Achieving Sustainability in the Workplace: Presenteeism and Occupational Health and Safety

Dear Colleagues,

Investigating the well-being of workers, including their physical and mental health, as well as assessing factors such as the workplace environments and behaviors that are linked to health and safety issues, can offer valuable theoretical insights and practical advice aimed at increasing healthy and sustainable productivity. However, numerous serious and neglected occupational health issues remain threats to the sustainability of workplaces. For example, presenteeism, which refers to an employee's persistence at work despite experiencing a health or other problems, is a prevalent issue across many industries and jobs globally and takes a serious toll on the physical and mental health and safety of employees. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of scientific theoretical tools, extensive empirical investigations, and sufficiently groundbreaking conclusions on how to manage and intervene to mitigate the consequences of employee presenteeism and other psychosocial factors or behaviors related to occupational health and safety. Therefore, there is an urgent need to dig deeper into the issues of presenteeism and occupational health and safety and how they are related to sustainability in the workplace.

This Special Issue aims to explore and discuss presenteeism and occupational health and safety issues related to workplace sustainability, including their antecedents, consequences, and initiatives designed to tackle them. Specifically, the Special Issue seeks to respond to four main questions: (1) How can we measure and capture presenteeism and other occupational health and safety issues in a scientific manner? (2) What induces presenteeism and other occupational health and safety risks? (3) How do presenteeism and other occupational health and safety issues affect workplace sustainability, e.g., the sustainable employability of employees or the sustainable productivity of organizations? (4) What management practices can be implemented to address presenteeism and other occupational health and safety concerns?

Based on the above questions, submissions concerning the following topics are particularly welcome: (1) cross-cultural research is encouraged due to differences in social backgrounds and work styles in different countries and regions; (2) research geared towards the aging workforce is encouraged due to the emergence of an aging society that has placed more urgent and higher demands on occupational health and workplace sustainability; (3) as the digital age offers more convenience for managing occupational health and sustainability by providing more novel tools, research related to digitalized interventions is encouraged. Both original research articles and reviews are welcome.

Overall, this Special Issue will provide the journal Sustainability with an occupational perspective on sustainability management in relation to health and safety.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Tianan Yang
Dr. Jianwei Deng
Dr. Ran Liu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• occupational health
• healthy workplaces
• presenteeism
• safety
• psychosocial factors
• sustainable employability