Würth Belux

If employees at Würth Belux are struggling with a problem, they can seek help through the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), the internal persons of trust, Mensura’s psychosocial aspects prevention adviser (PAPSY), or with EHS Manager Lia Lopez. As the Internal Person of Trust and Confidential Adviser, she regularly offers a listening ear for all kinds of concerns.

“I see and hear from different colleagues,” Lia says. “My ‘feelers’ had already picked up certain recurring themes for a while, which I reported to the CEO at the well-being meeting every month, as well as to our HR manager – mainly psychosocial and ergonomic topics.”

Hugo Vanderputten, prevention adviser at Mensura, has been guiding Würth Belux for ten years. In doing so, he monitors the cooperation between Würth Belux and Mensura as an external service, in tandem with Service Delivery Coordinator Sonja Smets. From that expertise, he suggested a tailor-made route.
 

The Health & Safety Journey is Würth’s journey with Mensura to achieve a sustainable impact on absenteeism and well-being within the organisation. The programme is underpinned by a three-pronged approach.

 “First of all, it is a multidisciplinary process,” Hugo explains. “Mensura experts from different domains sit around the table together to identify the client’s risks and action points. So the H&S Journey is truly people-driven: a network of more than 700 experts with me as the central access point for the client. In doing so, we are also supported by technology. We collect data from questionnaires, reports, company visits, etc. and use machine learning and AI to distil valuable advice from them. We track all actions in clear digital customer portals for employees and employers.”

Survey and Check

After an interdisciplinary meeting in May 2024, Lia and Hugo planned the next step: the application of the two Health & Safety tools. During the summer, all employees were given a voluntary Health & SafetySurvey, a digital questionnaire that probed their health, sense of safety, working conditions, and so on. 58% completed the survey. The Health & Safety Check was scheduled at the employer level. In doing so, Lia and Hugo delved into the administrative side of the well-being policy: were all the documents and procedures in order?

Afterwards, they studied the results from the two tools on clear dashboards. “You always have to look at those complementarily,” Hugo says. “Even with crystal-clear procedures for psychosocial support (for example), your employees may run into mental problems in the workplace.”

Two obstacles

Two obstacles emerged from the Survey and Check: psychosocial aspects (including resilience and workload) and ergonomics – a confirmation of Lia’s suspicions. Together with Hugo, she listed all the results and areas of concern and submitted the package to the board in September 2024, explicitly asking for action.

“As an internal prevention adviser, I make neutral recommendations, but concrete measures have to come from senior management,” Lia explains. “After all, this is the only way they are truly supported. If it doesn’t start there, how can we expect the whole organisation to change?”

The management took responsibility and formulated a few concrete action points. These were included in the 2025 Annual Action Plan: an ergonomics risk assessment in the spring and an early update of their psychosocial risk assessment in the autumn – both facilitated by Mensura. This will allow Würth Belux to define tangible priorities to outline targeted next steps.

The output of the Health & Safety tools also played a key role in the sustainability process. Indeed, those insights helped form the basis of the sustainable action plan the company presented to enterprise network Voka in January 2025. After implementing all these initiatives in 2025, Würth Belux will resubmit the results to Voka in 2026 in order to achieve the Voka Sustainable Business Charter (VCDO).

So the journey’s destination is already set, and Lia looks ahead optimistically. “Thanks to our approach, we have created an opening in the organisation to take positive steps. Of course, prevention costs money, but there is a return on that investment.”