Comparing medical and recreational cannabis use among employees: associations with health and work-related outcomes.

Nearly one in five US employees reports having used cannabis in the past year. As policies and laws regarding cannabis use rapidly change, concerns have arisen over employees' use of cannabis, for both medical and recreational purposes. While extant workplace research has not distinguished between types of cannabis users, other studies have found that medical users are clinically and socio-demographically different from non-medical users. This study utilized a sample of employed National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) respondents to examine differences in workplace characteristics and health outcomes among employed medical, recreational, and mixed-use cannabis users. While some differences were initially seen when examining health and work-related outcomes between the groups, several changed after controlling for other important health-related factors. One key difference between the user groups is the higher percentages of medical and mixed-use cannabis users in the construction and mining industries. This study discusses future research needs, as well as practical implications for workers and employers.

Building Capacity for Workplace Health Promotion: Findings From the Work@Health® Train-the-Trainer Program.

Small- and mid-sized employers are less likely to have expertise, capacity, or resources to implement workplace health promotion programs, compared with large employers. In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed the Work@Health® employer training program to determine the best way to deliver skill-based training to employers of all sizes. The core curriculum was designed to increase employers' knowledge of the design, implementation, and evaluation of workplace health strategies. The first arm of the program was direct employer training. In this article, we describe the results of the second arm-the program's train-the-trainer (T3) component, which was designed to prepare new certified trainers to provide core workplace health training to other employers. Of the 103 participants who began the T3 program, 87 fully completed it and delivered the Work@Health core training to 233 other employers. Key indicators of T3 participants' knowledge and attitudes significantly improved after training. The curriculum delivered through the T3 model has the potential to increase the health promotion capacity of employers across the nation, as well as organizations that work with employers, such as health departments and business coalitions.

Opening the black box: Examining the nomological network of work ability and its role in organizational research.

The aging of the industrialized workforce has spurred research on how to support people working later in life. Within this context, the concept of work ability, or an employee's ability to continue working in their job, has been introduced as an explanatory mechanism for understanding employee disability, wellbeing, attitudes, and behavior. However, the work ability concept has evolved across disparate literatures with multiple, content-diverse measures and often with little consideration of theory or examination of its nomological network. Using the job demands-resources model as a framework, we present a meta-analytic summary (k = 247; N = 312,987) of work ability's correlates and potential moderators of these relationships. Taken together, we found consistent negative relationships between job demands and work ability, and consistent positive relationships between job and personal resources and work ability. Work ability was also associated with important job outcomes including job attitudes and behaviors such as absenteeism and retirement. Measures of work ability that include both perceived and objective components generally showed stronger relationships than did exclusively perceptual measures, and occupation type was a significant moderator of certain relations between work ability and its correlates. We supplemented this meta-analysis with a primary data collection to examine differences between perceived work ability and the conceptually similar variables of self-efficacy and perceived fit, demonstrating that perceived work ability can explain incremental variance in job- and health-related variables. Our discussion focuses on the value of the work ability construct for both research and practice and future directions for work ability research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Training Employers to Implement Health Promotion Programs: Results From the CDC Work@Health® Program.

PURPOSE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated the Work@Health Program to teach employers how to improve worker health using evidence-based strategies. Program goals included (1) determining the best way(s) to deliver employer training, (2) increasing employers' knowledge of workplace health promotion (WHP), and (3) increasing the number of evidence-based WHP interventions at employers' worksites. This study is one of the few to examine the effectiveness of a program designed to train employers how to implement WHP programs. DESIGN: Pre- and posttest design. SETTING: Training via 1 of 3 formats hands-on, online, or blended. PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred six individual participants from 173 employers of all sizes. INTERVENTION: Eight-module training curriculum to guide participants through building an evidence-based WHP program, followed by 6 to 10 months of technical assistance. MEASURES: The CDC Worksite Health ScoreCard and knowledge, attitudes, and behavior survey. ANALYSIS: Descriptive statistics, paired t tests, and mixed linear models. RESULTS: Participants' posttraining mean knowledge scores were significantly greater than the pretraining scores (61.1 vs 53.2, P < .001). A year after training, employers had significantly increased the number of evidence-based interventions in place (47.7 vs 35.5, P < .001). Employers' improvements did not significantly differ among the 3 training delivery formats. CONCLUSION: The Work@Health Program provided employers with knowledge to implement WHP interventions. The training and technical assistance provided structure, practical guidance, and tools to assess needs and select, implement, and evaluate interventions.

Individual employee's perceptions of " Group-level Safety Climate" (supervisor referenced) versus " Organization-level Safety Climate" (top management referenced): Associations with safety outcomes for lone workers.

Research has shown that safety climate is among the strongest predictors of safety behavior and safety outcomes in a variety of settings. Previous studies have established that safety climate is a multi-faceted construct referencing multiple levels of management within a company, most generally: the organization level (employee perceptions of top management's commitment to and prioritization of safety) and group level (employee perceptions of direct supervisor's commitment to and prioritization of safety). Yet, no research to date has examined the potential interaction between employees' organization-level safety climate (OSC) and group-level safety climate (GSC) perceptions. Furthermore, prior research has mainly focused on traditional work environments in which supervisors and workers interact in the same location throughout the day. Little research has been done to examine safety climate with regard to lone workers. The present study aims to address these gaps by examining the relationships between truck drivers' (as an example of lone workers) perceptions of OSC and GSC, both potential linear and non-linear relationships, and how these predict important safety outcomes. Participants were 8095 truck drivers from eight trucking companies in the United States with an average response rate of 44.8%. Results showed that employees' OSC and GSC perceptions are highly correlated (r= 0.78), but notable gaps between the two were observed for some truck drivers. Uniquely, both OSC and GSC scores were found to have curvilinear relationships with safe driving behavior, and both scores were equally predictive of safe driving behavior. Results also showed the two levels of climate significantly interacted with one another to predict safety behavior such that if either the OSC or GSC scores were low, the other's contribution to safety behavior became stronger. These findings suggest that OSC and GSC may function in a compensatory manner and promote safe driving behavior even when either OSC or GSC scores are low. The results of this study provide critical insight into the supplementary interaction between perceptions of OSC and GSC. Recommendations for future research, as well as practical recommendations for organizational intervention, are discussed.

Effects of a Workplace Intervention Targeting Psychosocial Risk Factors on Safety and Health Outcomes.

The goal of this study was to test the effectiveness of a workplace intervention targeting work-life stress and safety-related psychosocial risk factors on health and safety outcomes. Data were collected over time using a randomized control trial design with 264 construction workers employed in an urban municipal department. The intervention involved family- and safety-supportive supervisor behavior training (computer-based), followed by two weeks of behavior tracking and a four-hour, facilitated team effectiveness session including supervisors and employees. A significant positive intervention effect was found for an objective measure of blood pressure at the 12-month follow-up. However, no significant intervention results were found for self-reported general health, safety participation, or safety compliance. These findings suggest that an intervention focused on supervisor support training and a team effectiveness process for planning and problem solving should be further refined and utilized in order to improve employee health with additional research on the beneficial effects on worker safety.