Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded August 24th, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. Today I'm joined by Dr. Marnie Dobson. Dr. Dobson is Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology. She has a PhD in medical sociology and has been an occupational health researcher for the past 15 years, involved in work stress research, as well as workplace intervention development with several skilled labor working populations, including firefighters and urban transit operators. Dr. Dobson is joining us today from Los Angeles. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Thank you for having me.

Jill James:

Well, I asked you here today because of your work and research on work stress. I talk with so many of our listeners from the podcast who are stressed for various reasons, and I talk with employees who are additionally stressed, much of it complicated or compounded by outright stress caused by the pandemic and or family illnesses or other stressors of bouncing life. And for that reason, I really wanted to dig into this subject and hopefully be able to discover some resources that we can pass on to the listeners, which is why I asked you here today. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

It's my pleasure.

Jill James:

Before we dig into the topic of work stress, what is a medical sociologist?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

That's a good question. Medical sociology, I think of as a distant cousin of public health, although the sociologists wouldn't necessarily like to think of it that way. I think medical sociology is really a subsection of sociology that's interested in the social causes of illness and how the social world impacts people's health and wellbeing. It's not too far off from public health where we know that illness occurs within communities. It was not much of a side step for me to go from the sociology of medicine to public health, which is where I've ended up, particularly in occupational health and safety as well, which as we know a subset of public health.

Jill James:

How did you get into this work? What's your path?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Well, I met a colleague of mine who I work closely with now for 15 plus years, Dr. Peter Schnall and Paul Landsbergis and others who are social epidemiologists. I was really fascinated I think in their particular knowledge about the workplace and work factors that contribute to some of the chronic disease epidemics that we know really well. It was really working with Peter and Paul and other colleagues that grew my interest in thinking about work as a source of stress and to understand better how people are impacted by social environments. We know that socioeconomic status, things like poverty, different social statuses impact on people's longevity, how long they live, as well as the illnesses that they may end up being exposed to. This was another aspect of that, the work environment and how it plays a role in people's health.

Jill James:

What do we know about work stress and what is it? I'm assuming you've given a definition to it as well.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Well, we know stress, stress in general is a ubiquitous human physiological thing. We all experience stress. It's part of our makeup, the fight or flights response is a natural biological response. We have too threats, distant, distant past, humans were threatened particularly by nature and wildlife, and their responses were to fight or flee actual threats. And now we're much more likely to be surrounded by symbolic threats, to our wellbeing, to our security, whether it's financial or work security. We still have these fight or flight stress responses. In normal times we would experience a fight or flight response where we get an increase in our heart rate, our muscles getting ready to run or fight, our breathe thing increases. And then the threat is over and our bodies return to normal.

But in an environment where there is a lot of sources of stress, they may all be symbolic, our fight or flight response continues, and it continues to kick in and it can become chronic when we're exposed to sources of stress in our daily lives. When that happens, that really can impact a person's physiology on a short term and long term basis. The symptoms of stress are things like headaches, fatigue, the short term symptoms that we've all felt when we're under stress. But what many people don't know is that if you're exposed to these kinds of stressors, as we call them, which are the sources of stress in our daily life and in our workplaces, that over time that chronic exposure can impact our health in more permanent ways.

Jill James:

You're talking about symbolic stress or the stressors, for people who are listening, particularly in our American culture, right? Where maybe we're always comparing ourselves to one another or something else that, well, maybe mine isn't that bad, or you just take something for granted. Would you mind maybe naming some of those typical stressors or these symbolic stresses to just try to base them for us?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah, of course. Sociology also we look at stress and stressors as well as in epidemiology and other disciplines. It's really a cross-disciplinary study stress. It can be, you can experience stress from life events, especially things like divorce or loss of a loved one. These are acute events that may not be chronic, they may get better over time. We can experience stress from uncertainty in terms of whether we are going to be able to pay the bills, so financial stressors like that. And then there's certain kinds of job characteristics or what we call work stressors that we've learned about over almost 40 years of research, that these aspects of the way work is organized, actually impact people in profound ways, in terms of provoking the stress response on a chronic basis.

