Workplace Interventions in Response to COVID-19: an Occupational Health Psychology Perspective

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has imposed significant threats to individuals’ physical health and has substantially changed the socioeconomic order and the nature of our work and life all over the world. To guide organizations to design effective workplace interventions to mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19, we take the occupational health psychology (OHP) perspective to propose a framework that highlights important areas for organizations to intervene in order to better protect workers’ physical health and safety and to promote workers’ psychological well-being. Specifically, we integrate the prevention-based public health model with the Total Worker Health (TWH) and OHP-based approaches to propose a comprehensive set of primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions that target different groups of employees with varied exposure risks to the new coronavirus. We believe these proposed interventions can contribute positively to the development of healthy and safe work. Implications of these proposed interventions for workers, organizations, and policy makers are also discussed.