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Posted January 13, 2026

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health 
• Rocky Mountain Center’s Occupational Health Psychology Program website:
• Hierarchy of Controls Applied to Total Worker Health
• UPOWER (NIOSH Center of Excellence in Total Worker Health at the UofU)
• Referenced home care research paper
• Reference bus operator research paper

TRANSCRIPT

David Pace

Our guest today is Dr Ryan Olson, a Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah. During his applied science career, Dr. Olson has developed and evaluated many uniquely effective workplace programs to reduce stress, reduce injury hazards, improve health, promoting behavior such as sleep, exercise, diet and improved well being. He is a charter member of the Society for Occupational Health psychology, past president of the organizational behavior management network and founding investigator and past co-director of the Oregon Healthy workforce center, which is a NIOSH Center of Excellence for total worker health.

 

It’s nice to have you here, Ryan, thank you.

 

Ryan Olson

Thank you very much for having me.

 

David Pace

Before we go any further, can you build out the acronym of NIOSH?

 

Ryan Olson

Yes. NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It is a research institute at the federal government level, founded in 1970 as part of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. So the standards and enforcement part of that act is OSHA. NIOSH is the research arm of that really important Occupational Safety and Health Act.

 

David Pace

Is this under the auspices of CDC?

 

Ryan Olson

NIOSH is housed inside the CDC. Many people expect it to be inside the National Institutes of Health, but it is within the CDC.

 

David Pace

Gotcha. So, I also meant to mention in your introduction that you now provide leadership support for the U power Total Worker Health center’s research corps. We’ll talk about that in a minute. That’s here at the University of Utah.

 

Ryan Olson

Yes, that is the University of Utah’s Total Worker Health Center of Excellence, led by Dr. Emily Hannah. And I provide some support for their research core, gotcha. So there are now 10 of these centers across the country, and U Power was an exciting new addition in the last funding cycle. Gotcha.

 

David Pace

I wanted to kind of start our conversation, Ryan, with this quote that you had in your presentation that you made. It was on Safety Day here at the U a few months back, and I hope it’s a good place to start, because I think a lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about today might be informed by this framing by Russ Harris in the book The Happiness Trap, which is a book that explains that the way most of us go about trying to find happiness ends up making us miserable, and that it in fact, drives the epidemics of stress, anxiety and depression. And the quote goes like this: “The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating more suffering.”

 

So, this is one section that I wanted to talk about. Maybe it’s a good this is a good jumping off point about the stress that we have in the workplace. And maybe you could kind of give us a lay of the land of this particular kind of work that you’re doing as it relates to stress in the workplace.

Tell us why we’re so stressed out of work, and at what point did this kind of become formalized into this kind of work you’re doing?

 

Ryan Olson

Yeah, well, our discipline, occupational health psychology, when people hear the word psychology, they often think right away of stress and mental health, and so those are areas we’re well known for studying and developing programs, systems to intervene and reduce stress or improve health in the workplace. But yes, stress is very prevalent at work, and you know, occupational health and safety disciplines, we often pay a lot of attention to the industries that are at higher risk for workplace fatalities or traumatic injuries,

 

David Pace

Like mining?

 

Ryan Olson

Yep, like mining, construction, agriculture, forestry, and that’s critically important. And psychology has a role in those areas, because it is about how to how to change organizations and how to change behavior.

 

But in terms of stress, it is top of mind for many workers who are maybe more in the knowledge workspace, where they spend a lot of time in front of a computer. And in occupational health psychology, a very common model of work stress is a job strain model, which is that we are particularly burdened when we have high work demands coupled with low control. So, you’re piled on and piled on with more and more to do but have little control or discretion over exactly what you’re doing or how to do it.

 

David Pace

That sounds familiar.

 

Ryan Olson

Yeah, it’ll feel familiar to a lot of people, and it may not be chronic all the time, but at least acute periods of what we would call job strain, which is high demands and low control. And we know that chronic job strain, is associated with a higher risk of heart disease, in a more acute sense, workers experiencing job strain, the prevalence of insomnia is about 30% so and this also should feel familiar from personal experience. You’re stressed out at work, you’re likely to be waking up in the middle of the night, not sleeping super well, and then poor sleep affects almost everything. I’ve collaborated a fair amount in my career with sleep and circadian rhythms experts. And sleep interacts with a lot of things, including occupational safety. Nobody wants a sleepy bus driver or a sleepy machine operator or a sleepy co- worker operating heavy machinery . . .

 

David Pace

… or operating AI, for that matter, just kidding.

 

Ryan Olson

Yeah, and we also tend to mistreat others when we’re sleep deprived. So, there’s an interesting and compelling study where police officers who were sleep deprived were more likely to mistreat or abuse suspects or the general public. We may mistreat our co-workers, but in some occupations, it’s very consequential if, if you’re not at your best, you’re likely to make missteps and experience safety related incidents.

