Background: Most employees will experience serious illness, caregiving, dying and loss (End-of-Life (EoL) experiences) at multiple points throughout their working lives. These experiences impact affected employees but also their colleagues in terms of health and well-being, and the workplace as a whole in terms of workplace safety, productivity and labour relations. The impact of EoL experiences on employees means that workplaces are called to play a more active role in providing support for EoL experiences.

Aim: To describe how the EU-CoWork (2024–2028) project addresses its main aims to (1) createCompassionate Workplace cultures, practices and policies and improve health and well-being of employees dealing with EoL experiences in different national work contexts in Europe;(2) describe and evaluate the process of co-creation and implementation of CompassionateWorkplace Programs (CWPs) and how these influence the programs’ outcomes.

Design: EU-CoWork employs a facilitated and co-creative Developmental Evaluation approach to the development of 12 tailored CWPs across four European countries (Belgium, Austria,Sweden and Greece).

Methods: To evaluate the outcomes and processes leading to these outcomes, a mixed-methods Realist Evaluation methodology is applied, formulating and testing Context-Mechanism-Outcomes configurations and combining longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data collections.

Results: EU-CoWork will generate evidence to support an expanded model of occupational health and safety risk factors sensitive to the specific challenges related to employees’ Experiences. In doing so, several challenges will have to be navigated: involving employees with EoL experiences while avoiding overburdening them, avoiding tokenistic engagement, managing power differentials, balancing the need for scientific rigour with the flexibility required in co-creation, reconciling different epistemologies and disciplinary traditions and organisational resistance to change.

Conclusion: There are potential long-lasting broader societal impacts through the stimulation of open discourse on EoL topics, the reconciliation of work and care, and changes in gendered work and care patterns.