13 formas simples e eficazes de melhorar o bem-estar dos colaboradores

One of the most effective ways to improve employee wellbeing is to change the conditions people work in first, and then support individuals on that foundation. In practice, that means five things. Identify psychosocial risks such as excessive workload or low job control.

Train managers to recognize distress and listen well. Give employees safe channels to speak up. Recognize their contribution regularly.

Make every resource easy to reach for the whole workforce, including people who never sit at a desk. Perks and discounts can be part of that picture, but they work as one piece of a broader plan, not as the plan itself.

This order reflects where the evidence points. International health guidance and European workplace surveys agree on what matters most: job design, management quality and open communication.

A program bolted onto a stressful job is unlikely to be enough on its own, since WHO recommends comprehensive approaches rather than isolated initiatives.

The good news for employers is that many of these factors can be influenced by their own decisions. They depend on decisions about staffing, schedules, leadership and communication, and companies make those decisions every week anyway.

Why employee wellbeing is now a business priority in Europe

Mental health at work has moved from the HR agenda to the boardroom, and the numbers explain why. According to the World Health Organization, 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety worldwide, at a cost of US$1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Those are global estimates, not European ones. Still, they describe a problem that many employers in Europe recognize in their own absence rates, turnover and recruitment costs.

The organization also estimated that 16% of working-age adults had a mental disorder in 2023. Apply that proportion to a company of 500 people and it would mean around 80 colleagues.

Many people in that situation keep working while they struggle, often without telling anyone, and the effects show up indirectly. You see more mistakes, more conflict, more short absences and more resignations that seem to come out of nowhere.

European data points in the same direction. In its 2022 OSH Pulse survey, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) found that 27% of workers experience stress, anxiety or depression caused or made worse by work.

That figure is narrow by design. It measures work-related mental strain, not general life satisfaction, which makes it directly relevant to employers. These are conditions linked to the job itself.

There is also a constructive side to the story. Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey 2024 links better job quality to better health and well-being, higher motivation and stronger engagement.

In the same survey, four fifths of the EU workforce reported good or very good health, while 18% reported health problems that limit normal activities. Put simply, the way jobs are designed shapes how people feel, how much energy they bring and whether they stay.

For organizations struggling to attract and retain talent, that chain is the real business case. Wellbeing is connected to engagement, engagement to retention, and retention to the cost of constantly replacing people. It also connects to the employer brand.

Candidates increasingly ask about workload, flexibility and culture during interviews, and current employees share their experience openly, both online and offline.

What actually affects wellbeing at work

Before choosing any initiative, be clear about the causes. The World Health Organization describes poor working environments as a risk to mental health and gives concrete examples: discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity.

None of these is solved by a gym membership or a meditation app. They are features of how work is organized, managed and distributed.

The European agency adds its own priorities. It identifies unsocial working hours and work intensity among the psychosocial risks with the most detrimental effect on workers’ health. It also considers a preventive, holistic and systematic approach the most effective way to manage them.

That means acting before problems escalate, looking at the whole working environment, and following a repeatable process rather than reacting case by case.

Enterprise data shows how widespread these pressures are. ESENER 2024, the agency’s fourth survey of workplaces, was carried out between May and October 2024 and covered 41,458 establishments.

In it, 56% of establishments reported dealing with difficult customers, patients or pupils, and 43% reported time pressure. Employer representatives answered the survey, not workers. These figures therefore reflect what management sees, and employees’ own perception could differ.

Risks also vary by role, so a single company-wide initiative rarely fits everyone. Some patterns appear again and again:

• Customer-facing teams carry the emotional weight of difficult interactions, often with little time to recover between them.
• Sales teams face target pressure, frequent travel, public rankings and periods of isolation from colleagues.
• Frontline and shift workers deal with unsocial hours, limited access to information and little say over their schedules.
• Office and hybrid employees often experience workload creep, constant connectivity and unclear priorities.
• People on temporary or uncertain contracts live with job insecurity, which affects how safe they feel raising concerns.

Mapping these patterns inside your own organization is the first practical step. It tells you where to look, which teams to talk to first and which interventions are likely to matter most.