 

David Pace

So, your work, it seems like, has expanded and had to adapt and even evolve based upon work patterns and work environments that are maybe different than they were during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I’m sure it’s continually evolving. Is that part of the challenge of what you’re doing?

 

Ryan Olson 

Yeah, I think for anyone working in occupational health, and also anybody seeking a job or trying to do the next thing in their career, the changing nature of work is a constant adaptation, and right now we’re experiencing a pretty major disruption with the dawn of AI. And during these major disruptive periods, work stress and just general global stress, about the world and about the future, is an elevated concern.

 

David Pace

You have spent a lot of time in two particular areas that I wanted to address as kind of case studies of maybe what we’re talking about. And one is with home health care workers, and the other one is with transit workers, right? And this was in Oregon, where you lived just prior to moving to Utah? Is that correct?

 

Ryan Olson

I’m known for working with occupational groups that are isolated or dispersed and don’t typically have access to a co-worker or a supervisor, or health and safety programs that a more traditional worker might have access to. So, I’ve worked with almost every variety of commercial driver. I think we’d need to add taxi drivers and Uber drivers to get me the full bingo card. But homecare workers as well. And these are occupational groups where the data really make them stand out, as with the sore thumb that they need safety and health support.

 

David Pace

Can you give me a couple of examples, maybe from one of each of these areas? What is the work life of, say, a bus driver and and why is it unusual? I mean, I think you said isolation, which makes sense. It’s not like they have a break room or a water cooler, where they can step out and talk with you know. Workers in isolation, therefore, is part of that. But tell us how you got into that. I mean did somebody come to you and say, look, we got a real problem here, or did you identify it yourself by doing some of your own research?

 

Ryan Olson

After working with commercial truck drivers who are very experienced and trying to lose weight, truck drivers and commercial drivers have medically regulated health conditions, and so things like high blood pressure or diabetes can cause you to be at risk of losing your your medical qualification to drive a commercial vehicle.

 

We wanted to do some primary prevention, so catching people as they entered an occupation that has some obesogenic exposures and trying to prevent weight gain and also support their success as new employees. So in industrial organizational psychology, there’s a range of evidence based tactics for helping new people succeed at their jobs. So, we wanted to kind of do that two-pronged support alert people to the hazards of weight gain and prevent weight gain, but also support their success as new employees.

 

But for a bus operator, a day in the life of you know a public transit bus operator, what sticks out in my mind is talking with the president of a Amalgamated Transit Union Local. He says, “I start. My shift at 3:13am not 3:10am not 3:20am but at 3:13am.” It’s a very much on the spot, timeliness driven occupation, and, also, the shifts every single driver works a little bit different shift. There isn’t one shift that the bus operators work because they’re rolling out, you know, every 15 minutes, or every 30 minutes, depending on the line.

 

So, there’s a lot of variable shift work, early morning shift work hours, long spans of the workday where you might work the morning commute, have four hours off and then come back to work, the evening commute. Prolonged sitting: Bus operators like to say talking about their compatriots driving truck that their freight talks back.

 

So the bus can be full of passengers who are wonderful and really appreciate the public transit service, but they can also experience misbehavior and abuse, you know? I was on a TRAX train on my way to come interview for this job, and a passenger who was being unruly was tackled by security personnel and handcuffed right on the train, and we could not leave until that situation was handled. And you know, so the train operator is somewhat removed from the passenger misbehavior, but bus operators are right there when it happens.

 

David Pace 

what’s the name of the program

 

that you’re with bus operators.

Ryan Olson

It’s shift on board. Shift on board.

 

David Pace

Is that part of your total worker health? It’s program? Or is it a subset of that?

 

Ryan Olson

Yeah, total total worker health is an approach advocated by NIOSH, okay, that encourages the integration of injury prevention and safety with promoting working conditions that advance employee well being. So I think shift on board does take a total worker health approach, in the sense that we’re integrating some preventive health programming with support for new employee job success.

 

We had multiple transit industry partners in the western states and Pacific Northwest, and they were randomized to onboard new employees as usual, or do our enhanced onboarding, which added five in- person training sessions that were each followed by a challenge on a particular theme using a digital health tool developed at our at my former university with with our scientific team.

 

For home care workers, their experience is very different, but like a bus operator, they are alone when dealing with workplace challenges. So, home care workers will transfer clients in and out of bed or assist them with bathing on their own, whereas in a hospital, some of these tests would just not be allowed to be done alone, because they’re so physically dangerous, putting people at risk of injury.

 

So, with home care workers, our current version of our program. It’s a 10-week socially supportive group program. We teach the workers about ergonomic safety tools that are low tech and portable to assist them with tasks like assisting a person in and out of bed or doing their housekeeping work to reduce the risk of physical injury.

