EUROPEAN SAFETY WEEK STARTS TODAY…. and this year feels particularly significant

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) has launched its new 2026–2028 Healthy Workplaces Campaign, “Together for Mental Health at Work.” For those of us working in occupational health and safety, I think this represents an important development.

Mental health at work is increasingly moving away from being viewed primarily through the lens of individual wellbeing and resilience. The focus is shifting towards something much more familiar to health and safety professionals: identifying hazards, assessing risk, putting appropriate controls in place and preventing harm.

 At Modig, this is a shift we have been seeing in practice for some time, with two areas in particular becoming increasingly important in our work with clients:

The first is psychosocial risk assessment.

Organisations are recognising that a general wellbeing survey, mental health first aid, or an employee assistance programme is not, on its own, psychosocial risk management.

We need to understand the conditions under which people are actually working. This includes reviewing their workload and demands, role clarity, levels of control, organisational change, working relationships, bullying and harassment, support, working patterns and other factors that may create psychosocial risk.

Just as importantly, the assessment needs to lead somewhere.

A good psychosocial risk assessment should help an organisation understand where the risks are, who may be affected, what controls already exist, where the gaps are and what practical action can be taken.

The second area is training and supporting people managers and supervisors.

Managers don’t need to become psychologists or counsellors.

They do, however, need the confidence and competence to recognise psychosocial hazards within their teams, understand how the way work is organised and managed can contribute to risk, notice when somebody may be experiencing distress, have an appropriate conversation, understand their boundaries and know when and where to signpost for additional support.

For me, that distinction is important.

Supporting mental health at work is not about expecting managers to diagnose people. And psychosocial risk management is not about trying to identify which employees are “vulnerable”. It is about creating work that is as psychologically healthy and safe as we can reasonably make it, while ensuring that people are appropriately supported when difficulties arise.

 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be using the new European campaign as an opportunity at Modig to continue this conversation with our clients and wider network.

We are already supporting organisations with psychosocial risk assessment and action planning, manager and supervisor training, development of practical psychosocial risk controls, and integrating psychological health more meaningfully into existing occupational health and safety systems.

There is still a great deal for all of us to learn in this area, including what interventions make the greatest difference in different working environments.

But I think the direction of travel is becoming much clearer:

Psychological health and safety needs to become part of how we manage work and not something we address only after somebody becomes unwell.

That is a development I very much welcome.

– by Malin Kelly, Modig Corporaste Services Ltd.

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