The 2026 – 2028 Healthy Workplaces Campaign ‘Together for mental health at work’ aims to raise awareness about the impact of psychosocial risks and promote the creation of supportive, inclusive, and mentally healthy work environments across all sectors.

The campaign supports the European Commission's wider Strategic Framework on Safety and Health at Work 2021-2027. This topic is of growing importance as data shows a general decline in European’s mental health, with 37% of workers experiencing overall fatigue and 29 % experiencing stress, depression or anxiety, according to the OSH Pulse Survey 2025.

The five priority areas of this campaign are:

• Psychosocial risk assessment and management
• Harassment, sexual harassment and violence
• Physical risks and mental health
• Psychosocial risks in the health and social care sector
• Supporting mental health at work

The 2023-25 Healthy Workplaces campaign raises awareness about the impact of new digital technologies on work and workplaces and the associated occupational safety and health (OSH) challenges and opportunities. It also provides a platform for the exchange of good practice solutions.

In line with the 'vision zero' approach to work-related deaths of the EU Strategic Framework on Health and Safety at Work 2021-2027 as well as the objectives of the European Digital Strategy the campaign seeks to place OSH within the wider EU policy debate and also considers the gender dimension and the needs of specific groups of workers at increased risk.

Five priority areas give structure to the campaign:

• Digital platform work
• Advanced robotics and artificial intelligence
• Remote work
• Smart digital systems
• Worker management through artificial intelligence

The campaign is mainly based on the findings and resources of the OSH Overview on Digitalisation 2020-2023, but also includes EU-OSHA research in other areas, such as the Foresight studies and the OSH Overview on Supporting Compliance.

The 2020-22 campaign focuses on the prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). 

MSDs continue to be one of the most prevalent type of work-related health problem in Europe.

Posture-related risks, exposure to repetitive movements or to tiring or painful positions, carrying or moving heavy loads — all of these very common workplace risk factors can cause MSDs. Given how widespread work-related MSDs are, it’s clear that more needs to be done to raise awareness of how they can be prevented.

The campaign takes a comprehensive view of the causes of this persistent problem. It aims to disseminate high-quality information on the subject, encourages an integrated approach to managing the problem, and offers practical tools and solutions that can help at workplace level. 

Learn more about work-related musculoskeletal disorders

Exposure to dangerous substances is much more common in Europe’s workplaces than most people imagine and more must be done to protect workers from such hazards. The 2018-19 Healthy Workplaces Manage Dangerous Substances campaign aimed to raise awareness of dangerous substances in the workplace and the risks they pose, and to create a culture of prevention by disseminating campaign materials and carrying out promotional and engagement activities. It generated a knowledge base on how to effectively manage dangerous substances, including information on the existing legal and policy framework, good practice solutions, tools and instruments, and ideas for successful communication and awareness-raising actions.

Specific highlights of the campaign were attributed to vulnerable groups, substitution and carcinogens and work-related cancer, which accounts for the highest proportion of fatal occupational diseases in the EU. As one of the legacies of the campaign, EU-OSHA continues to be an active partner of the Roadmap on carcinogens, a European action scheme to reduce such exposure.

Learn more about safe management of dangerous substances at work

The Healthy Workplaces for All Ages campaign promoted the importance of sustainable work — that is, safe and healthy working conditions from the start to the end of a person’s life. With Europe’s workforce ageing and retirement ages rising, it is becoming ever more important that working conditions are safe, healthy and fair. This will enable people to work for longer and retire in good health. 
The campaign highlighted ways of managing OSH in the context of an ageing workforce and encouraged the exchange of information and good practices. Demographic change affects most workplaces in Europe. However, by introducing measures to ensure that work is sustainable, enterprises and organisations can minimise negative effects and increase productivity, making work safer and healthier for everyone. 

 Learn more about ageing and occupational safety and health

A poor psychosocial work environment can have significant negative effects on workers' health.

Psychosocial risks occur in every workplace, but even with only limited resources they can be successfully assessed and managed. This campaign provided support and guidance for workers and employers in managing work-related stress and psychosocial risks, and promoted the use of practical, user friendly tools to facilitate this.

