Workplace health promotion

Workplace health promotion is the combined efforts of employers, employees, and society to improve the mental and physical health and well-being of people at work. The term workplace health promotion denotes a comprehensive analysis and design of human and organizational work levels with the strategic aim of developing and improving health resources in an enterprise.

The World Health Organization has prioritized the workplace as a setting for health promotion because of the large potential audience and influence on all spheres of a person's life. The Luxembourg Declaration provides that health and well-being of employees at work can be achieved through a combination of:

Workplace health promotion combines alleviation of health risk factors with enhancement of health strengthening factors and seeks to further develop protection factors and health potentials. Workplace health promotion is complementary to the discipline of occupational safety and health, which consists of protecting workers from hazards.

Successful workplace health promotion strategies include the principles of participation, project management, integration, and comprehensiveness:

A report by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work notes growing evidence that significant cost savings can be made by implementing workplace health promotion strategies, and over 90% of United States workplaces with greater than 50 employees have health promotion programs in place.

Strategies for workplace health promotion need to be inclusive to account for diversity in the workforce, and behavioral economics is a key tool for implementing workplace health programs. The United States Department of Health and Human Services includes five strategic guidelines for workplace health promotion in its Healthy People 2010 initiative. These include:

More generally, workplace health promotion efforts are implemented at three functional levels, including:

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