EFNMS becomes official EU-OSHA campaign partner with focus on mental health in maintenance

Psychosocial risks are not caused by individual workload alone. The way work is planned, organised and managed also plays an important role.

Within maintenance, typical factors include unplanned interventions, work outside normal operating hours, complex troubleshooting, staff shortages, contractor coordination and conflicting priorities between production, safety and maintenance.

When reactive maintenance structurally accounts for a high share of the workload, pressure on maintenance teams can increase further.

Mental health therefore also becomes a maintenance management issue. Not because every breakdown automatically creates a psychosocial risk, but because structural patterns in work organisation can increase mental strain over time.

For Maintenance Managers and Reliability Engineers, indicators such as overtime, emergency work percentage, maintenance backlog, schedule compliance, repeat interventions, absenteeism and safety incidents can provide useful signals. None of these KPIs measures mental health directly, but combined trends may indicate organisational conditions that require further analysis.

Within the EFNMS European Health, Safety & Environmental Committee (EHSEC), the mental health of maintenance professionals is a specific area of focus.

In this context, the committee developed a Mental Health in Maintenance tool to help organisations assess mental health and psychosocial risks from a maintenance perspective. The objective is to structure the topic more systematically and connect the discussion to the day-to-day organisation of maintenance work.

BEMAS and EFNMS are also preparing a European, non-profit research initiative on mental health among maintenance professionals, with the survey planned for launch in 2027. The research aims to provide a better understanding of how maintenance professionals experience mental workload and psychosocial risks, and which characteristics of the working environment and maintenance organisation play a role.

These practice-based insights should help to build a stronger understanding of the issue within the specific context of maintenance. A general workplace wellbeing approach does not automatically take into account situations such as breakdown interventions, shutdowns and turnarounds, on-call duties, maintenance backlog or the continuous trade-offs between production continuity, safety and technical risk.

Wim Vancauwenberghe, Director of BEMAS, represents BEMAS within the EFNMS EHSEC Committee and contributed to the development of this approach. The Mental Health in Maintenance tool will also be presented during a meeting of the EU-OSHA Steering Group in Brussels.

BEMAS represents Belgium within EFNMS. This enables experiences and challenges from Belgian maintenance and asset management practice to contribute to European initiatives, while insights from the European network can in turn be shared with the wider maintenance community.

The campaign underlines that mental health is not exclusively an HR or occupational wellbeing topic. Decisions made within maintenance management can also influence psychosocial risks.

A mature maintenance organisation therefore considers not only technical reliability and cost, but also the conditions under which maintenance work is prepared and executed. This includes realistic planning, clear priorities, sufficient capacity, workable on-call arrangements, well-prepared shutdowns and clear responsibilities during breakdown situations.

From an asset management perspective, this connection is logical. Sustainable asset performance depends on the combined management of performance, risk, resources and people throughout the asset lifecycle.

Technical reliability and human capacity should therefore not be treated as separate domains.

The maturity question shifts from “How do we support employees when pressure becomes too high?” to “Which characteristics of our maintenance system create or increase this pressure, and how can we control them?”

The main value of Mental Health in Maintenance lies in connecting human factors with operational performance.

A structurally high workload, insufficient planned capacity or a high proportion of reactive maintenance can affect not only employees but also decision-making, safety, execution quality and maintenance efficiency.

Psychosocial risks therefore deserve consideration alongside other risks that are systematically identified and managed within maintenance and asset management.

The cooperation between EU-OSHA and EFNMS provides the European maintenance community with a framework for examining these issues in a more maintenance-specific way and for exchanging practices across countries and industrial sectors.

EFNMS – European Federation of National Maintenance Societies is the European federation of national organisations active in maintenance, reliability and asset management.

Through its national members and specialised committees, EFNMS facilitates knowledge exchange and cooperation in areas including maintenance management, asset management, safety, technology, education and professional development.

BEMAS represents Belgium within EFNMS and contributes through EFNMS activities and committees to European knowledge exchange on current challenges for maintenance and asset management professionals.