 Learn more about psychosocial risks and stress at work

The Agency’s campaign for 2012-2013 focused on risk prevention. In simple terms, prevention is about managing work-related risks with the ultimate aim of reducing the number of work-related accidents and occupational illnesses.

Final responsibility for managing risk lies with employers and top management, but their efforts are bound to fail without active worker participation.

For these reasons, this campaign placed special emphasis on the importance of leadership by top management and owners working in tandem with active worker participation.

Learn more about leadership and worker participation

Maintenance is a very common activity: it affects every workplace, in every industry sector, and it concerns everyone at every level (not just workers with ‘maintenance’ in their job description).

This campaign emphasised the importance of safe maintenance as being at the heart of good health and safety working practice.

And while the specific details vary between industry sectors (depending on the specific types of machinery that are used, for example), it identified principles that are common to proper maintenance, in all of Europe’s different workplaces.

Campaigns objectives:

• Raise awareness of the importance of maintenance for workers’ safety and health, of the risks associated with maintenance, and of the need to carry it out safely;
• Raise awareness of employers’ legal and other responsibilities to carry out safe maintenance, and of the business case for doing so;
• Promote a simple, structured approach to OSH management in maintenance, based on an appropriate risk assessment (the ‘five basic rules’).

The ultimate aim, of course, was to help to reduce the number of people who are being hurt or are experiencing ill health as a result of inadequate maintenance or lack of maintenance, now and in the future.

More information:

• OSHwiki
• Publications 

Risk assessment is the cornerstone of health and safety management in the workplace.

The overall aim of this campaign was to promote an integrated management approach to risk assessment, helping organisations to carry it out systematically, and act on its results.

It sought to raise awareness of the legal obligations that employers have to carry out risk assessments, but also to demystify the risk assessment process; risk assessment is not necessarily complicated, bureaucratic or a task only for experts. It advocated a simple, step-by-step approach, and also one in which the workforce is consulted and involved.

Our Online interactive Risk Assessment tool (OiRA) is the legacy of this campaign and can be seen as the 21st century solution to the challenge of promoting occupational safety and health to micro and small enterprises. The OiRA project has the potential to help many thousands of small companies across the EU to carry out risk assessments in a simple and cost-effective way.

More information:

• OSHwiki
• OiRA project site

The Healthy Workplace Initiative aimed to provide employers and workers at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with easy access to information on how to make their workplaces safer, healthier and more productive.

It ran in 12 European Member States: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania as well as Türkiye and Croatia.

The campaign targeted SMEs with the message: "Health and Safety is everyone's concern. It's good for you. It's good for businesses!'.

Learn more about occupational safety and health in micro and small enterprises

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), affecting the body’s muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments and nerves, are the biggest cause of absence from work in practically all of the EU Member States.

This campaign sought to promote an integrated management approach to this problem, emphasising the idea that employers, employees and government should work together to tackle MSDs.

It emphasised the concept of ‘managing the load’: considering not just the load being carried, for example, but all of the strains being put on the body by environmental factors, and the pace at which the task is carried out.

It also stressed the importance of managing the retention, rehabilitation and return to work of those who suffer, or have suffered, from MSDs.

Learn more about work-related musculoskeletal disorders

This campaign was dedicated to ensuring that young people have a safe and healthy start to their working lives.

Young people are particularly vulnerable in work environments, where there is often inadequate occupational safety and health provision for them.

Many of the accidents and health problems that affect young workers are preventable, however, and young people are receptive to information regarding workplace health and safety, and will act to protect themselves when they know about potential hazards.

This campaign involved promoting risk awareness among young people and employers in the workplace, and also in schools and colleges: trying to reach young people at an early age, to instil in them a culture of risk prevention.

Learn more about young people and safety and health at work

It is not just workers in industries such as construction or manufacturing who are at risk. Noise can be a problem in many working environments, from factories to farms, call centres to concert halls.

This campaign focused on the issue of managing noise at work, with the tagline ‘Noise at work – it can cost you more than your hearing’.

Learn more about the problems of noise from OSHwiki

Construction is one of Europe’s largest industries.

