The workplace, along with the school, hospital, city, island, and marketplace, has been established as one of the priority settings for health promotion into the 21st century.

The workplace directly influences the physical, mental, economic and social well-being of workers and in turn the health of their families, communities and society. It offers an ideal setting and infrastructure to support the promotion of health of a large audience. The health of workers is also affected by non-work related factors.

Regrettably the concept that the workplace is an important arena for health campaigns of many kinds, as well as basic occupational health and safety programmes is not yet widely accepted. In one country there were ill-advised cuts in occupational health services to support AIDS prevention work, due to lack of comprehension that the workplace is a vital arena for AIDS prevention.

The concept of the health promoting workplace (HPW) is becoming increasingly relevant as more private and public organisations recognize that future success in a globalizing marketplace can only be achieved with a healthy, qualified and motivated workforce. A HPW can ensure a flexible and dynamic balance between customer expectations and organisational targets on the one hand and employees skills and health needs on the other, which can assist companies and work organisations to compete in the marketplace. For nations, the development of HPW will be a pre-requisite for sustainable social and economic development.

Benefits

Proper attention to workers' health and safety has extensive benefits:

• healthy workers are productive and raise healthy families; thus healthy workers are a key strategy, i.e. goal, for overcoming poverty.
• workplace health risks are higher in the informal sector and small industry which are key arenas of action on poverty alleviation, where people can work their way out of poverty; 
• safe workplaces contribute to sustainable development, which is the key to poverty reduction; 
• the processes of protecting workers, surrounding communities and the environment for future generations have important common elements, such as pollution control and exposure reduction; 
• much pollution and many environmental exposures that are hazardous to health arise from industrial processes, that may be influenced by occupational health and safety programmes; 
• occupational safety and health can contribute to improving the employability of workers, through workplace (re)design, maintenance of a healthy and safe work environment, training and retraining, assessment of work demands, medical diagnosis, health screening and assessment of functional capacities; 
• occupational health is fundamental to public health, for it is increasingly clear that major diseases (e.g. AIDS, heart disease) need workplace programmes as part of the disease control strategy.

Benefits of Workforce Health Promotion

To the organization	To the employee
a well-managed health and safety programme	a safe and healthy work environment
a positive and caring image	enhanced self-esteem
improved staff morale	reduced stress
reduced staff turnover	improved morale
reduced absenteeism	increased job satisfaction
increased productivity	increased skills for health protection
reduced health care/insurance costs	improved health
reduced risk of fines and litigation	improved sense of well-being

These benefits are greater for low-paid workers in high risk occupations and settings, and in this way occupational health interventions can reduce inequities. Efforts made by WHO and its partners to strengthen key aspects of occupational health focus on increasing the coverage of workers in under-served countries and regions with basic occupational health services.

Workplace health promotion - What is it?

The European Network for Workplace Health Promotion has defined workplace health promotion as the combined efforts of employers, employees and society to improve the health and well-being of people at work. This vision of workplace health promotion places particular emphasis on improving the work organization and working environment, increasing workers' participation in shaping the working environment, and encouraging personal skills and professional development.

Workplace health promotion focuses on a number of factors that may not be sufficiently covered in the legislation and practice of occupational health programmes, such as the organizational environment, the promotion of healthy lifestyles, and non-occupational factors in the general environment. Non-occupational factors include family welfare, home and commuting conditions, and community factors which affect workers' health.

Workplace health promotion supports a participatory process to help promote a stronger implementation of occupational and environmental health legislation. It suggests tools for maintaining or strengthening a national healthy workplace initiative, such as an awards system as an incentive for participating enterprises, and creation of healthy workplace networks. To be successful, workplace health promotion has to involve the participation of employees, management and other stakeholders in the implementation of jointly agreed initiatives and should help employers and employees at all levels to increase control over and improve their health.

While some health promotion activities in the workplace tend to focus on a single illness or risk factor (e.g. prevention of heart disease) or on changing personal health practices and behaviours (e.g. smoking, diet), there is a growing appreciation that there are multiple determinants of workers’ health. In addition to person-focused interventions, workforce health promotion initiatives have moved toward a more comprehensive approach, which acknowledges the combined influence of personal, environmental, organizational, community and societal factors on employee well-being. A health-promoting workplace recognizes that a healthy workforce is essential and integrates policies, systems and practices conducive to health at all levels of the organization. Rather than a series of projects, workforce health promotion is an ongoing process for improving work and health. Effective health promotion assists employers to adopt appropriate administrative procedures and workers to use safe working practices. Occupational health personnel benefit from training and education in health promotion to enable them to implement it as a part of their occupational health practice.

Experience in workplace health promotion has shown that competitions and awards are valuable in engaging enterprises in occupational health and safety activities. Firms and enterprises achieve valuable publicity and a boost in staff morale through competing to become the most healthy and caring company.

Advocacy

Advocacy is a key health promotion activity for overcoming major barriers to public health and occupational health. The barriers addressed by advocacy are poor living and working conditions, rather than individual or behavioural barriers. The modern use of the term advocacy gained momentum from the Ottawa Charter on Health Promotion (a landmark definition of health promotion): “Political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, behavioural and biological factors can all favour health or be harmful to good health. Health promotion aims at making these conditions favourable through advocacy for health”.

Advocacy has a key role in building and maintaining occupational health programmes and is essential to shape the social and political climate. The tactics and strategies of advocacy and lobbying are not easily described in terms of programmes. This is because advocates need to adopt the same set of opportunist, responsive, imaginative, flexible, dramatic and above all newsworthy tactics that are the stuff of all successful public opinion, political and commercial campaigning.

Occupational health and safety grew up in the environment of the large factory and enterprise, and we are only now learning how to carry it out in small enterprises and the informal sector. Intermediary organizations - which may be NGO’s or private consultancies that specialise in occupational health and safety - play an important role in working with employers, self-employed workers, and sometimes directly with workers.

The Western Pacific and European Offices of WHO have been particularly successful in developing effective healthy work programmes that focus on primary prevention. In these initiatives the hazards associated with the combined effects of lifestyle factors and occupational exposures are identified and minimised. Health promotion that introduces healthy lifestyles and supports the maintenance of such lifestyles with appropriate information, counselling and educational measures is undertaken as part of the occupational health and safety programme.

Source:  http://www.who.int/occupational_health/topics/workplace/en/print.html