What factors have greater influence on workability?

Introduction
Identifying the factors that affect workability to assess the change in workability with age is an important mission for promoting occupational health activity to an aging workforce.
This research used the Work Ability Index (WAI) as the index for evaluating work ability to study the factors that strongly affect workability from the three perspectives of mental resources, and physical resources, and workloads.

Methods
A questionnaire survey of 6,740 people in 16 Japanese companies was conducted from 2009 to 2011. The survey consisted of questions primarily relating to the WAI, NIOSH job stress questionnaire, exercise habits - physical strength awareness survey, questions concerning chronic fatigue subjective symptoms, and others.

Results
1. The factors identified that increase workability are good human relations, satisfaction with work, degree of discretion regarding work, health with emotionally stability, etc.
2. Conversely, the factors that lower workability are exasperated feelings of stress and a heavy work burden.
3. People with low workability are very sensitive to stressors, and conversely, people with high workability showed stamina against stressors.
4. Having daily exercise habits not only affected the appearance of depressive symptoms, but also had a large affect on improving workability as evaluated using WAI.
5. Advanced age workers with high workability demonstrated high functional physical strength and high ability to recover from work induced fatigue. Conversely, people who complain routinely of chronic fatigue had low workability.

Discussion
Meaningful findings suggest that exercise habits have a large affect on workability. In addition, people in the habit of exercising have low levels of depressive symptoms, which are stress acute reactions and also tend to have little dissatisfaction regarding work.