Developed and written by Catherine Fitzgerald 2018
You will want to approach this project from the position of a HRM consultant or consulting team (with a partner) to develop a proposal for improving the wellbeing, health and safety of an organization of your choice. You will want to gather secondary public data on your chosen organization.
You (and your partner, if you choose to work with a partner) will present a formal written business report and proposal (approximately 10 pages, APA format, not including references and appendices) to your instructor week 13. You (and your partner) are to turn in your written business report and proposal via Moodle in the appropriate assignment dropbox below ( under the heading ‘Consulting Project Written Business Report and Proposal Drop box’). The ‘Consulting Project Written Business Report and Proposal Guidelines’ and ‘Consulting Project Evaluation Criteria’
are included below this project description. Work that does not meet the time lines will not be accepted.
Your written business report will outline the organizations current situation (summarizing both the strengths and challenges faced by the organization in integrating health protection and health promotion), your recommended solutions based on priority criteria, an action plan with specific implementation steps (develop a wellbeing, health and safety plan including measureable goals, expected outcomes, timeframe, costs and key stakeholder responsibilities) and future evaluation efforts. I will discuss further.
Integrating wellbeing, health and safety into the workplace requires a coordinated, comprehensive and context dependent set of integrated health promotion and protection strategies that can include but are not limited to policies, programs, benefits, environmental supports and community involvement initiatives designed to encourage the health and safety of all workers and the communities in which they live and work. A comprehensive and integrated approach puts policies and interventions in place that address multiple risk factors and wellbeing, health and safety conditions concurrently and recognizes that the interventions and strategies chosen may influence multiple organization levels. You (and your partner) will want to refer to comprehensive and integrated healthy and safe workplace models such as the WHO Healthy Workplaces Model or other broader integrated models. You will want to read the various articles on healthy and workplace models included in your Moodle shell, some of which are posted under week 1.
A systematic process of building wellbeing, health and safety into the workplace will begin with mobilizing workers and employers to invest in healthy workplaces which will involve various degrees of change. You will want to assess the organizations readiness and or resistance towards change. Workplace change is contextual and complex requiring you to understand and incorporate a change model. You will also want to begin by assessing the leadership and employee commitment to healthy and safe workplaces. All this being said, you will want to begin with a needs assessment to establish some base line information about the organizations current commitment, leadership, culture, structure, strategy, vision, values, and practices towards the integration of health protection and health promotion. You will want to include information about the workers, employers and stakeholder’s needs, values and priority issues as people operate within different ethical frameworks (refer to chapter 10). You may need to state your assumptions based on various sources if this information is not publicly accessible to you. You will want to gather secondary public data about the organization, industry and community. You will want to read the various articles on measuring healthy and workplaces included under week 1.
Once you have gathered information about the organization you will want to summarize both the strengths and challenges faced by the organization in integrating health protection and health promotion. You will then want to develop priority setting criteria and establish a few key priorities that are most essential to the wellbeing, health and safety of the organizations workplace. This will involve you (and your partner) using the content in this course to generate solutions. Your next step will be to develop a wellbeing, health and safety plan including measureable goals, expected outcomes, timeframe, costs and responsibilities (such as the key person and/or implementation team accountable) that focuses on a few of the top priorities identified in your assessment. The overall plan should have some immediate and long term goals (3-5 years) in order for the organization to measure success in the future. It should outline the implementation steps needed to put integrated health protection and promotion strategies and interventions into place. You will want to describe how future evaluation efforts will take place to investigate the merit (i.e. quality), worth (i.e. effectiveness), and significance (i.e. importance) of the planned integrated health promotion and protection plan.