A practical framework based on international guidance

The WHO guidelines on mental health at work, published in 2022, offer the clearest structure for employers. They group interventions into five types: organizational interventions, manager and worker training, individual interventions, return-to-work programs and gaining-employment programs.

The guidelines prefer that these be delivered comprehensively and embedded in work health policies, rather than run as isolated initiatives. For most companies, the first four types are where daily effort goes.

Start with organizational interventions

The guidelines recommend that employers prevent work-related mental health conditions through organizational interventions. These assess workplace risks and then mitigate, modify or remove them.

This is the foundation, and it is where many wellbeing strategies are weakest. In practical terms, it can mean reviewing staffing in teams where overtime has become normal.

It can mean giving people more say over shift patterns, or clarifying roles so that two managers are not setting competing priorities. It can also mean redesigning how difficult customer interactions are escalated, so frontline staff are not left alone with them.

The assessment does not need to be complicated to be useful. Short, regular surveys, conversations with team representatives and a look at absence and turnover by department will often reveal where the pressure points are.

The findings must then lead to visible changes. A risk assessment that ends in a report nobody reads does nothing for the people it describes.

Train managers to recognize distress and listen

Manager training is the second pillar. According to the same guidelines, it helps managers recognize and respond to staff in emotional distress, and it builds skills such as open communication and active listening.

Managers are where organizational policy becomes daily experience. A well-designed workload policy means little if a team leader responds to a concern with impatience or dismissal.

Good training covers real situations. It shows managers how to open a conversation when someone seems withdrawn and how to respond without trying to diagnose. It explains when and how to refer someone to professional support and how to adjust tasks temporarily.

It should also help managers look after themselves. They often absorb pressure from above and below, and an exhausted manager struggles to support anyone else.

Support individuals and plan returns to work

Individual interventions and worker training still have a place. Sessions on stress management, healthy boundaries or digital disconnection can help people recognize their own warning signs.

They work best when the underlying conditions are being addressed at the same time. Otherwise, the message employees hear is that stress is their personal responsibility.

Return-to-work programs deserve particular attention. A gradual, planned return after a period of leave, with clear communication and adjusted responsibilities, reduces the risk that someone comes back to the conditions that contributed to the absence.

Staying in appropriate, respectful contact during the leave matters too. People who feel forgotten often find the return harder.

Intervention type	What it targets	Example actions	Where digital tools can help
Organizational interventions	Workplace risks at the source	Workload reviews, schedule flexibility, role clarity, escalation procedures	Pulse surveys to locate risks; dashboards by team, site or role
Manager training	Leadership behavior	Training in active listening, recognizing distress and referral to support	Sharing guides with all managers; prompts for regular check-ins
Worker training	Individual awareness and skills	Workshops on stress, boundaries and healthy routines	Delivering content to every employee, including on mobile
Individual interventions	Personal support	Access to support services offered by the employer	One directory where employees find resources quickly and discreetly
Return-to-work programs	Sustainable reintegration	Phased return, adjusted tasks, follow-up conversations	Structured communication and keeping people connected during leave

The table also clears up a common misunderstanding. Technology does not replace any of these interventions. It makes them easier to deliver consistently, helps them reach more people and allows progress to be tracked over time.

Breaking the silence around psychosocial risks

One finding from the latest European enterprise survey stands out. Among EU-27 establishments that find psychosocial risks harder to manage than other occupational safety risks, 59% named reluctance to talk openly about these issues as the main difficulty. The barrier is often cultural before it is technical or financial.

That silence has a cost. If people do not raise workload problems, conflicts or early signs of burnout, managers only learn about them when someone goes on leave or resigns.

According to a summary of the survey by the European Trade Union Institute, psychosocial risks were largely unchanged compared with 2019.

Over the same period, employee participation in risk-mitigation measures fell from 61% to 55%. With fewer employees involved in designing solutions, the pattern becomes harder to break, because the people closest to the problem are not part of the response.

Making it easier to speak up usually involves several layers working together:

• Anonymous pulse surveys, short and frequent, so people can flag problems without exposing themselves.
• Visible feedback loops that share what the survey showed and what will change as a result.
• Regular one-to-one conversations where wellbeing is a normal topic, not something raised only in a crisis.
• Leaders who talk openly about workload and pressure, which signals that the subject is legitimate.
• Channels that work for everyone, including employees without a corporate email or computer.

