stress factors, which included job insecurity, blocking of promotional opportunities, deadline pressure, and underutilisation of capabilities.
The study concludes that mental health complaints and absenteeism were both attributable to negative working conditions. The greatest absenteeism came with monotonous, repetitive activities, and the lowest with complex, demanding activities. Mental health complaints occur more frequently with monotonous, repetitive activities than with more highly skilled tasks11. Symptoms grow if employees are afraid of losing their job. Other stress factors result from contradictions between occupational expectations and opportunities to realise them, overload or underutilisation, and conflicts with superiors and co-workers.
Corporate health promotion
Within the framework of a network for corporate health promotion, member states of the European Union and the countries of the European Economic Area have arrived at common definition of corporate health promotion12. According to this definition, corporate health promotion encompasses all joint measures taken by employees, employers, and society to improve wellness and health in the workplace. There are three strategies for attaining this objective:13
* Improving work organisation and working conditions,
* Promoting active employee participation,
* Reinforcing personal areas of competence.
Over the past few years, interest in corporate health promotion at the national level and in Europe has grown considerably. In 1989, Germany passed the Health Reform Act, which established health promotion and prevention as responsibilities of the statutory health insurance schemes, which then set up appropriate infrastructures.
Corporate health promotion can be approached14:
* In the context of behaviour modification and health education in the workplace
* As a component of corporate occupational safety and health;
* As a strategy for reducing sickness-related absenteeism;
* As a combination of health-appropriate work design and health education;
* As a component of organisational development and management systems.
Historically, corporate health promotion began as a series of measures to prevent selected risk factors in the area of heart and circulatory disorders. It was later extended to preventing combined physical and psychological risk factors. A qualitative leap forward came with the combination of measures for health-appropriate work design, education, and the dissemination of information. This was supported by occupational safety and health legislation at the European level and by applying the WHO policy on health promotion to the workplace.
In Germany, the social partners have developed a special understanding of corporate health promotion, especially against the background of enduring public debate about the economic situation and the issue of labour costs. Corporate health promotion is seen as a vehicle for solving the absenteeism problem and reducing the resulting wage costs.
