Below is the first video of what we hope to produce weekly – a SafetyAtWorkBlog Update. This short weekly video is an informal wrap up of some of the SafetyAtWorkBlog articles and a quick mention of what is coming up soon. This episode also mentions a couple of interesting safety-related books.
Please let me know your thoughts on this initiative.
In previous writings about gender and occupational health and safety (OHS), the work of Jerald Greenberg was mentioned, particularly his book “Insidious Workplace Behaviour”. His perspective seems even more pertinent today as many of us are weaving our way cautiously through communications and interactions with our work colleagues as we clarify what is acceptable behaviour so as to avoid offence or accusations of bullying and sexual harassment.
SafetyAtWorkBlog’s position is that sexual harassment is part of OHS and safety management systems due to the potential physical and psychological harm, in a similar way that bullying became an OHS concern.
Greenberg researches organisational behaviour and has written about corporate misdeeds and misbehaviour but he identified many precursors to some of these incidents.
Over the last few months, SafetyAtWorkBlog has received several new OHS-related books for review. There’s not enough time to undertake a deep review of each book so here is the first of a series of quick reviews.
The latest episode of Safety At Work Talks is a return to the sequence of interviews with Professor Sidney Dekker. In April 2017, Dekker published a book called The End of Heaven which discusses suffering. This book has a very different tone from his previous books and is intriguing.
The breadth of the discussion was also surprising with concepts and references rarely talked about in relation to occupational health and safety, such as morality, Acts of God, train disasters and the Bible. If this sounds heavy, it is useful to follow the discussion that leads to this statement from Dekker:
“Safety Culture is the new Human Error”.
This latest episode is available at
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/safetyatworkblog/safety-at-works-talks-episode-03
Podbean: https://safetyoz.podbean.com/
I once had to stop a potential fight on a construction site between a works supervisor and a safety professional. The verbal abuse and niggling occurred for several minutes before the men’s chests were inflated like roosters and it was at this point I stepped in to diffuse the situation by asking some questions as…
Safety people love evidence, particularly evidence of hazards because evidence can validate what we thought we saw. Perhaps of more importance is evidence about what types of interventions work. A recent study into the prevention of workplace bullying (abstract only) held the promise of solutions, even though it was a literature review and of some…
It took a long time but Wiley has published a Dummies guide on Health and Safety At Work. The lack of an occupational health and safety (OHS) book in this series has always been a mystery particularly when the Dummies” market seems to be, primarily, small- to medium-sized businesses. This edition is written for the UK market but the vast majority of the book is applicable to any jurisdiction that is based on the original UK OHS laws. But is it any good?
SafetyAtWorkBlog dipped into several chapters of the book to see if it was on the right path.