The feedback loop is where many programs stumble. Asking people how they feel and then doing nothing visible erodes trust faster than not asking at all. Small, quick changes show that the listening is real, such as adjusting a meeting rhythm, simplifying a reporting process or adding cover during peak hours. Over time, that credibility raises participation, and higher participation gives management a more accurate picture.

Involving employees in the solutions also makes them stronger. A team that helps redesign its own shift rota is more likely to accept the result and point out problems early. Joint working groups and suggestion channels with public follow-up turn employees into contributors, not just survey respondents.

Recognition and the need to feel valued

Recognition rarely appears by name in health guidance. Yet it ties directly to the job quality that European surveys associate with better wellbeing, motivation and engagement.

Feeling that your effort goes unnoticed is a quiet but persistent form of strain, and it tends to grow when workloads are high and managers are stretched.

Effective recognition tends to share a few traits. It is specific, naming what someone did and why it mattered. It is timely, coming close to the moment rather than months later in an annual review.

It comes from managers, from peers and, where relevant, from customers whose feedback can be shared with the team.

Linking recognition to company values also reinforces culture, because people see in concrete terms which behaviors the organization actually rewards.

Rewards can complement recognition through points that can be exchanged, awards for specific achievements or team celebrations. The risk lies in using rewards to compensate for unsustainable demands.

A sales team that receives generous incentives but faces impossible targets and constant public ranking may perform in the short term while burning out underneath.

Healthy incentive design pairs ambitious goals with realistic workloads and celebrates team achievements alongside individual ones. It also recognizes behaviors such as collaboration, mentoring and customer care, not just volume.

For commercial teams in particular, transparency helps. Clear rules, progress people can follow in real time and fair targets reduce the anxiety that comes from uncertainty.

A well-run incentive program can motivate a sales force and improve customer relationships at the same time. Pushing for results at any cost does the opposite.

Reaching every employee, wherever they work

Many wellbeing strategies are designed, unintentionally, for office employees. Frontline staff in retail, logistics, hospitality, manufacturing or healthcare may have no corporate email, limited computer access and schedules that make live meetings impractical. Yet these groups are often the most exposed to unsocial hours, difficult customers and time pressure.

Inclusion here is a practical matter. Information about support services, surveys, news and recognition should be accessible from a phone, in the employee’s language and without juggling several logins. Take a company with warehouses in Spain, Germany and the Netherlands.

It needs internal communication that works across languages and local realities while keeping one consistent message about culture and priorities. Comprehensive internal communication means reaching people top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer, not only sending announcements from headquarters.

Tool overload is the other side of this problem. Picture news on an intranet, benefits on a separate portal, surveys in a third app and recognition in a fourth. Employees stop checking.

HR teams spend their time chasing updates, sending reminders and reconciling spreadsheets by hand. Centralizing access in one portal reduces friction for employees and administrative work for HR.

It also produces a single, more complete view of participation and sentiment, which is hard to build when data lives in four disconnected systems.

Where benefits and discounts fit

Benefits and discounts are popular, and they can ease everyday financial pressure, which many employees genuinely value. Chosen with the workforce in mind, they also signal care.

On their own, though, they do not change workload, management quality or job security, the factors international guidance places at the center.

Presenting a discount program as a wellbeing strategy can even backfire if employees feel the underlying problems are being ignored.

The sensible approach is to treat benefits as one supporting layer. Combine them with the organizational changes, manager training and listening practices covered earlier in this plan.

Make them easy to find in the same place as other HR resources. Choose options that connect with your broader goals. Sustainable mobility is a good example.

A carpooling program can lower commuting costs for employees, support environmental and ESG objectives and create informal connections between colleagues from different departments who might otherwise never meet.

Personalization matters as well. A workforce with many young parents, shift workers or long commutes will value different options than a mostly urban, hybrid team. Asking employees what they would use, and checking actual uptake, prevents spending on benefits that look attractive in a brochure but remain unused.

The regulatory and standards context

In the European Union, the Framework Directive 89/391/EEC establishes that the employer has a duty to ensure the safety and health of workers in every aspect related to the work. That general duty is the starting point.

