EU-CoWork: Developing Compassionate Workplaces in Europe for the Digital and Green Work Environment to Protect Employees’ Mental and Physical Health and Wellbeing

Research objectives

A significant proportion of employees will encounter End-of-life experiences during their professional life. Such experiences affect employees' and their colleagues’ health and well-being, but also the work environment in terms of productivity and safety. Digitization and the green transitions have influenced the job demands and resources of jobs and work environments such that employees can feel less or not supported when coping with EoL experiences.
EU-CoWork wants to explore the exposure to psychosocial risks inherent to these new ways of working, their impact on employee mental and physical health and wellbeing outcomes, and evaluate how compassionate workplaces can mitigate these effects. The project will develop Compassionate Workplace Programs (CWPs) tailored to the European context and individual workplace characteristics, and evaluate their effectiveness for European workplaces. EU-CoWork will co-creatively develop CWPs in 12 workplaces across 4 European countries (Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Greece), employing developmental evaluation and an international mixed methods process and impact evaluation.

With this project, the EU-CoWork consortium wants to offer insights and building blocks to create work environments that ensure adequate and tailored support and policy to counter-balance experiences that may exacerbate the risk for adverse mental health and well-being outcomes for employees.