A healthy workplace is one where employers and employees collaborate to continually protect and promote people’s health, safety, and wellbeing and workplace sustainability.1

A healthy workplace considers:

  • health safety and wellbeing matters in the physical work environment
  • health, safety and wellbeing matters in the psychosocial work environment, including organisation of work and workplace culture
  • personal health in the workplace and how it can be supported
  • community participation to improve the health of workers, their families and other members of the community.

Our definition of workplace is any place where work is carried out for a business or undertaking and includes any place where a worker goes, or is likely to be, while at work. This may include offices, factories, shops, construction sites, vehicles, ships, aircraft or other mobile structures on land or water. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us realise that a workplace can also be our own home.

South Australian workplaces are increasing their focus on workplace health and wellbeing, with many delivering strategies and programs to protect and promote worker health, safety, and wellbeing.

The idea that working is good for us is well supported and working in a healthy workplace has greater benefits.2

Workplace health and wellbeing relates to all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment to how people feel about their work, the culture at work, the way work is organised and how people are encouraged to maintain good physical and mental health.3

1 World Health Organization (WHO), Healthy workplaces: a model for action, WHO, 2010.

2 The Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Realising the health benefits of work – an evidence update, The Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2015, accessed 2022; Department of Health, National Preventive Health Strategy 2021–2030, Department of Health, 2021, see Working Conditions Table 1 p. 14

3 International Labour Organization (ILO), Workplace wellbeing, ILO [website], n.d., accessed October 2022.