Psychosocial literacy at work: The role of digital data

Abstract

Abstract The burden caused by poor psychosocial working environments on the working population, organizations, societies, and economies are a major challenge to occupational health, and fair work. A key enabler for accelerating the promotion of healthy and safe workplaces is the enhancement of psychosocial health literacy at work, to support not only workers and organizations but also communities and countries to understand, recognize and take effective actions to protect and promote their own psychosocial health and sustainability. Digitalization, on the other hand has been an enabler for knowledge creation and added value to information. The present work proposes a methodology that combines digital big data on psychosocial health of the Portuguese working population (PWP), allied with quantitative and qualitive approaches to the design of psychosocial literacy at work tailored interventions. In the promotion of psychosocial safe working environments collaborative co-design models are often recognized has effective because the process undertakes meaningful engagement with workers, enlarged community, health and safety professionals and decision makers, to uncover specific wisdom and ensure tailored psychosocial work literacy interventions. Each organization is unique and undertakes its own “personality”, so individualized interventions for dealing with the organization individual psychosocial profile are the most effective way to design such interventions. The digital data from the PWP are allied with a qualitative tailored approach admitting results maximization by using digital big data and algorithm calculation for several values and cluster identification incorporating individual and organizational specificities, using the data from the Portuguese Observatory on Occupational Factors (Popsy@Work). Its intended to raise awareness on the need to democratize the access to psychosocial health at work. Key messages • Digital big data on psychosocial health monitoring, reporting and foresight, allows the promotion of robust metrics and reference values for the Portuguese working population. • Psychosocial literacy at work is potentiated by collaborative co-design models – aligning digital big data and qualitative individualized approaches.