CESI renews partnership with EU-OSHA for Healthy Workplaces Campaign on mental health

CESI will continue its cooperation with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) as an Official Campaign Partner in the forthcoming 2026–2028 Healthy Workplaces Campaign, Together for Mental Health at Work – Preventing psychosocial risks at work.

The new campaign puts a growing workplace challenge at its centre. According to EU-OSHA, 29% of workers in the EU experience stress, anxiety or depression caused or made worse by work. Excessive workloads, limited control over work and poor communication are among the psychosocial risks that can negatively affect workers’ mental health when they are not properly addressed.

For CESI, protecting mental health at work requires a strong focus on prevention and on the organisation and conditions of work. Psychosocial risks should be identified, assessed and managed as part of occupational safety and health, with workers and their representatives actively involved in the process.

CESI Secretary General Klaus Heeger said: "Mental health is an essential part of health and safety at work. Stress, excessive workloads, harassment or permanent digital connectivity are not secondary concerns, but occupational risks that need to be properly prevented and addressed. We are therefore very pleased that CESI will again partner with EU-OSHA in its Healthy Workplaces Campaign. Together, we want to raise awareness, promote effective prevention and ensure that workers and their representatives have a strong voice in creating mentally healthy workplaces across Europe."

The EU-OSHA campaign accordingly promotes proper psychosocial risk assessment and management and cooperation between employers, managers, workers and workers’ representatives. It will address five priority areas: psychosocial risk assessment and management; harassment, sexual harassment and violence; the relationship between physical risks and mental health; psychosocial risks in the health and social care sector; and support for mental health at work.

As an Official Campaign Partner, CESI will contribute to raising awareness of these issues among its member organisations and the workers they represent across Europe. The partnership will also provide opportunities to exchange knowledge and good practices with trade unions, employers and other European stakeholders.

CESI’s renewed participation builds on its involvement in EU-OSHA’s 2023–2025 Healthy Workplaces Campaign, Safe and healthy work in the digital age. In that campaign, CESI used the partnership to explore occupational safety and health challenges associated with digitalisation and to strengthen awareness, knowledge and exchange of good practices among its members. CESI has also been a partner in previous editions of Healthy Workplaces Campaigns of EU-OSHA.

The 2026–2028 partnership provides a new framework for that cooperation, this time centred on ensuring that psychosocial risks are treated as workplace risks to be prevented and managed collectively. By bringing workers and their representatives into prevention and risk-management processes, workplaces can better protect mental health while creating safer, healthier and more sustainable working environments.

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