Vital employees

Employees face work environments that are subject to change and in which work demands and pressures are increasing. Besides this changing work environment, personality traits and (major) changes in the private sphere (e.g. divorce) can also put pressure on health/vitality. This can lead to an imbalance between work demands and work capacity. If this is the case, and this is offset by insufficient energy sources and control options, for example, it can be at the expense of work performance and will have negative consequences on mental and/or physical health. This overwork can eventually result in sick leave. This absenteeism involves high costs that are borne by both employees (including medical costs) and employers (including payroll costs and replacement) and society as a whole (benefits and medical costs). From 2014 to 2022, these costs increased from €1.3 billion to €2.6 billion. A doubling in eight years, illustrating the need for solid intervention.

Promoting vitality at work and reducing absenteeism increases social earning power: it contributes to a healthier society (social impact) and reduces costs for employees, employers and society (economic impact).

It is important to gain knowledge about what employers are up against with regard to vitality/health initiatives so that this can be acted upon in a thorough manner to promote employee vitality/health and control absenteeism costs. Providing insight into how employees can promote employee vitality and what aspects play an important role in this is central to this. These issues exist at various employers.

The project
Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Steven Vos (lecturer at Fontys Sports College and Professor at TU/e), an innovation acceleration research into various vitality/health implementation issues is being conducted. In this research, the Delphi method is applied to arrive at active factors (including among the frontrunners) that can stimulate further implementation of vitality programs at companies in the Brainport region. In this way, the companies are working in co-creation on a model that answers the question, "How can you promote employee vitality?" Among other things, the model shows the hindering and promoting factors of implementation of vitality programs. In preparation for the Delphi method, insight is first obtained into the working methods of organizations in the field of employee vitality and bottlenecks that are experienced.

€49,608 will be used as a PPP program grant.