culture – Page 67 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Fatigue, impairment and industrial relations

Many of the employees in the health sector in Australia have recently been negotiating new employment conditions. It is rare for the workplace hazards of fatigue and impairment to be given such prominence in industrial relations negotiations.

A major cause of fatigue is the lack of adequate resources for relieving staff. This issue has been identified for doctors, ambulance officers and firefighters over the last 12 months.

Many important OHS issues are identified in a recent ABC Radio interview with Dr David Fraenkel, the Treasurer of Salaried Doctors Queensland (SDQ). Dr Fraenkel mentions the following issues, amongst others:

Queensland Health‘s duty of care to the public
Queensland Health’s duty of care to its employees
“wrong site surgery” due to judgement impaired by fatigue

Dr Fraenkel also shows the institutional pressures on individual doctors to not discuss the implications of fatigue. He mentions that there is a code of conduct that impedes the discussion of issues by health care professionals.

He admits that should a young doctor leave their station to relieve their fatigue they would most likely be “called to account” for their action and their career may be jeopardised for what OHS professionals would admit is an individual taking responsibility for looking after their own safety and health.

Salaried Doctors Queensland has established a website in support of its campaign which includes some factsheets. The print media also picked up on the SDQ media statements.

Kevin Jones

Firefighter trauma

A major element of risk management is business continuity. This requires considerable planning, disaster recovery resources, and a long-term focus.

In early 2009 parts of Victoria, some not far from the offices of SafetyAtWorkBlog, were incinerated and across the State over 170 people died. In a conservative western culture like Australia, the bush-fires were the biggest natural disaster in living memory.

The is a Royal Commission into the Victorian Bushfires that is illustrating many of the disaster planning and community continuity needs in risk management.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30 Report” provided a report on 5 August 2009 which originates from the views of the community and the volunteer firefighters. One of the issues relevant to safety professionals and risk managers is the psychological impact on volunteer workers. Many in the report talk of trauma. Many in the disaster areas have not returned and their are many who remain psychologically harmed.

When a workforce is so closely integrated with a community, rehabilitation is a daunting task and changes a community forever.

Overseas readers may have experienced their own natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, floods and wildfires. Many of these stories are reported around the world. In the recovery phase of any disaster, businesses need to rebuild but are often rebuilding with damaged people. It would be heartening to see the OHS regulators and OHS professions becoming more involved over the long recovery period.

Kevin Jones

Leadership, stress and performance reviews – interview

Graham Winter is an Australian psychologist who was the chief psychologist for the Australian Olympic team and is now an author and business adviser. In August 2009 he has a book released entitled “The Man Who Cured the Performance Review”.

SafetyAtWorkBlog managed to interview Graham last week about the book, stress and safety leadership. The SafetyAtWorkBlog podcast is available for download.

SafetyAtWorkBlog Graham Winter Interview

Kevin Jones

New Work/Life Research

There seems to be new institutes and academic schools popping up regularly over research into the issue of work/life balance. Recently one of the oldest and most prominent of the institutes, the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, released new research data.

The latest Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) was released in late July 2009. The executive summary identifies several important issues relevant to OHS:

“Three years of data about work-life interference in Australia tell us that many employees experience frequent interference from work in their personal, home and community lives, many feel overloaded at work and feelings of time pressure are also common and growing.”

“Work hours are central to work-life interference….. Many Australians are a long way from their preferred working hours and the 2008/09 economic downturn has not made any difference to the incidence of this mismatch.”

The work by Barbara Pocock and others at the Centre is characterised by recommendations for improvements rather than simply describing a situation. In this data the researchers say

“Our AWALI reports over the past three years suggest that employers and public policy makers can help workers deal with work-life pressures. This involves improving the quality of supervision and workplace culture, controlling workloads, designing ‘do-able’ jobs, reducing long working hours and work-related commuting, increasing employee-centered flexibility and options for permanent part-time work, improving the fit between actual and preferred hours and increasing care supports.”

It is obvious from these comments that OHS professionals need to work hard on these matters to create, or maintain, their workplace safety cultures.

Kevin Jones

Behavioural-based safety is no different to traditional safety management

Sometime ago SafetyAtWorkBlog wrote that “engagement” was just a new term for “consultation”. Rebadging or rebranding occurs in the safety discipline as much as any other but our internet ears pricked up at some recent comments in a Canadian podcast from Safety Excellence.

Shawn Galloway and Terry of ProACT Safety is discussing traditional approaches to safety management and how they fit into his philosophy of safety excellence. They say this about behavioural-based safety (BBS):

“[People] come back in with advanced strategies, like behavior-based safety and it’s the same old thing. Everything on the behavior-based safety list is already covered by a rule or procedure in traditional safety.