Things like workload, if your workload is really high, we call that high job demands. We also call these psychosocial stressors because they're a combination of psychological, how people perceive the kinds of stressors they're experiencing, but they're also social, they're part of the way in which the workplace in this case is organized. You put them together, you understand that it's an interaction between people's psychological experience and also the social reality that they live in. Job demands is a good example of that. You can feel like you're over loaded and in reality there may be a lot of under staffing going on. You don't have enough people working at the counter, for example, in a Deli in Walmart, and you've got to a line up of people waiting for you, getting more and more irritated, and you're rushing back and forth between sides of the Deli, because someone's not there to help with the load. That is an example of an objective workload issue.

Jill James:

Yeah. Right. I was mentioning when we first began that I've been talking with many employees who are identifying stress and just in the last 48 hours, the people that I've spoken with that have reached out to me, and I'm guessing these are all work stressors. One was a teacher who's preparing for the school year and the regular stress that goes along with that, but was reaching out and asking questions like, how do I buy an air fill purifier for my classroom? What's the difference between a face mask and a respirator? What do you think I should wear? How would I redirect air in my classroom? And then another school employee who's the parent of small children who's asking me similar questions, all of that regarding the pandemic.

A college professor talked to me about first day back in a classroom after not being with real human, in-person teaching for well over a year and talked about the makeup of the students. And then her computer didn't work right away when she was doing something. And then, plus wearing a face mask and was she thirsty while she was teaching? And then what were the students like this semester? I talked to a police officer yesterday who said, my work has just been so busy, I haven't been taking time for myself and a way to detach from my work. We were talking about, he has a yoga practice and he said, I haven't done it in so long and it's the one way I can unplug. Another employee in health services who has got a really ill family member who was talking about balancing that kind of stuff. I'm guessing those are all examples of-

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Oh yeah. Yeah. The COVID pandemic unfortunately has created a veneer of stress or stressors, over a top of what people always have experienced in stressful jobs. So not only are the teachers dealing with potential workload issues or feeling they don't have enough say in health and safety in the classroom, they're not getting their voices heard about concerns about PPE and how to manage students in the classroom. Those kinds of things are, are stressful on top of what is already a very difficult job, partly because there's lack of resources. We know that the number of students in classes has been increasing over time, so teachers are expected to do more with, with less, which is just objectively, really stressful.

And then to add the pandemic to it, which is the concerns, the uncertainty of being exposed to a virus that might make you or someone you love sick, is a major stressful experience. We also know that parents of young children, school aged children in the last year and a half while kids have been at home, reported major increases in stress and anxiety, to try to continue working from home while managing small children and trying to keep them on Zoom, was what we call work family conflict on steroids.

Jill James:

Yeah. Right. Right. With regard to work stress, you had alluded to physiological impacts, but what is the impact to human beings?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Well, there's been a lot of epidemiological research, so research on populations, and there have been various stress models that have developed to try to explain certain circumstances in the workplace that increase people's risk for stress and then increase their risk for poor health. You can study a population over time and assess whether if you're exposed to high demands and low job control, which is not really having much of a say over the timing of your tasks or over when you can take breaks or how fast you're expected to work. The combination of having very high demands and very low control is what we call job strain. And this model has really been shown in many, many longitudinal studies to have a negative impact in over time on people's mental health.

So it's associated with increased risk of depression as well as increased risk for hyper attention and high blood pressure and also increased risk for cardiovascular disease for cardiovascular mortality as well. There's been a lot of studies over the years that are now accumulating this evidence that these kinds of work stresses have an impact on these chronic diseases that we know are a heavy burden on individuals and on society as a whole. That's just one model, there's other models as well. We know things like bullying, for example, which has been on the increase, is a significant stressor for people in the workplace. It's been increasing in the last 15 years, now annual reports where they ask questions about bullying, show about 30% of Americans personally experienced up from about 17% in 2007. We're seeing an increase in bullying, which also has effects on mental health as well as sick leave.

People are more likely to take sick leave when they're being bullied because it does affect their mental health and their wellbeing, and that affects the overall productivity of organization.

Jill James:

I remember when, I think I may have mentioned to you when we spoke before, I was an investigator with OSHA for over a decade before I went into private practice, private industry rather. I remember one investigation I was on where employees had filed a complaint about workplace bullying. Specifically I remember the employees were talking about being in the bathroom and someone coming into this stall next to them and bullying them and saying things to them while they were trying to use the bathroom about whatever it was they were doing with their job, and then using a nail gun while they were working to shoot nails at them.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

That's lovely.

