Assessment & Planning Tools

This Action Checklist is designed to help change agents during all stages of developing, implementing, and improving a healthy organization change agenda. It addresses enabling conditions for change, the change process, and the scope and focus of interventions. Individual change agents, committees, teams, training workshops, or informal networks in an organization can use this checklist. You can adjust the actions listed in the checklist and the sequence in which you do them, adding other items to fit your organization’s specific context and goals. The checklist also provides you with a guide to the issues you will need to fully consider, discuss, and learn from. You may need to regularly revisit the checklist, updating it as you make progress.

The Healthy Organization Assessment can help you determine where your organization is on its path to promoting employee well-being and achieving sustainable performance into the future. This tool focuses on the building blocks of a healthy organization – vibrant workplaces, inspired employees, inclusive leadership, and positive culture – and the concept of sustainable success. You can use the tool individually, fill it in as a team or at a wellness or OHS committee meeting, or use it in leadership development sessions, or as a planning tool. Use your results to help strategize how to move further down your healthy organization path. The assessment will focus your attention on identifying the strengths you can build on, where improvements need to be made, and potential barriers to change that you will need to overcome.

This one-page handout summarizes evidence-based guidelines that can help to inform your healthy organization planning and actions. Like my Assessment tool and Checklist, it can be used by individuals, teams, committees or in training and development sessions. For more information on how to create a healthier organization, see my book: Creating Healthy Organizations: Taking Action to Improve Employee Well-being. (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

A useful insight from the field of health promotion is the importance of a person’s readiness to make changes in their health-related attitudes and behaviors. Organizations also can be assessed for their readiness to change in a healthy direction. First develop a vision that you and your coworkers would like to see your organization achieve. Today, this vision could outline the kind of workplace you want to create post-pandemic. Once you have a healthy organization vision that sets out your shared aspirations for how the organization can improve, use that vision to assess to what extent the important components of your organization are “ready” to support or enable changes in the direction of the vision. As a start, the key organizational features to review are presented in my Change Readiness Checklist.