How Health Institutions Preserve the Workplace Well-Being of Their Employees: A Discourse Analysis of the World Health Organization Policies During and After COVID-19.

The World Health Organizati on (WHO) is a UN agency focused on global health preservati on. Its main goal is universal health coverage, coordinati ng internati onal health emergency responses and promoti ng healthy lifestyles (WHO 2025a). To do so, it issues guidelines to support nati onal policies that address health problems, promote wellness, and tackle physical, psychosocial, and environmental health risks such as workplace well-being. This is advocated, via WHO’s website, in both normal and criti cal situati ons, e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic (Usher et al. 2020; Cullen et al. 2020). Since the end of the pandemic in 2023, declared by WHO itself, employers in various sectors have been promoti ng healthier working environments (Peters et al. 2022), following WHO’s guidelines. Several studies have analysed how companies and insti tuti ons communicate their workplace well-being policies (Paganoni/Osiejewicz 2022; Palumbo/Duin 2022; Qin/Men 2023; Grego 2024). However, no contributi on has so far investi gated WHO’s workplace policies and how they are communicated by the Organizati on that globally regulates these policies. To fi ll this gap, the study conducts a discourse analysis on those secti ons on the WHO’s website (i.e., “Careers”, “The WHO Environment”, “WHO Ethics”, and “WHO Code of Ethics”) that present the Organizati on’s policies for its employees’ workplace well-being. The study retrieved the versions of these Secti ons published during COVID-19 using The Wayback Machine and compares them to their current version. The aim is to assess how WHO’s policies are in line with current knowledge on workplace well-being best practi ces as well as to assess the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on WHO’s organisati onal rhetoric in communicati ng its workplace well-being policies.