Mid Sweden University

There is great demand for workplace health-promotion programmes that improve co-worker health and provide a return on investment, which is due to the continuous escalation of care costs and the prioritisation of co-worker health by businesses. Early research found that organisations that have achieved good co-worker health with low sickness absence through their conscious and well-structured work were also working according to Quality Management. Health-promotion interventions are possible in every organisation, but before starting a health-promotion programme it is necessary to analyse the organisation and especially its culture. The purpose of this paper is to measure in what way health-promoting activities influence the Quality Management culture, particularly the health-related values ‘Leadership commitment’ and ‘Participation of everybody’. A comparison between the Quality Management culture before starting a health-promotion project and the results a year later is presented. The results show that health-promotion activities do not affect the Quality Management culture, at least not from a year perspective. On the other hand, the results show that health-promotion activities can affect co-workers’ perception of their health.