Mainstreaming Health, Safety and Well-Being

Abstract

This chapter is about mainstreaming, i.e. embedding and integrating health, safety and well-being (HSW) into the strategies, activities and practices of organizations, i.e. into their business processes, systems, and culture as well as into the mind-set of managers and workers. This is important for successful HSW policies and management, especially over time. It requires the active involvement of key stakeholders, and may require adaptations in communication and mind-sets of HSW experts. There are, however, many different organizational contexts and mainstreaming therefore needs to be 'tailor made': it is always influenced by the context. In this chapter, a variety of strategies for mainstreaming is presented and discussed. Examples are integrated management systems, the implementation and evaluation of organizational interventions, the development of strategic HSW management, the integration of HSW into systems and into the planning and control cycle with its associated performance measurement, integration into workplace innovations and into human resource management. Other examples are the creation of healthy and safe work processes, the integration of HSW into the values and culture of the organization and into leadership development and making it part of human rights or corporate social responsibility policies.