However, the way psychosocial risks and wellbeing are regulated differs from country to country. Organizations operating in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, France or the Netherlands need to check the specific national requirements and any applicable collective agreements.

For companies that want a structured method, ISO 45003:2021 provides guidelines for managing psychosocial risk within an occupational health and safety management system based on ISO 45001. It is a guideline rather than a certifiable requirement.

That makes it a useful reference for building a process: identifying hazards, involving workers, planning actions and reviewing results at regular intervals.

Policy attention is also growing at EU level. The European Commission’s Communication on a comprehensive approach to mental health includes 20 flagships, with financing opportunities worth around EUR 1.3 billion.

For employers, that is a clear signal that mental health has become a sustained public priority, one that will keep shaping expectations from regulators, investors and employees.

This information is general and does not replace professional advice. For legal obligations, consult an employment lawyer or labor relations specialist in each country.

For health concerns, involve occupational health services or qualified healthcare professionals, and encourage employees who are struggling to speak with their doctor. If someone is in immediate danger, call 112, the emergency number across the EU.

Measuring progress without overpromising

Wellbeing cannot be reduced to a single number, and it is wise to avoid promising a specific financial return before you have your own data. A more credible approach is to track a small set of indicators over time and compare them across teams, sites and roles:

• Pulse survey results on workload, manager support and the sense of being recognized.
• Participation rates in surveys, programs and communications, broken down by location and role.
• Voluntary turnover, especially among employees in their first year.
• Absence patterns, analyzed in aggregate and with appropriate privacy safeguards.
• Uptake of support resources, recognition programs and benefits.

Dashboards are valuable when they lead to conversations, not just reports. Say the data shows that one distribution center scores far lower on manager support. The next step is to talk with that team and its leadership, not to publish a ranking.

A turnover calculator is also useful for estimating what departures cost your organization based on your own figures. That gives leadership a concrete reference when deciding where to invest, without relying on generic benchmarks.

Privacy deserves explicit attention. Employees will only answer honestly if they trust that individual responses stay confidential and that results are reported at a level where nobody can be singled out. Explaining this clearly at launch is part of building the open culture that makes measurement possible.

A 90-day plan to get started

A structured start helps turn good intentions into visible change. Here is a realistic sequence for a mid-sized organization:

1. Weeks 1–2: Gather existing data on absence, turnover, overtime and exit interviews, and identify the teams where risk signals cluster.
2. Weeks 3–4: Launch a short anonymous pulse survey on workload, control, manager support and recognition, accessible from any device.
3. Weeks 5–6: Share the results openly, invite employees into small working groups and agree on two or three priorities.
4. Weeks 6–10: Train managers in recognizing distress, active listening and referral, and start regular check-ins.
5. Weeks 8–12: Centralize resources, news, recognition and benefits in one employee portal so everyone knows where to find support.
6. Week 12: Repeat the pulse survey, compare results by team and decide what to adjust, continue or stop.

Take a hypothetical logistics company with three warehouses and a small head office. Its first survey reveals that night-shift staff feel uninformed and rarely thanked.

The response might include publishing shift-relevant news on mobile, enabling peer recognition between shifts and asking supervisors to hold brief check-ins at handover. None of these steps is expensive.

The second survey then shows whether those employees feel more connected, and it guides the next round of decisions.

How a single platform supports this plan

At Vip District by Epassi, we offer an all-in-one employee engagement platform, branded with each company’s identity and that brings the digital side of this plan together.

Vip Pulse runs surveys to understand how teams feel. Vip Connect handles comprehensive internal communication. Vip Awards and Vip Incentives support recognition and sales motivation, and Vip Savings provides employee discounts.

Carpooling supports mobility and sustainability goals. Dashboards and our ROI and turnover rate calculators help HR teams follow progress, so smart engagement is built on data rather than guesswork.

Frequently asked questions

Better wellbeing grows from consistent decisions about how work is organized, how people are heard and how their effort is recognized, and the right tools make those decisions easier to sustain.

If you want to see how one branded platform can bring communication, listening, recognition and benefits together for your entire workforce, request a demo with our team and we will walk you through it using your own priorities.