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Guest column
By: Juan Carlos Saez de Rus
Department Manager – Corporate Division
of Occupational Safety, Health, and Welfare
Occupational health, safety, and well-being
are essential for everyone and also for
the company’s productivity, competitiveness,
and sustainability
Healthy workers,
healthy companies
Nobody has any doubts about the impor-
tance of health and happiness for our well-
being. Happiness is intangible and diffi-
cult to quantify the returns, as if was just
another item in a balance sheet. Happy
workers benefit companies. As people say,
success does not bring happiness but hap-
piness can lead to success.
When somebody asks us what we want or
want motivates us people, the answers are
quite diverse and complex. In the last ins-
tance, we want to be satisfied with our lives,
to be happy, and as healthy as possible. It’s
worth repeating what is obvious because
we often forget and is not a coincidence
that in more than 40 cultures, including
non-Western cultures, the most widely re-
cognised values are health and happiness.
Promoting health at work could play a very
important role in preparing workers and or-
ganisations to be able to face changes.
The future of healthy companies depends,
to a large extent, on having well-trained
and motivated personnel, and also happy
personnel. Nevertheless, more importance
is giving to what is urgent and sometimes
companies seem to forget about CSR poli-
cies and well-being at the work place.
As part of these policies, companies have
practices that make them a healthy work
environment. This is known as a Healthy
Company, one which has among its objec-
tives helping its staff to be physically and
mentally fit. These practices in the medium
and long-term increase workers’ producti-
vity and provide the company and its em-
ployees with a better work environment,
with greater productivity and, certainly, the
benefits of practices for a healthy life.
The benefits of prevention and of living a
healthy life become evident in the medium
and long term. Accordingly, the measure-
ments taken by North American companies
with decades of experience are quite rele-
vant and clarifying.
Most Spanish companies have only started
to partially tackle this issue. The Spanish
corporate culture places more emphasis on
occupational health and prevention and has
made great strides in this respect, trying to
expand horizons and surpass current regu-
lations, for example, on prevention.
These first steps are undoubtedly of value,
but companies must be capable of taking a
qualitative leap and make the health of its
employees another corporate line of work
included in the strategic plan. That is, a
healthy company does not just offer its em-
ployees a discount voucher for a gym or a
healthy lunch option: that would be a very
superficial way of addressing this issue.