Work and work life have a major impact on people's health and wellbeing and is recognized by the WHO as "one of the highest priorities for health promotion into the 21st century." What happens at work affects the physical, mental, economic and social welfare of workers and thus their families and communities. Workplaces are an important arena to promote public health and a prerequisite for sustainable social and economic development. Interest in workplace health promotion has increased as more and more private and public organizations recognize that the future success in a globalized market can only be achieved with healthy, qualified and motivated workforce. 

Embracing WHO’s definition of healthy workplaces as “….one in which workers and managers collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of workers and the sustainability of the workplace”, the research group are interested in what creates a healthy workplace and how to implement healthy workplace initiatives successfully. In particular we are interested in psychosocial factors at work and how they are related to health and well-being among the employees.

We study research questions such as:

• What characterizes healthy and productive workplaces?
• How to develop, design, test, and evaluate interventions in organizations?
• What creates healthy healthcare?
• What characterizes Healthy Universities?

The group leads and participates in a larger number of national and international research projects in the areas of occupational health psychology, health promotion and positive psychology, well-being, successful aging, healthy workplaces, healthy healthcare, leadership, and implementation and evaluation of interventions.
We have a close collaboration with Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, UC Berkeley, Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK, University of Bologna, Italy, and HAN university of Applied Sciences, Arnhem and Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

We recently got funding for a Horizon2020 project on multilevel interventions to promote mental health in SMEs and public workplaces – H-WORK where we will work with 14 partners in 9 different countries in 3.5 years.