Day Two of PHSCon was likely to be uncomfortable. Day One covered context, community and curiosity. Day Two asked a more difficult question. Now that employers know more about psychosocial hazards, are they prepared to change how work is designed, managed and measured? The broad answer from the speakers and case studies was “not really”. …
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....
First, there was brainwashing, then greenwashing and safewashing. Could the well-being industry be accused of safewashing? Has well-being had its day in the sun? The first use of safewash to describe presenting occupational health and safety (OHS) information in a diffused truth was in the 2016 research paper by Sharron O’Neill, Jack Flanagan and Kevin …
Dr William Fleming’s open-access article called Employee well‐being outcomes from individual‐level “Mental Health Interventions: Cross‐sectional Evidence from the United Kingdom” is receiving a lot of online and mainstream media attention, and rightly so. It is a robust piece of research from a sample of over 46,000 workers in 233 organisations. The article compares: “…participants and …
For a country with clear health and safety obligations for almost half a century, it’s remarkable how often Australia still hears employers say they’re “unsure” what psychological health and safety requires. The duty has never been ambiguous. Employers must provide work that is safe and healthy and free from risks so far as is reasonably …
LinkedIn is an enormously inhumane software, but it does have some positive uses. One of them is being invited to meet people who might find you interesting or admire your work. Earlier this year, I jumped at the chance to have coffee with Dr Kat Page, who lived only a few suburbs away, as an …
WorkSafe Victoria has just concluded a Safe Work Month webinar on psychosocial hazards and psychological risks, attended by around 14,000. The content was familiar to anyone who has been following the development of Victoria’s new occupational health and safety (OHS) over the last four years, but it was an important communications opportunity for WorkSafe with …