Jill James:

Right? And so when people think about bullying, it can manifest itself in many different ways.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. The important thing to understand about bullying is that it's not necessarily just offhand rude comment, which is rudeness or meanness, but it really is a targeted and repeated abusive treatment of another person. It has a fairly important definition in that way that it has to be a repeated and targeted mistreatment. It can include verbal abuse. It can include work sabotage where people are trying to undermine people's work for whatever reason. It can even rise to the level of physical or other kinds of harassment. It is a major concern in workplaces. I think it's still not quite being dealt with as fully as it needs to be, because of the effects on people's health and wellbeing, and because people leave jobs, and turnover is a major cost to organizations.

Jill James:

And so, is work stress an epidemic?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

I believe it is. We have data to suggest that it is. There are national surveys that ask the same question and have asked it for years and years now about how often people feel stressed or tensed during the work day. The people that answer very often or often, it tends to be about 30%. So about one in three Americans do say that they on a pretty consistent basis on these annual or every four year surveys in terms of the quality of work life survey that's administered every four years is, it's one in three. One in three Americans experience pretty frequent stress at work. Other surveys have shown even more, three out Americans say that work is a significant source of stress along with money, the top two sources of stress are money and work generally. That's quite millions of people in that situation.

Jill James:

Right. Tell us more about this quality of work, life survey, rather.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. Well, NIOSH, is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which I'm sure you and your audience know about. NIOSH works with the general social survey to include a module, they call the quality of work life survey, and they've been including it in GSS since 2002, I believe, and the last one was 2018. It asks a lot of questions about the kinds of job characteristics we talked about, like demands and control and social support, work family conflict questions, as well as these more general questions on stress and so on. Now that survey is of a nationally representative sample of us working people, and this usually around 1500 people in each survey. It's a small sample, so it's also not analyzed very often. The findings are not published very often, you have to wait for a researcher to get excited and [crosstalk 00:20:30] dig into it and publish.

Unfortunately we don't get good, reliable reports on the levels of some of these work stresses that we probably need.

Jill James:

When it comes to work stress and the cost to the employer, can you talk about that?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. I think this is something that we really need a shift in thinking about, because there is a tendency to think that everyone experience stress, stress is ubiquitous. Obviously we don't want it negatively affecting people and it can have an impact on employee productivity and so on. That can be a cost, in terms of how stress impacts people's ability to concentrate or handle workloads and so on. But really there's short term effects like that, that can be measured. But also the long term effects are the costs of healthcare to treat the kinds of illnesses that people are more likely to experience if they're exposed to these chronic stressors for a long period of time. We know, for example, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. 300 million people according to the World Health Organization experience depression.

It's a major concern. One in five, I think Americans experience a mental health problem in a given year. People with depression are more likely to have sickness absences and maybe more likely obviously to go on disability, and both of those cost employers a lot of money. Now, we know that depression is what we call multi-ideological, so it has multiple causes that could be related to the individual, could be genetics, family history, past trauma. But we also know from research that these kinds of job stresses I've been mentioning like high demands and low control, work, family conflict, bullying, job insecurity, also increase the risk for depression. Some researchers out there have done a great job and figured out what the contribution of these work stresses is to the overall amount of depression.

In these studies, they've shown that about 15% of all depressive disorders may be related to, because of work stress. The idea is if you could reduce work stress, you could reduce up to 15% of the incidences of depression. When you think about the amount of depression out there, that's a pretty large number of people that could be helped.

Jill James:

Right. It is. That's staggering. Did you say it's the leading cause of disability worldwide?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

It is the leading cause of disability worldwide.

Jill James:

Wow.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. It's even becoming a problem in developing countries, especially with industrialization, we see more mental health concern at work particularly.

Jill James:

Yeah. Does that lead us into-

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

It's kind of a depressing picture right now.

Jill James:

It is. Right? And so I'm wondering-

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

I promise there's solutions.

Jill James:

Okay. Let's talk about those specifically, what does the Healthy Work Campaign do and or maybe we can flip into the center for socio epidemiology as well, social epidemiology.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. Well, my colleagues and I in the Center for Social Epidemiology, which is a nonprofit organization that's really dedicated to furthering the education and the research about these kinds of social factors, work factors that contribute to these chronic diseases like depression, other mental health issues, as well as cardiovascular disease, which you can imagine cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

Jill James:

Right. It is.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

And we know that [crosstalk 00:25:09]. Yeah. We know that these work stressors are impacting people's cardiovascular health and may contribute between 10 to 20% of cardiovascular disease deaths. There's a whole other burden there and cost to society in terms of work stresses impacts on cardiovascular disease. Here's a novel thought, if we can intervene and prevent or reduce the work environment from contributing to these chronic disease burdens, then we may be able to reduce the burden of these chronic diseases substantially, by considering work as a location for improving the health of individuals.