Unfortunately, it also has one of the worst occupational safety and health records, a problem that costs businesses and tax payers billions of Euros each year, over and above the appalling human suffering that it causes.

This campaign was designed to helping all stakeholders in the industry to build a safer, healthier and more productive working environment.

More information: OSHwiki

Across Europe, millions of employees are exposed to dangerous substances in their workplaces, and failure to control the associated risks can harm people’s health in many different ways.

European legislation sets out the obligations of employers to manage such risks, and a huge amount of guidance for employers and workers is available, but it needs to be acted on if it is to protect workers’ health.

A key aim of this campaign was to raise awareness of the risks, and to stimulate action to reduce the health risks of using dangerous substances.

Learn more about safe management of dangerous substances at work

Stress is responsible for millions of lost working days every year.

Far too many victims suffer in silence and too many companies do not realise the extent to which stress harms their business performance.

This campaign focused on the prevention and management of stress in the workplace.

Learn more about psychosocial risks and stress at work

Every year thousands of people are killed in workplace accidents across the European Union, and there are millions of accidents that result in absences from work of more than three days.

The problem is particularly acute in small and medium-sized enterprises.

This campaign focused on the prevention of work-related accidents.

Learn more about the topic from OSHwiki

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are one of the most common work-related ailments, affecting millions of European workers across all employment sectors, at a cost of billions of Euros to employers.

However, much of the problem could be prevented or reduced by following existing health and safety regulations and guidance on good practice.

The first of EU-OSHA’s campaigns focused on the effective management of the risks of MSDs.

Learn more about work-related musculoskeletal disorders

• The OSH Framework Directive

• Workplaces, equipment, signs, personal protective equipment

• Exposure to chemical agents and chemical safety

• Exposure to physical hazards

• Exposure to biological agents

• Provisions on workload, ergonomical and psychosocial risks

• Sector specific and worker related provisions

Directive summaries are available only in English, but links at the end of each summary lead to the full text of the directive in all EU languages.

In addition to the Framework Directive, a series of individual directives focusing on specific aspects of safety and health at work were adopted. Nevertheless, the Framework Directive continues to apply to all areas covered by the individual directives. Where individual directives contain more stringent and specific provisions, these special provisions prevail. Individual directives tailor the principles of the Framework Directive to:

• Specific tasks (e.g. manual handling of loads)
• Specific hazards at work (e.g. exposure to dangerous substances or physical agents)
• Specific workplaces and sectors (e.g. temporary work sites, extractive industries, fishing vessels)
• Specific groups of workers (e.g. pregnant women, young workers, workers with a fixed duration employment contract)
• Certain work-related aspects (e.g. organisation of working time)

The individual directives define how to assess these risks and, in some instances, set limit values for certain substances or agents.

The European Commission has announced its top three occupational safety and health actions in its Communication Safer and Healthier Work for All - Modernisation of the EU Occupational Safety and Health Legislation and Policy, which is based on the ex-post evaluation of the European Union occupational safety and health directives (REFIT evaluation).

In addition, some EU directives based on Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union relate to safety and health aspects. On that legal basis, a series of technical directives under the so-called ‘New Approach’ were adopted whereby the European standardisation organisations — European Committee for Standardization (CEN), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) — set and update European standards on a regular basis.

The EU Strategic Framework on Health and Safety at Work 2021–2027 sets out the political framework for European safety and health policy. The starting point for legislative initiatives at European level is a legislative proposal drafted by the European Commission. Under the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’, it is the European Council and the European Parliament that adopt EU directives. In some cases, they delegate the legislative power to adapt directives to technical progress to the European Commission.

The European Social Partners play a vital role in the European decision-making process in the field of safety and health at work, as they have to be consulted at various stages. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union also foresees the possibility of concluding autonomous agreements. So far, European social dialogue has resulted in the adoption of several autonomous agreements.

