World Day for Safety and Health at Work

  Promoting compliance, including through targeted support and awareness-raising, alongside effective enforcement by regulators, is essential to ensure that legal provisions on psychosocial risks translate into safer and healthier working environments . This is typically pursued through a balanced regulatory mix in which enforcement is combined with education, guidance and capacity building. Such approaches reflect contemporary regulatory theory, including responsive regulation and strategic enforcement, which emphasise combining deterrence with support for compliance rather than relying on sanctions alone.  Labour inspectorates play a central role in this framework. Across jurisdictions, inspection systems typically combine proactive prevention activities – such as targeted campaigns, preventive visits, sectoral programmes and thematic inspections – with reactive enforcement functions, including responses to complaints, incident notifications and reported harms. This dual ro...

  Social dialogue plays a central role in shaping national approaches to the psychosocial working environment. Evidence shows that OSH policies and regulations tend to be more effective when employers’ and workers’ organizations are involved in their development, monitoring and implementation, as participation strengthens legitimacy, improves compliance and facilitates adaptation to sectoral and organizational realities. In the area of psychosocial risks in particular, the knowledge and experience of workers and employers are essential for identifying organizational features, understanding sectoral risk patterns and designing responses that reflect actual work processes . Social dialogue mechanisms – whether through national tripartite bodies, bipartite committees, sectoral platforms or workplace-level structures – thus provide an important foundation for embedding psychosocial risk prevention within OSH systems. Approaches differ across countries as regards the respective roles ...

 Building on this taxonomy, the report adopts a multi-level perspective that prioritizes modifiable features of the psychosocial working environment, from how work is designed, managed and organized to broader workplace policies and practices. This approach moves beyond individual-centred perspectives that focus primarily on workers’ perceptions or personal characteristics and emphasize adaptation to existing working conditions. Instead, it highlights elements of work organization and management that fall within employers’ sphere of influence. The perspective therefore supports a proactive and systemic approach to the design and management of work, focusing on psychosocial risks that, so far as is reasonably practicable, can be managed within the workplace. Within this perspective, psychosocial factors are grouped across three broad and interrelated levels. While these levels overlap and interact, and should not be understood as independent silos, this structure helps clarify wher...

New ILO report finds that psychosocial risks at work account for nearly 45 million disability-adjusted life years lost annually, reflecting years of healthy life lost due to illness, disability, or premature death.

Long hours are not only a scheduling issue. They are a psychosocial risk with implications for safety and health. The ILO estimates that 35% of workers globally work more than 48 hours a week. What would healthier working-time arrangements look like in practice? Psychosocial risks arise from poor work design, organization, and management (e.g., high workload, low control, bullying) that cause stress, leading to mental and physical health issues. These risks severely impact safety by causing fatigue, distraction, and burnout, increasing workplace accidents, absenteeism, and staff turnover

Work plays a central role in people’s lives. For most workers, it occupies a substantial share of waking hours, and it shapes identity, social connection and economic security. When work is well designed and well managed, it provides structure and purpose, supports financial stability, enhances health and well-being, and contributes to organizational performance and productivity. Whether work produces these positive outcomes depends largely on the psychosocial working environment , understood as the aspects of work and interactions related to how jobs are designed, how work is organized and managed, and the broader policies, practices and procedures that govern work, and the ways in which these elements interrelate. Across the world, the psychosocial working environment is undergoing a profound transformation. Rapid technological change, including digitalisation and the introduction of AI-supported tools, has altered how work is coordinated, monitored and evaluated. New forms of work ,...