4 messages on health promotion in companies

Workplace health initiatives benefit everyone - society, companies and individual employees. There is a link between well-being at work and employee productivity and engagement. Stress and unhealthy lifestyles, fostered by excessive job demands and unhappiness at work, can be related to high levels of sickness absence. According to the Danish Health and Medicines Authority, it is important to work strategically with health initiatives at the workplace, precisely to increase employees' mental and physical health, reduce their sickness absence and increase efficiency and productivity during working hours. This means that it is important that considerations about the state of health and health efforts become part of the company's value base and that it plays a role in the decisions made in the company.

The 4 messages for health promotion

Health interventions is a vast area that you can learn more about when you start to engage with it. However, if you try to condense it, there are 4 messages that we would like to highlight:

1. It pays for companies to take a systematic approach to workplace health and to have a forward-looking strategy.

   • This means that a plan must be drawn up for how to work with health in the company and that the efforts must be followed up regularly.

2. Health promotion is about lifestyle, the workplace environment and corporate social responsibility.

   • This means addressing many different factors such as diet, exercise, community, well-being, work-life balance, etc.

3. Whether your business is small or large, private or public, and whatever the sector, you can make a positive difference.

   • This means that both smaller 10-person companies and global companies with thousands of employees can benefit from taking a look at workplace health.

4. There is no single health intervention that is best for everyone.

   • In other words, efforts must be adapted to the size, needs and framework conditions of the company.

By Josefine Huusom