Exploring co-workers’ network impact: a new lever for the adoption of healthy and pro-environmental behaviours – ResPro

The choices we make on a daily basis, whether it's regarding diet, physical activity, or mobility, have significant implications for both our health and the environment. On the one hand, the health issues associated with a lack of physical activity or a poor diet are a major challenge for society. Indeed, according to Santé Publique France, more than a third of adults in France combine a high level of sedentarity with insufficient physical activity. These people have higher mortality and morbidity rates as well as greater risks of reduced work-related well-being. Nutrition, through insufficient consumption of fruit and vegetables, excessive consumption of ultra-processed foods and pesticide residues, is implicated in the onset of certain chronic diseases. Individual behaviours in the transport sector are also at the heart of environmental issues (in terms of pollution and climate change). Yet public policies are struggling to bring about the behavioural changes needed to reduce these health and environmental impacts.

ResPro proposes to address this issue by developing an approach based on two original dimensions: (1) the leverage of social interactions and (2) the company as a place for the dissemination of healthy and pro-environmental (HPE) habits. ResPro harnesses methodological skills in network econometrics, behavioural economics and environmental economics as well as social psychology. The ultimate goal of this project is to make a meaningful contribution to the advancement of public policies’ effectiveness.

In this project, we will first assess the current state of social interactions at work by (i) documenting the impact of the recent health and energy crises on teleworking habits, (ii) describing the relation between teleworking, social interactions and well-being at work as well as (iii) provide an overview of current HPE behaviours by (iii) identifying profiles of individuals adopting different HPE behaviours (WP1).
In a second step, we will study the influence of co-workers (i.e. individuals working on the same site and with whom the employee regularly interacts on work non-related topics, sharing coffee or lunch breaks) on a series of HPE behaviours, related beliefs and well-being at work. The estimation of peers’ influence requires precisely reconstructing the co-workers’ network of each employee, which will be done with a very recent, non-intrusive and low-cost approach, that does not require peers’ elicitation, called the Aggregated Relational Data (ARD) methodology (WP2).
Finally, we will investigate both the direct and indirect (through peers) effects of a personalised intervention combining health, environmental and financial information, planning of actions, gamification (with individual and group goals) and personalised feedback on a subset of health-related behaviours (i.e. physical activity and active daily mobility) and well-being at work and the potential spillovers on other HPE behaviours (WP3).

This project will benefit from the collaboration with the SMMAG (Syndicat Mixte des Mobilités de l'Aire Grenobloise), through the M’PRO scheme, which supports, since 2017, around 150 companies and their 110,000 employees to reduce car use. This collaboration will guarantee us access to secondary data (WP1) and privileged access to companies to collect original data (WP1&2) and set up an experiment (WP3) among public and private companies from various sectors.