Recently, occupational health and safety (OHS) lawyer Steve Bell issued a challenge to all those who provide leadership training to executives.
At the annual breakfast for the Australian Health and Safety Institute, supported by Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Bell shared this leadership training scenario with his panel of experts:
The most popular solution to physical and psychological occupational health and safety (OHS) problems is leadership. Leadership is crucial to implementing changes to work processes and policies that can prevent harm, yet we often view leadership as executive benevolence, without really examining executive leadership in modern workplaces.
Looking at current leadership traits through a different lens may help us understand why it continues to be so difficult to improve worker health and safety.
Citizen and worker well-being will not be a major focus of the Australian government’s budgets, but it will still influence them. Recently, Professor Paul Read assessed the Wellbeing Budget concept in The Australian Fabians Review (issue 8). His optimism is notable and helps us understand well-being in an occupational and psychological context.
In Australia, the sovereign citizen movement has gained strength for some time, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also, according to The Age newspaper recently, creating administrative problems for the courts – Flash juries and Bible verses: How sovereign citizens clog up Australian courts (paywalled). I began considering how I would manage a worker who held sovereign-citizen beliefs and might object to certain policies and directives used in the occupational health and safety (OHS) context.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers was keen on establishing a “Wellbeing Budget“. The initiative faded, but the desire persisted. The Wellbeing Budget is getting renewed interest but also some anticipatory criticism. Such a budget could have significant impacts on occupational health and safety (OHS) management, so it warrants monitoring and cautious support.
The issue of working in heat has resurfaced in some Australian media this February, again driven by trade unions. The union approach continues to show negotiating flaws, deflections, and at least one inaccuracy.
Canada’s Institute for Work & Health (IWH) has produced a bold forecast of the future of occupational health and safety (OHS) in its new report, “Work & health 2040: Anticipating changes impacting the futures of occupational health and safety”. The seven trends identified are not greatly surprising. Change is needed to address these trends, but who should, and how to, make the changes is unclear.