Jill James:

What a novel thought.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. So anyway, as I was saying, the Healthy Work Campaign, as the Center for Social Epidemiology, we were finding that we were often speaking to the choir, we were talking to each other, which is great, because we want to broaden the research communities understanding about these issues and we created a clearing house for information and research on work stress and health. But what we realized is that, as researchers, we have a certain language that can be pretty inaccessible to a lot of people. Peter Schnall and myself and others really believe that it's part of the job of academics and researchers to translate the knowledge that we are generating into usable and accessible information for the general public and for other interested stakeholders, occupational safety and health professionals. We launched the Healthy Work Campaign in 2018 with a grand website, work, sorry.

Jill James:

I'm looking at it now. Healthywork.org.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Healthywork.org. We really wanted to create space where there was more accessible resources for organizations, individuals and worker advocates and unions to access this information about the importance of thinking about work stress, and thinking about what healthy work might look like. The Healthy Work Campaign really is, our goals were to increase education and produce educational material. We have we have been publishing articles that are more friendly language about some of these topics on medium. We have a blog that we publish our thoughts and ideas on regularly. Social media of course is a really important conduit for getting information out there and connecting to others who are also interested in these ideas. We also created statistics and infographics that organizations can use, some of which I've talked about today to raise awareness about the importance of addressing work stress and healthy work.

That was our number one goal. Our second goal was to offer organizations and also individuals, a tool to assess whether they were experiencing these kinds of work stressors. I think you have to know where the problem is, especially as an organization and, yes, we know that there's stress, but if we can find the source of that stress, then I think we have a better job of attending to it or addressing it and that was why we created the healthy work survey.

Jill James:

Yeah. Tell us more about that.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

The healthy work survey was our attempt to create a tool that would allow people easily to go online and fill out a survey. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Well maybe 15 to 20 minutes. After you fill it out, you have the option as an individual filling it out, to receive a report that can be emailed directly to you and it's confidential, anonymous, secure. It gives people an idea of whether they have high job demands and whether they have low job control and these other work family conflict. It compares their score to the national population scores. You can tell whether you're at higher risk than the US population, at intermediate risk or at low risk. If you're at high risk, then you know that this could be a concern for your health. Because we know that the greater the stress, the more likely you are to experience health problems. That was our first step, is offering it to individuals.

Jill James:

That's fantastic. Individuals can do their own benchmarking, like, how stressed am I?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

And what are these stressors?

Jill James:

Yeah. Right. And validate what's happening with them.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. We all know when we feel stressed and we're not telling people anything they don't know that way, but what we're trying to get people to see, is that it's not just in their head or in their bodies, it's also in their workplace, in the work environment. It can actually be attended to, that people all can work together collectively, hopefully that's the best way to go about it, to begin to address the source. Now it is important to have a yoga practice and meditate. I know a lot of companies are offering wellness programs to help people cope with the symptoms of stress, which I think is important. But of course, you can meditate and you can go do your yoga practice. You're going into the same workplace with the same stressors day after day. It's kind of a bandaid.

Jill James:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. People can take this assessment for themselves. And then do you have another assessment for groups of individuals, like an employer could essentially assign to their employees?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yes, we do. We just finished tweaking. We have a location on the website for employers. We also have a location for unions and worker advocates, occupational safety and health professionals. We send a unique link to an organization that's interested in working with us. They send that link to their employees and they can go online. It's completely anonymous, so there's no names collected. The information once we get a good participation rate, we are able to automatically translate those survey results into a report for the organization within a day or two of them finishing the survey. It's been a long haul. We worked with a computer programmer and good colleague who actually does this in another country, in a country that requires employers to look at this psychosocial work environment, as we call it work stress.

He really helped us put together the system and it worked really well and people can have data in their hands, within a day or two of their organization completing the survey. It gives organizations a starting point. Again, the survey allows organization to see where their group, their employees as a whole sit relative to the national average and also the national high risk levels of stress. It will tell you whether your group is at high risk or intermediate risk or low risk for these common stressors, like social support levels and workload and work, family conflict, safety climate and a number of things.

