Designing Healthy Workplaces

Pfeffer outlined core principles for designing “high‐commitment, high‐performance, high‐involvement” workplaces, i.e., reduced status differences, extensive sharing of information, selective hiring, self‐managed teams and decentralization, continuous training, high compensation based on performance, and employment security. This chapter argues that both Pfeffer and Hamel's core principles for building high‐performance, innovative, and resilient organizations run parallel to Grawitch, Gottschalk, and Munza recommendations for achieving “Total Worker Health” (TWH). It outlines themes running through these models of high‐performance work systems and TWH and outlines how they can be leveraged to design individually and organizationally healthy workplaces for the future. High‐performance work systems include systemic and performance attributes—and it is the “system” part that is new, unique, and important for strategic human resource management. The chapter highlights examples of organizations that have designed healthy workplaces by capitalizing on high‐performance work systems and outline a primary barrier to establishing such systems.