We wanted to ensure that we responded to the needs of employees and managers/owners of SMEs, and the challenges they face, regarding the implementation of measures supporting mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. Mental health and wellbeing challenges in the workplace is an issue that is growing, and SMEs are often hit harder. Thus is both due to the fact that these companies often contains fewer people than larger organisations, so when one of colleague is affected by mental health and wellbeing distress, the entire company often face challenges, but also due to the fact that there is often few resources available to tackle mental health and wellbeing issues and prevention. This project thus set out to design and make available resources, tools and strategies to prevent and contract work-related stress and negative mental health and wellbeing impacts of working conditions. focused on SMEs. The tools are made to be easily implementable, and the resources are freely available, to ensure the optimal uptake, and ease of implementation by SMEs, again considering the challenges they face regarding ressources and time.
A substantial body of evidence suggests that work related risks can negatively affect mental health, and that this has a large impact both on productivity and society as a whole. Promoting mental health and wellbeing in the workspace is a vital response to these challenges, as the workplace is both a major factor in the development of mental and physical health problems but also a platform for the introduction and development of appropriate preventive measures. Specifically, this project has focused on the needs of SME’s in relation to preventive measures for Mental Health and Wellbeing. Occupational epidemiologists have suggested that SMEs need "special attention because their knowledge, competence and financial resources to carry out interventions are limited and strategies that are routinely employed by larger organizations are difficult to implement and are infrequently adopted by SMEs. Therefore, this project wanted to ensure that easily implementable and easily understandable material is readily available for SME’s to implement, considering the limitations that SME’s often face.