A RE-AIMed Approach to Navigating Workplace Mental Health Promotion in Small Businesses: A Scoping Review and Feasibility Study.

  • Carly is a second-year MSc. student specializing in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. With a background in conducting research on both employee burnout and health promotion in the workplace, she has collaborated with data science and machine learning experts to pioneer people analytics projects aimed at predictive burnout detection. She aspires to be a researcher-practitioner who works towards narrowing the gap between workplace health promotion research and practice, particularly within small businesses. In her Masters studies, she has been exploring gaps in understanding the implementation experience in small business settings, working with real-world employers to ensure their perspectives are effectively captured and addressed in her research.

People’s work lives powerfully impact their daily mental health. These effects can be positive (e.g., flourishing through work), but can also be problematic (e.g., burnout or loneliness). Recognizing the key preventative role for workplace initiatives, wellness interventions are increasingly evident as a tool to promote employee mental health – particularly in larger organizations.  Yet, there is nevertheless a notable gap in understanding the optimal implementation of these initiatives in small businesses.

Our research addresses this gap through two complimentary phases. Phase One includes a systematic review of studies reporting workplace mental health interventions in small businesses to identify relevant interventions, characterize the strategies used, and report on how researchers communicated factors that influence implementation using the RE-AIM framework (Glasgow, 1999). Phase Two includes semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders to explore their experience implementing wellness initiatives and reflect on the extent to which the review findings resonate with their personal experiences. Findings will be integrated into scientific outputs as well as a lay summary shared with our partner and organizations involved in our research. Active involvement of members affected by these findings is critical to ensure that emerging research addresses key barriers to the uptake of the synthesized research evidence.

This project is co-funded in partnership with Mitacs and iA Financial Group.