Empathia’s Director of Privacy and Compliance, David Goehner, LCSW has co-authored an article in the Institute of Health & Productivity Management’s (IHPM) International Journal of Health & Productivity titled, “Validation of the 5-item Short Form Version of the Workplace Outcome Suite.”
The article reports on a study of the validation of the WOS-5 an abbreviated version of the Workplace Outcome Suite© (WOS). The study confirmed that the 5-item version of the original 25-item WOS – with items corresponding to measures of presenteeism, work engagement, life satisfaction and workplace distress, as well as a separate measure based on total and partial days absent from work – could be used to approximate the 25-item version without excessive loss of reliability, validity or sensitivity.
The article (pgs. 49-59) can be found in the December 2018 Special Edition publication of the International Journal of Health & Productivity.
Empathia has been a proponent of engaging in research-based and practical ways to demonstrate the impact of employee assistance services upon both individual users of the services, and perhaps more importantly upon the organizations the EAP ultimately serves. While utilization reports and satisfaction surveys can convey the value of EAP services, evidence-based measures of improvements in personal and organizational well-being and productivity provide a significant way to demonstrate return on investment.
Since 2010, Empathia has been actively involved in the development and validation of the WOS tool that measures change in the following constructs: Absenteeism, Presenteeism, Work Engagement, Life Satisfaction, and Workplace Distress. Empathia actively participated in the validation study of the original 25-question WOS, the development of the 9-question instrument, and most recently in the validation study of the 5-question WOS. Empathia is one of the few employee assistance organizations in the industry that utilizes the WOS as a standard of care across its entire book of business. Our clinicians employ the 9-question WOS during our whole-health assessment process and in always important follow-up services with individual users of our services.
