The core problem, according to the researchers, is that policy ideas which appear obvious within public health circles struggle to gain traction among the policymakers, employers, and managers who would actually need to implement them. Everyone can agree that healthy workplaces are desirable, but agreement on aspiration is not agreement on action. Different actors support the same vague ambitions while contributing to entirely different approaches, holding wildly different expectations about what can and should happen. The solution the authors propose is deceptively simple to state and fiendishly difficult to achieve: collective clarity about what the policy actually is, which instruments should support it, and who would be responsible for its success. Without those three answers, the healthy work movement risks spinning its wheels indefinitely.

Defining public policy is notoriously difficult in any domain. The term functions as an umbrella covering statements of desired aims and outcomes, a wide range of government instruments from taxes and regulations to guidance and voluntary agreements, and the governmental and non-governmental contributors whose practices actually deliver results. Applied to healthy working environments, the first challenge is identifying what policy actors mean when they invoke HWE, and how far they move beyond aspiration to specify which tools should produce which outcomes. International organisations and researchers tend to focus on aspirational aims and recommended practices, urging integrated and coherent policies that recognise the value of workplace health to public health, employment, and economic goals simultaneously.

The expanded vision of workplace health goes considerably beyond the traditional occupational safety and health focus on physical exposure to harm. Drawing on the World Health Organization’s healthy workplace framework, the agenda encompasses six key elements: attention to both physical and mental health; a longer-term view of immediate and chronic risks; focus on psychosocial risks such as excessive workloads, poor managerial communication, limited worker involvement in decisions, insecure work, and harassment or discrimination; emphasis on positive psychosocial measures connected to high job satisfaction; respectful and inclusive workplace decision-making; and recognition that the boundaries between work and life are often blurry, since private lives and wider social environments shape working lives profoundly. Behind this agenda sit three distinct motivations: it is the right thing to do, because a safe and healthy workplace is a fundamental human right; the smart thing to do, because a healthy and engaged workforce is more productive and innovative; and the legal thing to do, because companies must follow regulations minimising workplace harms.

Aspirations, however, remain incomplete until they can be mapped onto a concrete policy mix. Building on earlier research identifying the instruments essential to occupational safety and health policies, the authors catalogue an extensive toolkit: education to provide professional skills, workplace training in safety and health, evidence-backed guidelines for practice, awareness raising and direct organisational support, monitoring of risks and accidents, surveillance to prevent injuries and disease, enforcement through official inspections, accreditation standards and benchmarks, insurance coverage to mitigate company risk, and financial incentives or penalties deployed by governments. Each instrument implies a different delivery mechanism, a different responsible body, and a different theory of how change actually happens.

Extending this toolkit to the broader HWE agenda multiplies the complexity. A broader definition of health demands policy coordination to integrate physical and mental health initiatives. A longer-term view calls for guidance and research to anticipate musculoskeletal disorders and poor mental health, and strategies for worker retention that keep people healthier and in work for longer. Addressing negative contributors to mental health requires regulation of workloads to prevent stress and overwork, prevention of psychological, sexual, and racial discrimination and harassment, and support for workers during pregnancy or parental leave. Positive psychosocial measures depend on collaboration: fostering workplace autonomy where employees have meaningful say in how they work, ensuring workers feel part of decision-making through trade union and management partnerships, involving them in organisational change and innovation, and guaranteeing effective communication and support from management. Finally, acknowledging blurry work-life boundaries means coordinating measures covering caring responsibilities, family illness or loss, flexible and remote working, and adaptations to climate change and other crises.

Mapping these instruments onto responsible organisations exposes a thicket of overlapping and sometimes competing claims. Universities and national research centres would handle education; labour ministries, insurance institutes, trade unions, employer associations, and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work would share training responsibilities; labour inspection authorities would enforce regulations; standardisation institutes would set accreditation benchmarks. The expanded HWE agenda adds further actors, from ministries of health and rehabilitation centres connecting physical and mental healthcare, to EU agencies, member states, subnational authorities, employers, and trade unions managing the wider social, economic, and environmental factors that shape working lives. Even in the relatively well-established OSH field, uncertainty about aims and responsibilities produces contrasting implementation models across national contexts, as comparisons of Croatian and Portuguese legislation demonstrate. The broader agenda accentuates these difficulties dramatically, raising tensions over who should take responsibility for HWE success and how much weight should fall on state regulation versus encouragement for businesses to innovate.

The authors’ research on European Union policy reveals how this ambiguity plays out in practice, identifying a disconnect between two intersecting approaches. The first is top-down: the EU uses regulations to oblige and enforce minimum occupational safety and health standards, backed by external inspection, monitoring, guidance, and benchmarks designed to reduce variation in national practices. The second is bottom-up: going beyond minimum standards through voluntary measures, such as EU-OSHA guidance encouraging employers and managers to collaborate with workers on innovative workplace practices. The combined effect, the researchers find, may disappoint anyone expecting the call for a fundamental shift towards healthy working environments to translate into substantive outcomes. The result is a rhetorically ambitious strategy without the clear means to produce consistent collaborative action. The EU devotes considerable energy to OSH regulation and compliance, but relies on networking and guidance tools for the broader HWE agenda, and relatively few companies are both motivated and able to innovate. Large firms in export-oriented, technology-based sectors, which depend on retaining skilled labour and protecting their reputations as good employers, may demonstrate what maximal approaches look like, but most organisations lack the means or motivation to learn from or emulate them.

None of this diminishes the EU’s standing as a global leader in worker health and safety, and the authors emphasise that its experiences offer valuable international lessons. Their cautionary tale is instead about the gap between ambition and mechanism. A top-down approach obliges and enforces minimum standards, but policymakers appear reluctant to raise those minimums when facing employer pushback. A voluntary, guidance-informed bottom-up approach seems destined to produce useful but limited innovation, concentrated in a small number of leading organisations with little support for policy learning elsewhere. Rather than choosing between the two models, the authors expect both to endure, and they argue that policymakers must clarify how to secure the best of both worlds. The implications for multi-disciplinary public health practice may be clear, but the likely impact on policy and workplace practice is not. Until healthy workplace advocates can define exactly what HWE policy is, which instruments are essential, and who is responsible for designing, delivering, and coordinating them, the fundamental shift they envision will remain a long distance away, sustained by shared enthusiasm but starved of shared direction.

Subject of Research: Policy analysis of healthy working environment (HWE) policy in the European Union

Article Title: Healthy working environments are essential, but what exactly is HWE policy and who would be responsible for its success?

Article References: Cairney, P., Auslender, E., & Fuchs, L. (2026). Healthy working environments are essential, but what exactly is HWE policy and who would be responsible for its success?. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100861

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100861

Keywords: healthy working environments, occupational safety and health, public health policy, EU policy, psychosocial risks, workplace mental health, policy instruments, EU-OSHA, Horizon Europe, worker wellbeing, policy coherence, work-life balance