Category: consultation

Veterans, Suicide, Culture and Crompvoets

For many years, occupational health and safety (OHS) has been fixated on “Culture” as an encompassing term for what management activity does not work and what does. The focus has faded slightly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, Culture made an important reappearance this week with the delivery of the final report of Australia’s Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. However, some of the most telling analyses of the safety culture in the Australian Defence Forces occurred in 2021 with the work of Samantha Crompvoets.

NOTE: this article discusses suicides

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Regulations are guardrails

One of the learnings from the recent report into the Grenfell Tower Fire was the failure of regulations and their enforcement. Much attention was given to many of these failures happening during the UK Government’s “red tape challenge” where two (or more) regulations were removed for every one introduced.

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“How can I make my workers safer?”

Most of the Australian occupational health and safety (OHS) regulators have released their calendars of events for October.  There are many invaluable events, especially for those in small- to medium-sized businesses or who have been delegated as “responsible” for OHS in those companies. There are several special events and symposiums for those of working in OHS full time, but here are three themes that I would like to see discussed during the 2024 National Safe Work Month?

Continue reading ““How can I make my workers safer?””

“show me the bodies”

Significant changes in occupational health and safety result from one or more work-related fatalities. To my knowledge, this has not been labelled anyone’s “rule”, but it is a sad truism, and there are examples everywhere.

Episode One of the BBC’s excellent Grenfell podcast series references the phrase “show me the bodies” as having been said by a British bureaucrat requesting more evidence of the risks of external cladding on high-rise apartments. Such a thoughtless request implies that nothing needs to be done until there is evidence of a significant likelihood of death.

However, this article is not about Grenfell Tower (which will be coming soon) but about occupational health and safety (OHS) consultation and its failure.

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The Human Resources changes required for mentally safe workplaces.

In a recent LinkedIn discussion Professor Johanna Macneil asked me how the Human Resources (HR) discipline should change to meet the “new” occupational health and safety (OHS) duties about psychosocial hazards. Below is my response:

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The two approaches to psychosocial hazards

There are two common approaches to addressing and preventing psychosocial hazards at work.  One is to consider these hazards as originating within and affecting only workers and work processes. This looks at the hazards generated by work that affect work and downplays or dismisses factors from outside work.  The other is to acknowledge that work is part of life, that socioeconomic factors affect workers’ mental health, and that job stresses similarly affect workers’ social lives. In both instances, the use of “worker” includes all levels of a management structure. Both approaches need evaluation for effectiveness.

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Digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence, OHS and Work

What do Safe Work Australia (SWA) executives do outside National Safe Work Month? Several times each year, they appear before Senate committees. Recently, SWA’s CEO Marie Boland, Sinead McHugh, and Katherine Taylor spoke at a Senate Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces.

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