Work is a determinant of health.

Six days from now, on April 28, the International Labour Organization will mark World Day for Safety and Health at Work with the theme of "healthy psychosocial working environments."

The ILO is naming what the evidence has said for years. Leadership behavior, workload, role clarity, communication, and support structures drive worker health, and it has been shown time and time again that worker health is a driver of safety. Work is a determinant of health.

Stress, anxiety, and depression are now the second most common work-related health problem in Europe, and roughly 45% of workers say they are exposed to these risks at work.

This matters because it signals where policy is moving. EU-OSHA's 2026-2028 Healthy Workplaces Campaign targets the same theme. HBR published multiple articles this month on burnout and reframed it as a systems-design issue across the org chart. 85% of midlevel leaders report burnout, and "generic fixes like resilience training miss the point."

The Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois-Champaign reported that 61% of US workers are languishing, compared to only 39% who are thriving. Workplace psychosocial factors mitigated this; on teams with high autonomy and high support ("empowered squads"), almost 70% flourish.

The companies that will win the next decade of workforce health are the ones that stop buying downstream tools to treat symptoms and start redesigning the upstream conditions, including leadership behavior, job design, and the psychosocial work environment, that actually produce the outcomes.

That shift is underway. The ILO is simply putting it on the calendar.