Workplace health initiatives, specifically for mental health, should be treated as part of a firms operational risk profile not as separate a health issue, according to behavioural psychologists.
Speaking at a Global healthy Workplace Summit, sponsored by the Cigna Foundation, Stavroula Leka, a behavioural psychologist at the University of Nottingham, said: "Risk priorities still revolve around compliance and financial issues. But it should not be a surprise that risk is really all about people. Stress is costing 3% to 4% of European GDP rper year, that's €265bn.
"Among the employed with the poorest quality of work mental health is getting worse over time, even worse than the unemployed."
She added that it was not enough to devise policies to keep people at work without addressing job content, workload, schedules, control and the working environment, but there was no need to see this as a negative procedure.
"Employee health and absence is a consequence of workplace design.
"This is something every manager should be doing anyway if they want to be successful. Businesses need to understand that workplace health initiatives are good for them, they make sense," she said.
Akihito Shimazu, behavioural psychologist at the University of Tokyo, agreed, he added: "Producing more output with less employee input cannot be achieved with a workforce that is healthy in the traditional sense, that is merely symptom free.
"The traditional approach of occupational mental health falls short because it is focussed on preventing ill health, i.e. job burnout, rather than promoting health, i.e. work engagement."
Evelyn Kortum, Technical Officer in the Occupational Health Programme of the World Health Organisation, added: "Mental health is multi factorial. There is a spin over effect from work to home, what is actually work related we don't really know.
"But the workplace, as a place for intervention, is the best bet."
