<i>Total Worker Health®</i> and Organizational Behavior Management: Emerging Opportunities for Improving Worker Well-being
Total Worker Health gives BCBAs a ready-made framework to move beyond performance management into employee safety and well-being.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Olson et al. (2023) wrote a roadmap. They asked: how can behavior analysts help make jobs safer and healthier?
They linked two fields. One is Total Worker Health, a CDC program that mixes safety with wellness. The other is Organizational Behavior Management, our own science of workplace behavior.
What they found
The paper finds a gap. Safety teams rarely use behavior tools. OBM teams rarely track injury rates or stress.
The authors list places where the two worlds can meet. Examples: pinpoint safe lifting, reinforce reporting of pain early, and measure both quality scores and sick days.
How this fits with other research
Guo et al. (2024) already did it. A Japanese hospital used a Balanced Scorecard to share safety and wellness data each week. Turnover fell from 24 % to 3 %. Their case shows one concrete OBM tool named in the Olson roadmap.
Hartung et al. (2011) ran a trial. They gave Triple P parenting classes at work. Parents felt less stress and took fewer mental-health days. The result proves employee well-being interventions can live inside the workplace, just as Olson urges.
Esquierto-Leal et al. (2021) add the equity lens. They argue behavior-based leadership can change whole cultures. Olson widens the lens to include physical safety, fatigue, and health equity side-by-side.
Why it matters
You already shape performance with antecedents and consequences. This paper says you can shape health the same way. Start small: pick one safety habit, measure it daily, and tie it to the same reinforcement system you use for productivity. You turn your OBM skills into a health intervention without switching manuals.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add one health metric, like safe-lift count or hydration breaks, to your daily scoreboard and reinforce it the same way you reinforce task completion.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
We draw artificial boundaries between our lives at work, at home, and in the community. Each person is living an integrated life where all of their environments (resources, physical environment, psychosocial environment, responsibilities/demands) interact to impact their safety, health, and well-being. Total Worker Health® is an approach developed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to address such interactions, and to advance science and practice for protecting workers’ safety, health, and well-being. The Total Worker Health (TWH) approach represents an expansion of traditional occupational safety and health research and practice, with strong safety protections for workers as its foundation. The current paper provides an introduction to TWH, including: (1) Significance, (2) Historical Background, (3) Hierarchy of Controls, (4) Review of TWH Interventions, and (5) Future Opportunities. The reciprocal and interactive perspective of TWH is consistent with Skinnerian and other approaches to behavioral science, as well as organizational systems analysis approaches. With its behavioral and systems analysis roots, and associated historical emphasis on environmental conditions and interventions, the Organizational Behavior Management community can make great and important contributions in the TWH domain.
Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 2023 · doi:10.1080/01608061.2022.2146256