The Art of Health Promotion: linking research to practice

In 1976, Dr Bill Hettler, cofounder of the National Wellness Institute (NWI), developed NWI’s wellness model which included 6 interdependent dimensions of wellness: occupational, physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional. ¹ According to this model, addressing the spiritual dimension means supporting one’s search for meaning and purpose and aligning one’s actions so they are more consistent with an individual’s beliefs and values. Ten years later, Larry Chapman published an article in the inaugural issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, ² observing most workplace health promotion programs were not addressing spirituality. He suggested a definition and organizing framework might be adopted to promote incorporation of spiritual health into workplace health initiatives. He pointed to John Argeropoulous’ work ³ which identifies the issues of forgiveness, love, gratitude, kindness, charity, trust, and purposefulness (among many others) as fruitful areas to consider in an effective approach to well-being.

More than 30 years after Chapman’s call for health promotion practitioners to include spiritual elements in their programs, there is ample evidence that such topics are being incorporated into workplace wellness initiatives. A quick online search of “wellness wheel” images ⁴ confirms that many organizations include the spiritual dimension in their conceptual wellness framework, and deeper investigation indicates many of them focus on meaning and purpose in life. A 2012 journal article documents the growth of corporate chaplaincy within US workplaces noting one business chaplaincy staffing company had placed 2482 professional chaplains to serve more than 500 000 employees in workplaces in 850 US cities in 2011. ⁵ A 2017 empirical review found “exponential growth” in the mention of spirituality in the field of human resource management and summarized numerous studies demonstrating positive relationships between workplace spirituality and employee commitment, job satisfaction, performance, and work-life balance and satisfaction. ⁶ A 2018 industry survey by the National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investment found 28% of employers included purpose in life or “spiritual contentment” in its well-being strategy, while another 31% reported considering its inclusion in the future. ⁷ And this very journal named a 2018 research study that examined the relationships between forgiveness at work, worker productivity, and stress as one of its top five 2018 “Papers of the Year.” ⁸ Recent issues of The Art of Health Promotion (TAHP) have also touched on spirituality-related topics, such as the connection between individual purpose and health, ⁹ purpose-driven organizations, ¹⁰ and the health promoting value of volunteerism. ¹¹

While the researcher in me was interested in a summary of the research linking spiritual well-being with business outcomes to support the business case for addressing spirituality as part of a comprehensive wellness initiative, this issue of TAHP aims to offer practical insights about how others are incorporating aspects of spiritual well-being into their work. Since Larry Chapman authored the seminal challenge in the inaugural issue of this journal, the issue opens with an interview to glean his insights and observations about the progress we’ve made in addressing spiritual health in the past 33 years and what opportunities remain for the field. I was sharing my excitement about this issue with Dr Renee Moorefield and learned that she’d focused her doctoral research on identifying the dimensions of spirituality and correlating them with positive leadership characteristics. My interview with her explores what she learned in her 2002 study and how she’s incorporated spirituality into her work with business leaders. One of my earliest introductions to a commercial program that features a spirituality component (with a focus on individual purpose) as a contributor to individual well-being and leadership effectiveness was Johnson and Johnson’s Human Performance Institute. Caren Kenney’s article shares the institute’s latest thinking, identifying why purpose alone is insufficient for optimizing well-being. The perspective is an important one to consider in light of the increasing popularity of initiatives that focus on helping individuals or organizations identify their purpose. The issue closes with an article by Dr Loren Toussaint and his esteemed research collaborators on how they’ve incorporated and tested the effectiveness of programs aimed at teaching workers how to forgive one another.

Space limitations in this issue kept me from covering practical approaches to incorporating kindness, compassion, mindfulness meditation, and gratitude into workplace wellness initiatives. For science-based suggestions on how to address these topics into your wellness efforts, I highly recommend University of California–Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as a worthwhile source of resources. ¹² And of course, the researcher in me exhorts you to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and share them with fellow practitioners.