ICHW is a global resource for businesses, professional firms, labor unions, employees and the public to understand how to create healthy workplaces.
The Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (ICHW) was established by the University of California, Berkeley to become a global resource for businesses, professional firms, labor unions, employees and the public to understand how to create healthy workplaces, and a locus of innovation in the design and implementation of work and workplace changes based on integrated science.
ICHW is in the process of identifying and integrating key scientific findings associated with employee health and well-being across disciplines in order to understand how we might build a new organizational template that will promote employee health and well-being. Center members, representing over 15 academic departments and fields, are beginning to assemble research from their respective fields and are helping to build a single (“one-stop-shop”) repository of research and resources for easy access.
This picture will be translated into a new organizational template: set of guiding principles and recommendations based on empirical evidence that organizations can follow and put into practice. Finally, ICHW will conduct new interdisciplinary research to advance our knowledge and understanding of how employee health and well-being can be improved, and to promote innovation in workplace design and organizational practices to meet employers’ and employees’ needs.
A new organizational template based on all known science can guide companies and organizations within the public and private sectors and across industries toward a new formulation of work and workplaces which will result in greater employee health and well-being and improved organizational outcomes. Research and case studies have already demonstrated the potential of such organizational changes. Given this potential, a comprehensive, systematic, and evidence-driven approach to organizational change is likely to yield the scale of human and organizational improvements needed to make a significant impact on the looming human health and healthcare crisis