Jill James:

Are these surveys free?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

They are right now being offered for free. The Healthy Work Campaign is a project sponsored by the Center for Social Epidemiology, it's a nonprofit. We want to offer this as a service to employers and to other groups that really want to begin to address and deal with this work stress epidemic. Right now, yeah, it's completely free.

Jill James:

Wow. Thank you for that. That's fantastic.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Donations are always welcome, but it's not required. We are really committed to furthering this as a tool and resource for as many organizations as possible.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. And then, if someone an organization or an individual takes the survey, they've got their results, you also have a healthy work toolkit. And is that something that after they see their results, maybe they can deploy some things from this toolkit?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

That is our hope. Really the most important thing about the survey is that it's an educational tool to help organizations and workers know where the problems live, and then the next step has to be, what do we do about them? And so the toolkits are set up to help organizations particularly to find various ways other organizations and other groups have found to address some of these major concerns. We have a step by step process that organizations can follow to use the results of the survey to talk with leadership, with stakeholders in an organization, and especially with employees. Because we really believe and push the idea that it's really the employees that need to be involved in the process in order to find the solutions.

If you just institute changes from above without talking with employees and having employees and workers really talk about what the problems mean in the workplace, you're going to of miss the boat. I think there's a lot of knowledge among frontline workers about how you can address things like workload and how you can address things like social support. And so we really think that, and the research into work stress intervention has really shown that involving employees in the process is a really important part of a successful and effective intervention campaign.

Jill James:

That resonates with health and safety professionals, our audience here for this podcast, because we've all been saying that for so long, involve the employee, involve the employee.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. I think you have to. There's ways of doing it. It's not always easy, some companies might not have the resources to spend money on employees being involved in health and safety committees or being involved in work stress committee. Obviously if they have representatives, that can help when management and labor work together, that can often be a more effective way of implementing these changes and seeing that they work and that there's consensus.

Jill James:

You just said work stress committee. What a great idea, and also one that some employers may find that sounds stigmatizing, or countercultural for what they want to do. And at the same time I think we're at a point in history with the pandemic where it feels like we're more open to having those conversations about stress. This might be the time to seize the moment. Right?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

I think so. This is the problem with the way we think about stress. We do think about it as an individual problem. That's why we use the word stressor. It's awkward. It's much more awkward than saying work stress, but work stressor really puts the focus on the source of stress, which is the way work is organized.

Jill James:

Not the human being.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Not the human being. That's why we talk about healthy work, not just healthy workers, because we think that if a little bit more attention is paid to changing the way we work, then we may help to prevent some of the effects of stress on workers and on the costs to organizations. It will improve health and safety to look at some of these things, because we know that certain aspects, especially high demands at workload, under staffing, job insecurity, these kinds of things, we know that they also impact on injury rates, muscular skeletal problems, as well as mental health, because of the pandemic, and even before the pandemic, mental health has been a growing epidemic that is affecting the workplace, but may also be arising from the way we work.

Jill James:

You had mentioned that you launched the Healthy Work Campaign website in 2018. Do you have people who've implemented aspects of the toolkit that have some successes that you can talk about and, or are there other studies or campaigns in different countries, like you had alluded to who have seen a benefit?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Yeah. We haven't, we are just rolling out our organizational survey. We've had our individual survey up and running for about, I think about six months, eight months. The whole process has taken a while, but-

Jill James:

Of course.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

We are pilot testing our healthy work survey for organizations with some organizations now. We actually just finished one this last weekend and sent it out within two days of closing the survey, to the organization that we're working with. We're looking forward to moving ahead and helping them translate those findings into actionable goals. The healthy work strategies page has case studies and case reports from organizations, and also from researchers that have worked with organizations to successfully implement what we call work organization interventions, which is basically, how you create healthier workplaces. The Quebec hospital workers study, I don't know if you're familiar with it.

Jill James:

Mm-mm (negative). No.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

But group of researchers in Canada began working with a hospital system in Quebec Canada. The hospital system was really concerned about burnout among their nursing staff and other health problems that healthcare workers were experiencing. The researchers and the management of the hospitals worked within labor management committees and they involved different employees at different levels of the organization in these committees, they created a whole set of interventions to impact on things like improving social support. They found that there were communication and leadership issues among supervisors and subordinates that they thought could be improved upon. They also looked at staffing shortages. They also implemented health behavior changes, to encourage healthier eating, more exercise, but it was a combination. And so it also included efforts to address work stressors.

