Mental health at work is about to become a formal EU-wide compliance focus. EU-OSHA (the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work) has confirmed its next Healthy Workplaces Campaign, running 2026 to 2028, will be “Together for Mental Health at Work”, officially launching in October 2026. It is the clearest signal yet that psychosocial risk is moving from a wellbeing nice-to-have to a standard part of workplace risk assessment across Europe.
Why now?
EU-OSHA’s 2025 OSH Pulse Survey found that 37% of European workers report overall fatigue, and 29% report stress, depression or anxiety linked to their work. The campaign is designed to reach “new and overlooked occupational groups, sectors and areas” that haven’t traditionally been the focus of mental health initiatives at work.
Psychosocial risks, in EU-OSHA’s own terms, arise from poor work design, organisation and management, as well as a poor social context at work, and they can lead to real psychological, physical and social harm. That framing matters: it locates the risk in how work is organised, not simply in individual resilience.
Ireland is already moving on this
Irish employers don’t need to wait for the October 2026 campaign launch to see this coming. The Health and Safety Authority has already updated its Safety Representative training standards for 2026 to explicitly include psychosocial risks and remote work safety, alongside the traditional physical hazards Safety Reps have always covered. In effect, Ireland’s own regulator got ahead of the EU-wide campaign.
What “psychosocial risk” means in practice
For most employers, this isn’t about adding a wellness perk. It’s about extending existing risk assessment practice to cover things like:
- Excessive workload, unclear roles, or a lack of control over how work gets done.
- Poor management practices, unclear communication, or lack of support from supervisors.
- Isolation or blurred boundaries associated with remote and hybrid work.
- Job insecurity, bullying, or harassment.
These sit alongside, not instead of, the physical risks employers already assess. A risk assessment that only covers manual handling and slips, trips and falls is no longer the full picture regulators expect.
What employers should do ahead of October 2026
- Check whether your Safety Representatives have been trained against the updated 2026 standards, including psychosocial risk and remote work provisions.
- Add psychosocial hazards to your written risk assessment, even in a simple form, rather than leaving mental health as an informal or ad hoc topic.
- Review how remote and hybrid work is actually being managed day to day, not just what the policy document says.
- Watch for EU-OSHA’s campaign materials from October 2026, which will be rolled out in all official EU languages and are designed to be used directly by employers.
None of this replaces professional mental health support where it’s needed. But treating psychosocial risk as a standard part of workplace safety, rather than a separate HR issue, is where both Irish and EU regulators are now heading.
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