The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) strives to include as many people as possible in employment. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is suggested to be a suitable method to achieve this goal. Training in MI is already widespread within NAV, despite the lack of solid research evidence about its effects on employment, wherefore NAV commissioned this systematic review.

We found scarce evidence for the effects of MI as a method to facilitate return to work: only five controlled studies (range 29 to 500 participants) met our inclusion criteria.

All studies targeted people with severe and longlasting conditions (i.e. people with severe mental disorders, disability pensioners, HIV-positive people, and drug-related offenders).

MI was in all studies combined with one or more other interventions, and compared either with the same other intervention, another intervention or no intervention. Due to differences across studies we decided against pooling of the results. Median follow up was 12 months.

Main findings: Results from three of the five studies suggest that using MI to facilitate return to work may lead to more people achieving open employment (low to very low certainty of evidence). The other two studies did not report results for open employment separately. Interpretation of other results was difficult as the study populations constituted a mix of employed and unemployed people.

Only one study reported on work-hindering behavioural factors (e.g. expectancy to return to work). We could not determine the effect of MI on such factors.

Despite the scarce evidence, the results of this systematic review suggest that MI may be an effective method to facilitate return to work. Further investigation, including populations with less severe conditions, is required to verify this potential.