And then the researchers were able to assess everyone at time one, and then three years later as these interventions had been rolled out across the hospitals, there was also a control hospital because there were researchers in the mix. And so they were able to compare the effects of these interventions against the hospital that didn't get any of the interventions. They were able to find at the end of it, that there were increases in social support. There were decreases in job demands. There were increases in job control and also decreases in burnout over that three year process. It really was a successful study and we wrote up a short description of the study in our healthy work strategies page that people can go on and look at. There's about 30, I think, case studies there on various topics, some are on bullying, organizations that have been successful at addressing bullying.

Jill James:

Fantastic.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

And so on. We do have a lot of great stories. There needs to be more, and there can always be more written up about where organizations and worker advocate groups have been successful at improving working conditions for organizations. We are going to continue to update that and keep that as a resource for organizations that once they have their survey results, might want to know what other groups have done to address them.

Jill James:

The resources tab on your website looks very rich. And if people aren't enticed enough already to go to your website, you have a spot for stats and infographics and business costs and the work tools we've been talking about and strategies and a healthy work agenda and articles and research. There's one I want to ask you about because I'm interested to know what this is, if you can talk about it. Is it pronounced WOE documentary? W-O-E?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

This was really what prompted us to move in this direction. We really wanted to make a documentary, to raise awareness about the impacts of what we're talking about today, work stressors on health and especially on the chronic disease burden. We have produced a short 11 minute documentary called Working on Empty, and it is accessible on our website. There's actually a button right on the front page, which is a play button. It will take you straight to our Working on Empty website and play the short 10 or 11 minute video that we developed. We would like to eventually turn it into a granted documentary, about the impacts of work and what different groups are doing like we've talked about, to improve work stressors and improve health. Eventually that's where we hope to go.

But it's a neat little clip, takes 10, 11 minutes to watch. It really does give you a synopsis of what we mean by work stressors.

Jill James:

Fantastic. Thank you for that. I'm hoping that people who are listening today are interested in the survey, not only for themselves, but for their companies and maybe our listeners to the podcast will be able to supercharge getting some data into what it is that you're doing and spreading the word and making it impact for their workplaces.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

I hope so. And a lot of it does require some convincing and you have to sit down and talk about the importance of this. That's why we have resources for occupational safety and health professionals that want to make a business case, for example, to their company about why they should be aware of the harmful impacts of work stressors on employee health and wellbeing. Because sometimes it takes the bottom line to motivate some companies to attend to these kinds of impacts on their employees. There's ample evidence now that it does have a real financial cost as well, of course, as the effects of health problems on individuals and their families.

Jill James:

Right. Right. Well, Dr. Dobson, as we're wrapping up our time together today, is there a suggested first step for people when they come to your website? Is it what you just laid out, looking at the business strategies? What would you say would be step one and maybe step two?

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

Well, I think definitely looking at the film, because it will give you a little short 10 minute summary of what we've just been talking about, hopefully describing what we mean by these job stressors that we know impact how health. Looking at that, there's also an interactive graphic called Principles of Healthy Work, which explains in a little bit more detail than I was able to, the different kinds of stressors that we know from research have been evidenced in terms of their impacts on depression and burnout and blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Understanding that element of it, because what we realized is that, we took for granted that people understood our work. Honestly, I think a lot of people don't think about stress in this way.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). I agree with that.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

In terms of the sources of stress. We really did want to make it more accessible, make it available and sharing it with others, creating an interest and a movement around this was one of our goals. And then the second thing, would be to, you can go to the tabs for employers and there's a healthy work survey page. You click on the request access button and it will allow you to fill out a short form with your contact information. If there are specific questions we have our contact page. You can contact us at [email protected]. We will be happy to get back to you with a lot more information, because we have developed a lot.

Jill James:

You sure have in a short period. Well, I mean, your body of work has produced, has culminated to come to this. Fantastic.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

And a big community of, a very large community of researchers that have been working in this field for 30 or 40 years before us. We really are a part of a big community of psychosocial work stress researchers.

Jill James:

So much gratitude for all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you coming today and sharing this with us and sharing these resources. I hope many people listening really use the tools to identify and tend to those work stressors.

Dr. Marnie Dobson:

I hope so. And it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on Jill.

Jill James:

Thank you. Thank you all for spending your time listening today, and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers make it home safe every day. If you're not subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe at iTunes, the Apple podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals. Special thanks to Naeem Jaraysi, our podcast producer. Until next time, thanks for listening.