Incorporating Worksite Interventions in Safety and Health (IWISH)

Incorporating Worksite Interventions in Safety and Health: Building Capacity for Total Worker Health

In September of 2021, Dr. Jeremy Biggs and Lisa Gren, the principal investigators (PIs) of Incorporating Worksite Interventions in Safety and Health (IWISH) approached several different companies with a request to study their workers: not for what would keep them safe, but what made them feel safe during the pandemic. Even in the midst of societal upheaval and a dramatic rethinking of what work was valuable, why did some workers feel like their employers had their best interests in mind while others feared the daily trek to work? As the PIs conceptualized this project, they expected that there would be some overlap between areas of Total Worker Health (TWH) practice and what companies did to protect their workers. But which ones proved most valuable? How did employers manage the onslaught of rapidly changing information? And was the implementation of some strategies more effective than others, even when the strategy itself remained the same?

To answer these questions, the research team held a series of focus groups with four manufacturing companies and one transportation company in Utah. Since U-POWER aims to study work and worker health through the lens of power, the team decided to separately conduct focus groups for workers and their immediate supervisors so that both groups would feel freer to express themselves and to ensure worker voices were centered. Both groups were asked the same series of questions about the impact of the pandemic and how staff felt about their employers’ COVID-19 policies. 

In U-POWER’s third year, the research team concluded their data collection and set about reviewing and analyzing the transcripts from the focus groups. Members of the research team set about learning or refining their qualitative analysis skills so that they could begin to understand the lived experience of working in each company during the tumultuous year of 2020. 

To help guide this analysis, they turned to a set of six competencies that had been previously identified for TWH professionals to help characterize the varying solutions that each employer had proposed to help keep workers safe (below).