Article
Effectiveness of activity based workplace health promotion on diseases and health promoting psychological factors
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Authors
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Eva Steißlinger
- Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Deutschland
| Published: | March 21, 2025 |
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Outline
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The systematic review and meta-analysis by Steißlinger, Keller and Strahler (2024) examine the effectiveness of physical activity programs in workplace on health-promoting outcomes such as quality of life and well-being/life satisfaction as well as disease-promoting outcomes such as stress, depression/burnout. Despite the prevalence of such programs in the workplace, mental health-related work absenteeism continues to rise, suggesting that the programs are not effective enough.
Included studies had to meet several criteria, including employee participation, an intervention duration of 4 to 16 weeks, and the use of physical activity programs. The analysis followed the PRISMA guidelines. The RoB-2 instrument was used to assess the risk of bias. The heterogeneous study quality presented a challenge; of the 15 studies, 10 were classified as high risk of bias.
The analysis included 15 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with a total of 2031 participants. The results show that these programs have a moderate to large positive effect on quality of life (SMD = 0.52, p < 0.0001). In contrast, the effects on well-being/life satisfaction are very small (SMD = 0.11, p = 0.2994). For the disease-promoting outcome the programs contribute significantly to the reduction of stress (SMD = -0.3382, p = 0.0021) and depression/burnout (SMD = -0.4812, p = 0.0074).
Although physical activity programs have positive effects on the outcome quality of life and negative effects on the outcomes stress and depression/burnout. It remains unclear what type and intensity of interventions are most effective. Future studies should use more specific job-related questionnaires to better assess the effects on work-related outcomes. This could be an explanation for the low effectiveness on well-being and life satisfaction. Overall, the work shows that physical activity programs in workplace can be effective in promoting mental health, but improvements in the implementation and design of the programs are still needed to achieve more sustainable results.
