Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 125 
 
 
6.3 Guidance and support  
Supervision is only one approach to implementing legislation. As mentioned, supervision by state 
authorities can only reach a small share of all enterprises, particularly not the many small ones and the 
self-employed. In addition to supervision and control, a broad variety of prevention -supporting 
activities has been developed during the past decades.388  
The authors of EU -OSHA’s ‘Supporting compliance’  reports state a strong increase in ‘compliance 
promotion strategies’. They write: ‘The regulatory changes have been matched in more recent times by 
an increasingly diverse set of compliance promotion strategies. Not only has public regulation sought to 
engage and encourage duty holders in the pursuit of forms of regulated self-regulation, but … the 
discourse on regulation itself has sought a far broader understanding of its meaning and the role of the 
private and public regulatory actors and processes potentially involved in both defining and securing 
compliance.’389 
One important type of means are guidance and support tools  for enterprises and workers to extend 
the reach and impact of legislation. Labour inspectorates and other state institutions produce these tools 
either themselves or in collaboration with social partners or professional organisations.   
Proactive research and preventive guidelines, particularly in situations of new risks, have become a 
quite usual preventive activity (e.g. on nanotechnology, or on some developments in digitalisation). For 
very complex regulations, like REACH, national institutions installed helpdesks. European institutions 
also publish such guidance documents for EU-wide use, for example, the guidance on health and safety 
in agriculture,390 the guidance regarding the implementation of the Machinery directive,391 the guidance 
documents of EU -OSHA on COVID -19392 and the European Commission guidance documents on 
seasonal workers and COVID -19.393 Practically all EU and international OSH institutions published 
guidance documents on how to identify and reduce psychosocial risk at workplaces. 394  
A large amount of OSH guidance already exists in different formats ,395 starting with clas sical written 
guidance documents, increasingly  complemented by audio- visual and interactive tools. EU -OSHA 
covers a large variety of workplaces with its digital risk assessment tool OiRA (Online interactive Risk 
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