| Abstract: | We spend a large part of our lives at work. Thus, managing psychosocial risks in the work environment is of paramount importance, as it contributes to the well-being of employees and positively impacts their psycho-physical health, thereby significantly enriching their overall quality of life. Due to their close connection with stress, attention to psychosocial risks has recently been increasing. These are a wide range of factors, ranging from organizational, work, social and environmental, which negatively impact the psychophysical health of the employee. With changing working conditions and the constant development of technology, the number of risk factors in the working environment is only increasing, while existing risk factors are only getting worse. Therefore, attention to the well-being, and in this context the SEDP and PDP, of employees is of key importance. SEDP is a holistic concept that many equate with happiness and generally refers to feelings of overall fulfilment, satisfaction, meaning and quality of life. As such, it makes a significant contribution to employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation, and strengthens their commitment to the company and their relationships with each other. Meanwhile, PDP can be equated with psychological health and, in the context of the workplace, is mainly reflected in prosocial behaviour, a greater willingness to help others, a positive attitude, increased productivity, innovation and, ultimately, better stress management. Failure to manage psychosocial risks in the work environment and the associated higher levels of stress and lower levels of employee well-being can have a range of negative effects which manifest themselves at the employee level at the emotional, behavioural, cognitive and physiological levels and, as such, have a marked negative impact on their mental and physical health. The consequences of the above are also felt by the organisation, mainly in the form of higher costs as a consequence of increased absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover, lower employee performance, more errors at work, more work-related accidents and illnesses, poorer interpersonal relations, lower motivation and satisfaction, and as a consequence of lower overall business performance of the organisation.
In the empirical part, we conducted a study of psychosocial risks, PDP, SEDP and their connection among employees in two small family businesses in the Pohorje region, operating in the hospitality and tourism sector. The sector is characterised by seasonality of work, irregular working hours, working at inconvenient times, personnel problems and exposure to physical and emotional exhaustion. In this context, we set ourselves four hypotheses. Using the methods of descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality of distribution, the Mann-Whitney U test for comparing two independent samples and the Spearman correlation coefficient to identify statistically significant correlation between variables, we found, that, despite the risks, employees in both organizations studied feel on average partly well, express satisfaction with their lives, do not experience psychosocial risks in the work environment, and that the level of perceived psychosocial risks does not differ statistically significantly between them. We have also shown that there is no statistically significant negative correlation among psychosocial risks and employees' SEDP and PDP in the organizations studied. Drawing from the analysis of the data and the theoretical review of the given concepts, we formulated guidelines for improving the situation of psychosocial risks, SEDP and PDP of employees in the organizations studied. |
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