Workability
What Is Workability?
The Workability approach was developed by the Finnish Institute for Occupational Health (FIOH) in the mid 1980s and evidence shows that promoting Workability can improve both organisational productivity and individual workers’ wellbeing. In Finland it is an important contributor to the extension of working life by decreasing work related disability and premature retirement (Illmarinen 2005).
Workability is built on the balance between a person’s resources and work demands.
A person’s resources consist of health and ability, education and competence, values & attitudes. Work, on the other hand covers the work environment and community as well as the actual contents, demands and organisation and supervision of work.
Workability can be described as a building with several floors. A staircase links the floors indicating that all the factors interact.
Health and physical, psychological and social functional capacity create the ground floor.
The second floor represents professional knowledge and competence (skill) and their continuous development used to meet the demands of work life.
The third floor is about the relationship between work and personal life including values and attitudes to ageing and is relatively open to different influences – hence the balcony indicating interaction with the world beyond the workplace. The fourth floor represents work and its related factors. Work conditions, work content and demands, work community and organisation, supervision and management all have an influence on workability. Supervisors are responsible for the fourth floor and have a mandate to organise and change the floor if necessary.
Workability is not separated from life outside of work. The family and a person’s close community can also affect a person’s Workability in many different ways throughout life. The operational environment also has an impact and society creates the infrastructure, services and rules according to which enterprises and employees’ Workability can be supported.
In practice people search for the optimal balance between work and personal resources throughout their work life. The factors affecting Workability are continually changing. Promotion and maintenance of Workability requires good cooperation between employees and employers.
Reference
Ilmarinen, J. Towards a longer worklife! Ageing and the quality of worklife in the European Union, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health 2005. pp132-134
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Professor Juhani Ilmarinen at the METEOR project launch
Settle in for a 27 minute introduction to Workability from the architect of Workability himself.
Explore the Workability house (FIOH 2010 Age Power):
This simple image captures the essence of the many factors which impact our ability to work.
This METEOR presentation gives you a quick overview of the model:
Workability—a comprehensive concept for occupational health research and prevention
Workability is primarily a question of a balance between work and personal resources. In practice, people search for an optimal balance throughout their entire work life. This optimal balance may be very different in different phases of work life. In order to find a balance, work and personal resources need to be continuously combined. Personal resources change, for example, with age, whereas work demands change, for example, with globalization and new technology. The factors affecting Workability are therefore continuously changing.
Ilmarinen Editorial
Scand J Work Environ Health 2009; 35(1):1–5
Download FACT SHEET: What is Workability PDF
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Applying Workability
Benefits of good workability
Promoting Workability can have great benefits for both workers and businesses. The incidence of work disability and the likelihood of premature retirement and absenteeism can be reduced and individuals’ quality of life and wellbeing can be improved, with the effects carrying over into retirement. The company can also gain from increased productivity and improvements to its image as an employer of choice. A study of 200 companies using the Tervus Economic Appraisal method, found the return on investment in promoting Workability ranged from a factor of 3 to 20. This positive return was largely due to increased productivity and reduced absenteeism. (Bergström and Ahonen 2000)
Measuring work ability
At the centre of the workability model is the self assessment tool, the Workability Index (WAI). It provides a self-assessment of workability that is highly predictive of continued participation in the workforce. The WAI is usually supplemented with other questions that provide a self-assessment of individual and work related factors that are influencing or contributing to one’s workability. It gives a unique perspective – simultaneously highlighting both the work related and personal risk factors impacting on workability and the ways in which they interact.
BWA’s recent ARC Linkages project Redesigning Work for an Ageing Society developed the Workability Survey (WAS) which has been extended to aged care employment. The WAS incorporates the WAI and adds questions to assess a broader range of factors in more depth. This provides both management and workers with the information they need to more accurately develop and target effective measures to improve Workability at the individual and organisational level and to identify factors in the operational environment and beyond which impact on workability.
How to improve work ability
Investigations of the effectiveness of intervention programs, indicate that different aspects of the work situation can singly contribute to workability as follows;
This Figure depicts Explanatory power of the regression models for the work ability, people aged 30–64-years.
N=5199 Finnish Health 2000 Survey
There is no standard one-size-fits-all solution for maintaining and improving workability.
It is best done through a long-term, integrated program of activities that target all four areas – individual health, individual skills, competencies and values, physical and psycho-social work demands and the work environment.
The most successful programs identify and target the specific needs of the workforce and the individual workplace. This often means building on what is already being done through better targeting and integration of existing programs. It may also mean supplementing current programs and gradually introducing new activities. Most importantly, the Workability programs must be systematically monitored and evaluated to ensure that they appropriately and effectively meet the needs of both individual workers and the organisation.
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