The first European directives on safety and health at work were adopted on the basis of the general market harmonisation provisions. This was due to a lack of an explicit legislative competence in the Treaty in the field of safety and health at work until the mid-1980s. Before this, occupational safety and health was seen as an annex to market harmonisation and the economic policies of the European Economic Community. For example, Directive 77/576/ EEC on the harmonisation of national laws on safety signs in the workplace and Directive 78/610/ EEC on the harmonisation of occupational exposure limits to vinyl chloride monomers were adopted on this basis.

The Single European Act 1987 was a major step forward in that it introduced a new legal provision on social policy to the Treaty aiming for ‘improvements, especially in the working environment, as regards the health and safety of workers’. By inserting this provision into the Treaty, the importance of safe working conditions was made evident. Moreover, the new Social Chapter authorised the European Commission to promote social dialogue between employers and labour representatives at European level.

With the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the legislative competence in the field of European social policies was further strengthened by the incorporation of the social agreement into the Treaty. The Treaty of Lisbon — apart from the renumbering of the Articles on social policy — kept the substance of the provisions of ex Articles 136 ff TEC (now Articles 151 ff of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).

An enterprise’s leaders — senior management, directors and/or the board — are in a position to prevent accidents and ill health in the workplace. They can do this by:

• Committing to and communicating an effective OSH management strategy
• Developing robust safety and health management systems
• Monitoring the performance of those systems
• Setting a good example by following all safety procedures at all times
• Motivating staff to participate in ensuring good safety and health

Ineffective or non-existent leadership on OSH can result in accidents or even fatalities as well as poor mental and physical health among workers. It can damage a company’s reputation. Poor leadership can, in fact, have significant financial costs as a result of, for example, sick days, wasted time and compensation payments.

Good OSH leadership, on the other hand:

• Prevents accidents and illness
• Increases productivity and efficiency
• Improves employee morale
• Helps the bussiness to win new contracts and attract high-quality employees

There are some simple steps you can take to make sure that your organisation benefits from good OSH leadership. Here are some practical tips, based on a guide developed by the British Health and Safety Executive:

• Carry out regular risk assessments and act on the results
• Always consider the safety and health implications of introducing new members of staff, processes and working methods
• Visible leadership is effective leadership. Make sure leaders make regular visits to the ‘shop floor’ of your organisation to talk to employees about OSH problems and solutions
• Demonstrate commitment by making sure that safety and health issues are always on the agenda at board meetings
• Provide safety and health training to all leaders, promoting a greater awareness of the value of OSH

One of the keys to good OSH leadership is getting workers involved. Employers have a legal duty to consult employees on safety and health issues. But there are benefits to going beyond the minimum requirements. OSH management will be more likely to succeed if it encourages the active participation of workers and sets up a dialogue between employees and management.

In 2012, EU-OSHA ran a two-year campaign on this topic, called Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2012–2013 Working Together for Risk Prevention.

This campaign concluded with a benchmarking event where campaign partners exchanged examples of good practice, with workshops on topics such as ‘Leadership training’ and ‘The safety and health culture of an organisation’. 

OSH is best integrated into individual subjects rather than taught as a stand-alone topic. Activity-based learning and real-life examples will help bring the message home to children and young people. Key messages can be repeated in different ways for different age groups, whether in primary schools or vocational training colleges.

The whole-school approach is the ideal model. The integration of OSH into further education is more difficult and less well developed, particularly in universities. However, the same ‘whole-institute’ model applies. Networking and working in partnership with OSH authorities are key contributors to successful integration.

The whole-school approach combines education and school management. Pupils and staff work together to make the school a safe and healthy place to work and learn through:

• Risk education and OSH management, e.g. involving pupils in hazard spotting
• Health education and promotion, e.g. healthy schools initiatives
• Promoting dignity and respect for all, e.g. anti-bullying campaigns
• Caring for the environment, e.g. reusing and recycling

From case studies we know what helps to make the whole-school approach work:

• Leadership from the head teacher to motivate staff and pupils
• Involving pupils, parents and staff
• Providing practical support and tools; the ‘Napo for teachers’ resource has been helpful here
• Training for teachers
• Networking between schools
• Cooperation between OSH and education authorities
• Being practical and linking risk education to subjects being taught

More information:

• Read our report on mainstreaming OSH into the school curriculum programmes
• Network with other professionals through ENETOSH