Brief Description of the HESAPRO Project

HESAPRO — Health And Safety At Work in Relation With Productivity — is an EU-funded partnership project examining a question that is often treated as two separate issues: how workplaces stay safe, and how workplaces stay productive. HESAPRO starts from the position that these are the same question asked from two directions.

Why the project exists

Enterprises frequently manage occupational health and safety (OHS) as a compliance obligation, disconnected from operational planning. At the same time, productivity programmes rarely account for the human and physical cost of poor working conditions. HESAPRO was set up to close that gap by producing practical evidence, tools and training material that show employers and employees how safer work is, in most cases, more productive work.

Objectives

• Map the relationship between OHS conditions and productivity indicators across partner countries.
• Develop assessment instruments that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can use without specialist expertise.
• Produce accessible guides and leaflets translating research findings into day-to-day workplace practice.
• Build a shared resource base of reference material for trainers, safety officers and managers.
• Transfer good practice between the Turkish, French and Belgian partner organisations and beyond.

Who it is for

The primary audiences are SME owners and managers, occupational health and safety officers, vocational trainers, and employee representatives. The project also produces material of direct interest to policy makers working on national implementation of EU occupational health directives, since it documents transferable practice from multiple regulatory contexts.

Methodology

Work is organised in stages: a desk and field research phase, an instrument-design phase validated with partner enterprises, a piloting phase in real workplaces, and a dissemination phase distributing the resulting toolkit through partner networks and this website. This staged approach, standard for Lifelong Learning Programme partnership projects, allows findings from one phase to directly shape the next.

Expected impact

By the end of the project, participating enterprises should have concrete, low-cost instruments to self-assess the safety-productivity relationship in their own workplace, along with guides written for non-specialist readers. See the project overview for the full work plan, or go straight to the instruments and guides produced so far.