well-being of a working population before, during, and after an intervention.
Note: The NIOSH website has more information on the tWellBQ including:
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Resources for action
- NIOSH WellBQ document, including the Codebook and Item Source Table
- Stand-alone NIOSH WellBQ instrument