Health promotion in workplaces with office environments

Abstract

Our thesis aims to describe the importance of health promotion in workplaces with office environments. We want to shed light on the concept health promotion and open up people's eyes for the wideness of its meaning. With this thesis we investigate the manager's role to prevent unhealthiness and taking many varieties of health in consideration regarding the employees' wellbeing. We also look into the employees' attitudes and feelings towards health promotion and how it affects them. Health promotion open ups for opportunities to improve the employees' sense of coherence, their motivation and their health in different aspects. To analyze the connection between health promotion and sense of coherence we use Antonovsky's SOC model and regarding the connection between health promotion and motivation we use Herzberg's Two Factor theory. We have with the help from interviews with four managers and a health consultant and from 250 employees' survey answers come to our conclusions. One of them is that managers' attitudes are of big importance to make health promotion successful since employees consider their attitudes to be of great influence regarding health promoting activities. We believe that health promotion is and will be proved to be a part of a long term sustainable enterprise.