health – Page 33 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Bad work “habits” are part of the problem

The headline immediately caught my attention:

“Five bad habits to dump before resuming work”
Australian Financial Review, January 4, 2022

Such is the power of the click-bait headline.

This article is aimed at middle managers and those working from home. It is in the Australian financial/business newspaper so articles about individual empowerment and entrepreneurship rather than structural change are expected. The article above is a classic example of the Australian Financial Review’s approach to workplace health and safety matters: a newspaper with significant influence on business leaders and executives but one that rarely quotes or approaches occupational health and safety (OHS) experts.

We can control workplace mental health if we want to

Some years ago, Time Management was all the rage. It was the precursor to the resurgence of the Work Smarter – Not Harder movement, but it seems to have faded from conversation recently. Part of the reason is that everyone is expected to be contactable, every day, every week, every month. And then we wonder why there seems to be a workplace mental health crisis?!

The answer is simple – turn off your phone, turn off your work computer. This will cause some readers to shake and say that they cannot do that as their bosses expect them to be available. The unfairness of this was discussed a little in the article on “work-to-rule“, but the employers’ expectations are more than unfair. They indicate a poor manager who cannot manage their time and of a workplace culture that endorses this sloppiness/laziness. A recent New Zealand article looked at some of the recent trends.

Some OHS approaches need the Industrial Relations touch

Several years ago, there was a proposal to produce a book of research linked to the work and themes of Professor Michael Quinlan. That book became “The Regulation and Management of Workplace Health and Safety“, and I recently obtained an affordable copy for my Summer break. (An excellent book review has been written by Eric Tucker on which this article is based)

There are many labour and industrial relations concepts in the book, many that I had to look up – pluralism, unitarism, politicalism. Read enough industrial relations (IR) research papers, and these terms might become second nature, but occupational health and safety (OHS) texts (what few there are of them) seem simpler and blander, generally avoiding the politics of work and therefore the politics of safety. Most of the recent OHS books seem to be dominated by Leadership and neuroscience *.

Banyan Health Group responds

Earlier this week, I paused an article on corporate burnout which used a media release from the Banyan Health Group as the catalyst. The group chose not to respond to some challenging questions but later reversed their position. Below are the responses of Ruth Limkin – CEO of The Banyans Healthcare Group to those questions. I thank Ruth and her team for their support

SAWB: The media release mentions chronic stress risk factors of “increased absenteeism, disconnected employee relationships, heavy workload and tight deadlines” and “longer hours”. The World Health Organisation has written that “Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life”. What can an executive manager do to reduce or eliminate these factors and thereby reduce the need for personal psychological interventions? Should the businesses change the way they do business and change the expectations that they place on executives?

Corporate burnout and expecting too much

The Banyan Health Group issued a media release about company executives experiencing burnout in support of Psychology Week. I put some questions to the Group’s media contact from the occupational health and safety (OHS) perspective. The contact said that the Banyan Health Group members did not think they were best placed to answer the questions. [They have since chosen to respond and that supplementary article is available HERE]

That’s perhaps understandable, but we know that work-related mental health problems require a multi-disciplinary response involving personal and structural interventions as individual, social, and organisation factors contribute to poor mental health, of which burnout is part. Organisations that put themselves out there as subject matter experts and corporate workplace service providers to business should be able to respond to challenging questions. Below are statements from Banyan’s media pack and my questions.

The Good, the Perfect and the Practicable

Managers often say that we shouldn’t let the Good suffer in the pursuit of the Perfect. And there’s a bit of a parallel there between occupational health and safety (OHS) principles and the legislative requirement to achieve safety only as far as is reasonably practicable. So the aim is the Perfect and the practicable is the Good. But one of the traps of this sort of thinking is that you can’t establish what is the Good without first understanding what is the Perfect.

Can nightshift be safe?

Is it time that we reassessed night shift work through the occupational health and safety (OHS) lens?

In 2022 Dr Lin Shen and Dr Tracey Sletten of Monash University will be starting a research study, supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council, to

“… examine the role of light in the response to shift work and to help develop more individual recommendations for light exposure to improve the management of shift work”.

Shen and Sletten are looking for companies willing to participate. Contact details are available in the Research Project Proposal.

This article is not a criticism of the research project but uses some comments in the proposal as a catalyst for a discussion about the health and safety of night shift work.

Category: health

Bad work “habits” are part of the problem

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We can control workplace mental health if we want to

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Some OHS approaches need the Industrial Relations touch

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Banyan Health Group responds

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Corporate burnout and expecting too much

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The Good, the Perfect and the Practicable

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Can nightshift be safe?

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