There is one apparent epidemic in European workplaces that has not been vaccinated yet, and it appears to be creating a real employment and productivity crisis across the pond. The real question might be, can this virus make its way over here?

[Image courtesy of EU-OSHA on Flickr via a Creative Commons license]After a recent poll found that workplace stress is still a major health and safety concern in Europe, EU-OSHA recently announced the Healthy Workplaces Campaign, designed to provide tools and support to employers and employees to better manage stress in the workplace.

Fortunately, it can’t be transferred by sneezes or handshakes, but it can take hold if the right measures aren’t in place, or if measures that are in place are taken for granted or not executed at all. This virus I’m talking about is something very familiar to many of us – workplace stress. We here in Canada and the U.S. have some reasonable programs in place, though the virus still exists. We seem to be doing a reasonable job of managing workplace stress, but is the same being said in Europe?

According to the latest survey, not so much.

An opinion poll conducted by EU-OSHA recently revealed that a little more than half of workers (51 percent to be exact) said that stresses related to work  was common in their workplaces, and – perhaps more concerning – about 40 percent of respondents said that their companies or public entities do not handle workplace stress well.

In some sort of defense of the workplaces, however, the same poll revealed that 40 percent of all employers polled said that workplace stress risks are more difficult than physical health and safety risks in the workplace. But the results of the poll are putting EU-OSHA into motion with a new two-year campaign to help educate employers about workplace stresses and present some tools to help those employers address the issue more aggressively.

The Healthy Workplaces Campaign, according to EU-OSHA, is designed to highlight workplace stress and help employers and workers get the help and resources they need to be more productive and less absent at work. The campaign includes workshops, seminars, conferences, training sessions, various visual-arts competitions and the European Good Practice Awards, which were launched this year to recognize those companies that have put in effective measures to handle, manage and even eliminate stress.

If you would like to know more about the campaign, check out this link.