The role of employee surveys to promote physical health and healthy lifestyles at the workplace: a scoping review

Background: Employee surveys aim to assess employees’ attitudes and work environments and offer a strategic approach to workplace improvement. However, in these surveys, areas related to health and lifestyle are often overlooked, despite their relevance to the wellbeing and performance of the employees. The aim of this scoping review was to examine the role of employee surveys in promoting physical health and healthy lifestyles among employees at the workplace. Methods: To be eligible for inclusion, published articles needed to investigate employees’ physical health or lifestyles and utilize employee survey data, be published in English within the last 10 years (2014–2024) and be available in full text in the databases ProQuest one business, Emerald Insight, PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. Results: 1,550 studies were screened, and eight studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Of these, two studies assessed data at two time points to study change over time, and only one study aimed to influence behavior change of employees. This demonstrates a lack of evidence-based methods for linking employee surveys data to health promoting initiatives in a workplace context. Conclusions: This scoping review highlights an urgent knowledge gap in the literature. Future research should explore the process of using employee surveys for identifying health related problems, designing and implementing solutions, follow-up improvements, and thereby creating a workplace health promoting loop process. Registration: A study protocol has been preregistered on Open Science Framework with registration number xza4m.