 

David Pace

So ergonomics refers to the actual positioning of your body and in various work scenarios, so that you don’t injure yourself.

 

21:51

Yeah, it has to do with the fitting that the task to the person, and some work tasks are poorly fitted to the human body’s capabilities and put the body in extreme or unusual postures with too much burden on the body. And so ergonomic tools would would reduce the prevalence of severe body postures and take the physical burden off the body.

 

So, one example is a slideboard, which is kind of looks like the top of a skateboard without the grip tape and the scooped edges. And you can lay it between, you know, like a chair and a wheelchair, and the client will, with guidance from the worker, but not physical support, kind of scoot themselves across the slide board from surface to surface. It’s tremendously less risky than giving the person a bear hug and then pivoting and have helping them to the new spot. That’s an example of ergonomics in the home care situation.

Our current study, which is focused on home care workers with chronic pain, who are even more vulnerable than the typical worker, we actually had them do an assessment which suggested tools that might be helpful to them, and then we purchased about $100 worth of tools and shipped it straight to them to just get rid of the barrier.

 

David Pace

So, it’s a combination of raising consciousness, education, training, but also actual hardware that you need to provide these people who are not going to be using it unless it’s given to them.

 

Ryan Olson

Yep, and labor unions, government agencies, private home care agencies, are struggling with this gap in tool access because it’s often not covered by insurance.

 

David Pace

So in this podcast, Ryan, we’ve been talking, now that we’re in our second year about the eight dimensions of wellness that the National Institutes of Health have put out. Talk to us a little bit about some of the graphs and some of the, yeah, the graphics that you had in your in your PowerPoint that you had at Safety Day. Because you were talking about stress and values in particular. But I’m going to leave it at that, and have you just kind of run with that, because I think everybody is informed by the kind of work you’re doing here, if you’re working, and even if you’re not in an institutional work setting.

 

Ryan Olson

Yeah, I think maybe we can use home care workers in our program as a launching point to illustrate stress in the workplace, because the other piece of the program is cognitive behavioral strategies for pain self management, because these are workers with chronic pain.

 

If you’re in a meeting with 10 people, probably all of human kind’s major life stressors are in the room with you. Somebody’s going through a divorce or separation, experiencing financial strain, someone just got a diagnosis of a serious illness or disease, but it isn’t visible unless you ask about it. And in our homecare process, especially in the socially supportive activity where workers nominate a problem that’s going on in their life “Hey, I need some help with this,” and they give it an urgency rating. And some of the problems that have come up have been really dramatic, and that social support activated has been very special and just really emotionally incredible.

 

And one, one example that I actually heard about through a facilitator: one of the caregivers had become homeless during the program and had joined the meeting on her smartphone from her car. The group’s challenge for that day was to help this fellow caregiver network and figure out ways to find a new apartment opportunity.

 

You know, so we, we all are experiencing life’s ups and downs, but that’s just an example of how co worker support was activated to help a person in need. One in four people across the globe will experience a mental health disorder each year, by the World Health Organization standards. And this means that they’re experiencing emotional and behavioral distress And dysregulation or disruption to the degree that it’s interfering with their life functioning.

 

So, it’s a prevalent problem, and it’s often invisible. One in three workers are concerned about revealing that they’re struggling. They’re worried about the consequences of saying I’m depressed or I’m anxious or I’m barely holding it together.

 

David Pace

So, it’s not just about long work hours, these workplace stressors and their responses to them, but it can be about broken or inefficient systems or processes, high work demands, low control over work, that came up earlier, low employment quality, and then you had this work, non-work conflict and spill over. What is that exactly?

 

Ryan Olson

It’s a particular type of work stressor where requirements or demands in one domain are conflicting with your ability to fulfill the demands in the other. And yeah, work-family conflict or work non-work conflict is a known prevalent workplace stressor. And there’s a huge, fortunately, literature on supportive supervisory behaviors that leaders can do that attenuates and alleviates some of that work-to-family conflict. So, my my former former out well, not former colleague, my former co worker, but still colleague. Leslie Hammer is one of the well-known folks working in that area, and she has a website on supportive leadership that includes access to some of these training resources.

 

I’d be remiss if we didn’t squeeze it in during the conversation that when we’re talking about stress, I talk about values, and values driven stress reduction. One of the primary values in occupational health and safety is the hierarchy of safety controls, which, which is a priority structure for addressing systems and hazards first. You know, the first priority and most powerful tool would be to reduce or eliminate the stressors from the work environment. So, you know, some of these are just day-to-day hassles that drive you nuts, but some of them are, you know, substantial, very dangerous types of hazards.

