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...

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 ,...