Promoting Well Being

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What is a healthy workplace?

“A healthy workplace or workplace health promotion is the combined efforts of employers, employees and society to improve the health and wellbeing of people at work.

This can be achieved through a combination of:

  •   Improving the work organisation and the working environment
  •   Promoting active participation
  •   Encouraging personal development”

 (Luxemburg Declaration on Workplace Health Promotion in the European Union, June 2005)

 Key features of healthy workplaces as a setting include:

  •  It combines ‘high visibility’ innovative work with long term organisational development and change.
  • It seeks to balance top-down commitment with bottom-up engagement and empowerment.
  • Health is determined by the interplay of environmental, organisational and personal factors.
  • Shift of emphasis from preventing accidents and occupational disease to ‘health creation’.
  • Focus on the introduction and management of change within the whole organisation.
  • Applying whole system thinking.
  • Using organisational development and change management approaches and techniques. This means that the settings approach to healthy workplaces sits with existing quality management systems or processes e.g Investors in People, ISO, EFQM (European Framework for Quality Management)
The case for workplace health promotion - what it is and why Workplaces are an important, yet under-utilised, setting for promoting health and well being. A healthy workforce is vitally important. For e.g. one of the most common health problems now within workplaces is mental health/stress. Much of this is preventable and can be addressed as can other areas through workplace health promotion programmes.

There is moderate evidence that a range of stress management interventions can have a beneficial and practical impact. Action can also help to ensure that people who are at risk of unemployment due to health or health related problems receive the advice and support they need to maintain employment. Large numbers of people can be reached and encouraged to acquire the knowledge and skills to live a healthy lifestyle.

Health promotion in the workplace takes several approaches: Providing information, advice and consultancy to assist employers in developing suitable health promotion programmes and strategies Implementation of policies and practices which assist employees make healthy choices Development of specialist training in support of workplaces Recognition of the impact that organisations can have on individuals There are many organisational benefits to be gained from effective health promotion in the workplace.

These include: Increased productivity Reduced absenteeism Reduction of numbers of civil claims for accidents and ill health caused by a failure to recognise and/or control workplace risks Better recruitment and lower employee turnover Improved employee relations Lower levels of occupational stress Improved work environment Improved corporate image