 

But that’s the first question to start with. You know, if something is driving people crazy or causing a lot of stress, is there a way that we can eliminate or reduce that stressful exposure? And some of those are just processes that have evolved over the years into some kind of a Frankenstein that no longer makes sense, has too many steps, too many approvals, too much red tape. And so, you know, process redesign and systems redesign can help with with some workplace stressors in many environments . . .

 

David Pace

. . . Or it could be like right now during this podcast, somebody is pounding something into a wall over there, and the intervention would be, just tell them to stop it, and then we can go get social support and psychological healing from that, later, but yes, systemically, we can fix a lot of things.

 

Ryan Olson

Yep, and much of that burden is on leaders, because leaders have the power of budget and also the power of decision-making to make those kinds of changes. So, I remember being at a conference with a safety consultant named Terry McSween. He wrote a book called values-driven safety, and Terry was just talking about when he takes on a new client, one of his first questions is, what’s going to seriously hurt or kill somebody here? Not let’s not look at the safety data first, which might be a lot of first aid injuries, but what’s going to kill somebody? And he shared a story at this particular conference talk about a foundry that he was working with, and they had this old fire suppression system that had sprinklers directly over molten material. So, if a fire alarm had been triggered, and this system went off, the water hitting the molten material could kill or seriously hurt somebody.

 

The worker has no control over that correction of the system. Somebody up top has to decide to remove and replace that system. And so power and leadership contributions are important, and it’s not just a safety issue. If you’re a worker, that’s the kind of thing that might give you day-to-day worries, if you’re aware of it and add to your stressors at work.

 

David Pace

Sounds like the Triangle Fire of 1912 or 1911. You know the workers in the Triangle factory weren’t cognizant of the dangers that they were in, especially when they tried to get out of the blocked doors. Terrible leadership failure.

 

Ryan Olson

Yep, terrible tragedy and early case study in most occupational health textbooks.

 

David Pace

Let’s very quickly pivot to this new program that you have for graduate students. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and what makes it unique and different and maybe necessary?

 

Ryan Olson

Well, we the Rocky Mountain Center is a nationally regarded training center for a range of occupational health disciplines. We also have a new undergraduate occupational health degree program offered through Weber State University. But occupational health, psychology and mining safety are two of our newest graduate programs. Occupational health psychology is what it sounds like. It’s the application of occupational sorry, of psychological science to advance the safety, health and well being of workers. And psychological science is really all about understanding why we do what we do, why organizations do really well, really middle of the road or really poorly with regard to safety and health, and so there’s a whole science dedicated to this, and our job is to to train graduate students at the masters and doctoral level to be scientists-practitioners and in changing organizations for the better.

 

David Pace

And there’s also a research component to that.

 

Ryan Olson

Yes, most definitely, and that’s that’s why we use the phrase scientist-practitioner, because, especially for the PhD students, we are generating new knowledge in the area.

 

David Pace

So, this is an unusual program, isn’t it?

 

Ryan Olson

Nationally, yes, there are only three occupational health psychology graduate programs affiliated with NIOSH funded education research centers. So rather than being housed in a psychology department, we’re in a multi-disciplinary center where the students from all the disciplines learn together and interact and collaborate.

 

David Pace

Well, it sounds like a really stimulating program of interest to a lot of different people. In fact, we’ll put some more information about that, as well as in our resource section. Ryan, what do you want the average person to know about occupational health and safety and environmental safety, environmental health, I guess?

 

Ryan Olson 

Well, thinking to all of the young people out there, thinking of careers for the future. If you love health and love the health sciences, consider occupational health, any one of the disciplines could be appealing to you and a great fit. It’s a very enjoyable  meaning and purpose-driven career that I think a lot of people don’t know exists.

 

So that’s one message, especially on the main campus here at the U we would love to see more Main Campus applicants to our new occupational health psychology program.

 

I think most of us are workers, and if we’re not getting paid for work, we’re doing unpaid work at our houses, with our families and kids and households. It’s just good to be aware as a citizen that you know, let’s say you’re employed, that your employer is going to have somebody with an occupational health hat on in human resources in a safety department, or even the business owner who’s having to wear like five hats, one of them is safety and health.

 

And so our center can be a resource for anybody out there who might have a concern about their workplace with regard to stress or safety or health. Our job, we spend a huge proportion of our lives at work, especially if we work full-time, a third of it, then the other third is asleep, and sleep is affected by work. So, we’re, you know, we’re big champions for the importance of having a healthy work life on your overall health and well being.

 

David Pace

rRght, which definitely fits into the purpose of this podcast, which is this integrated notion of health components that we’re all struggling to balance. So, our guest today has been Dr. Ryan Olson, the Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah. I want to thank you, Ryan for being with us here today.

 

Ryan Olson

Thanks so much for having me.