With the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work during their lifetime, it’s important employees are looked after. Here’s some powerful health and safety facts to back up your H&S implementation.

Most people spend the majority of their week at work and a job has a huge influence on a person’s identity. Unhappiness at work will naturally affect your personal life and can make you more prone to developing mental and physical illnesses. A healthy lifestyle depends on your happiness and wellbeing while at work.

Often, people don’t realise the effect their work is having on their physical and mental health, and in today’s society, it’s easy to get caught up with the demands of a job and become overworked. Whilst chasing professional success is admirable, it shouldn’t come at the expense of your physical and mental health.

So, what makes a healthy work environment?

**Click on the infographic to the right to get into the stats.**

A healthy work environment will vary from person to person depending on what they look for in a job. Typically speaking though, a healthy workplace will provide several factors, including fair wages and an encouraging atmosphere. You should also be able to have a good work life balance with time to unwind after work, exercise and maintain a social life. These things are essential to maintaining good physical and mental health.

Studies have shown that happy employees are 20% more productive than unhappy employees but unfortunately, only 23% of British people are happy in their work. Too often, the demands of a job cause workers to develop unhealthy habits such smoking, drinking caffeine and under-sleeping to keep up with what’s required of them. This often comes about when there is not enough work-life balance in a person’s routine.

A healthy work-life balance is critical to employee productivity, health and happiness. Studies have shown that in countries where family life and recreational activity take priority over work, citizens are significantly happier. In Denmark for example, which is widely considered the world’s happiest country, 2/3 of their average day is spent on eating, sleeping and leisure and only 2% of employees work regular long hours. To combat employee unhappiness, workplaces should encourage workers to pursue activities unrelated to work alongside their professional lives.

The poor physical and mental health of employees is a huge expense to the economy. 300,000 people with mental health conditions leave employment or take days off every year and sickness absence costs UK organisations £29 billion a year annually. Fortunately, more and more companies are making the health and wellbeing of their employees a priority. Being able to work on a flexitime schedule and having the option to work from home is becoming more common, meaning employees can put their wellbeing first when they need to – a great step in the right direction.

This infographic created by Stanley R Harris looks at this topic in further detail, comparing healthy and unhealthy work environments to see what might be causing unhappiness amongst employees.