A lot of times it’s an admission of failure of their traditional safety program…”

It is refreshing to hear a BBS specialist acknowledge that the role for BBS is to progress safety beyond compliance and that compliance strategies, what Galloway describes as “traditional safety”, are fundamental to a company’s safe operation.

For those enlightened safety professionals who seek a deeper understanding of their discipline thr0ugh alternate perspectives, this particular podcast is very good.

The full podcasts are often worth listening to as they discuss safety culture issues, performance indicators and many more of the current safety management concepts.

Kevin Jones

A study of violence

Australian writer, Jeff Sparrow, recently recently a book that looks at violence and killing , “Killing: A Misadvanture In Violence“. As part of promoting the book he has been interviewed on several radio shows, the one most relevant to SafetyAtWorkBlog, is the 3CR program, Stick Together, about his book.

Sparrow says that he wanted to investigate the “normalisation of killing” and l0oks at occupation which have killing as part of the job. He analysed the killing of animals through the first-hand experience of kangaroo-shooting and visiting an abattoir.

Sparrow says that the abattoir was very much a factory that deconstructs animals rather than manufacturing items, such as cars. This will be no revelation to anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation, in which he analyses abattoirs, particularly meatpacking, in the context of food production. Schlosser’s section on the worker safety and compensation processes in the US meat industry is confronting.

They are also possibly more directly relevant to OHS (or heartless capitalism) than Sparrow’s take on abattoirs, although Sparrow does mention how the structure of the workplace “controls the workers”. This harks back to the dehumanisation of workers for the purpose of productivity where repetition makes the reality of the action of killing or dismemberment, mundane.

In comparison, the roo-shooters have a more detailed understanding of their “craft” because they are working in the wild, where things can go wrong, instead of on the killing floor.

Sparrow also looks at killing that is undertaken in other occupations, such as the defence forces, and workplaces, such as deathrow. In these contexts Sparrow talks about the industrialisation of the war processes.

Ultimately, from the workplace perspective, Sparrow’s book sounds like an interesting resource for those who study the depersonalisation of the worker, or industrialisation. For those who work on, or have responsibility for, production lines, this psychological approach to the book may help.

Kevin Jones

A sample chapter of the book is available for download.

Maintain instead of repair

Every country has its share of high-fliers who “burn out”. Many fade away from the public eye with their careers over. Frequently this path to wealth and prominence is not perceived as a workplace health or safety matter. Some people decide that the health trade-off of multi-million dollar salaries is worth it.

Sadly the psychological reality of this personal decision is often masked by clichés. Frequently, executives say that a major motivation for their decision is “to spend more time with my family”. Many executives may believe this to be a major part of their decision, but regrettably, this worthy sentiment has become a cliché – the equivalent of a beauty pageant winner working toward “world peace”.

The family-time phrase/reason/excuse signifies an important element of the executive’s personality. They were willing to sacrifice decades of their relationship with their partner and to be absent from the development of their children for money.

If any of these departing executives use the family-time phrase in the same departure speech or media exit-interview as regaining “control of their lives” to “re-engage with the most important people in my life”, ask the executives, or politicians, “how do you justify ignoring your family over your career?”.

In some cases one could be more specific. “Do you think that your multi-million career was related to your daughter’s persistent attempts to kill herself?” “After being absent so frequently and for so long, are you still justified in describing your marriage as a loving relationship, or your partner as your ‘soulmate’?” “Was your million-dollar salary really worth it?”

Int he wake of the self-generated corporate financial crisis, some corporate executives are re-examining their ethics and morality. Not enough are going through this but it’s a start. Most say they operate for the benefit of shareholders but they cannot deny the reality of massive remuneration for their efforts. What they are ignoring is the individual cost to their loved ones of these efforts.

Should we look up to the billionaires who sacrifice the wellbeing of others they say they love to chase the dollar? Are these the paragons of our society?

People are trying to maintain or establish a work/life balance. (There are several articles at SafetyAtWorkBlog that report on this movement.) But the reality is that to achieve a work/life balance, one must be prepared to sacrifice income. This may involve the necessity of achieving a certain stage in one’s career that is not the top, but still a position of value in the company and, equally important, of value to one’s family and even one’s own psychological well-being. If one’s colleagues fail to understand this decision, the workplace culture is faulty, and probably irreparable.

If the ultimate ideal is to have a happy, functional, and sustainable community, one must examine one’s own motivations, and one’s own personal priorities. Everyone must consider whether we want to emulate those who sacrifice their family’s welfare for money or whether we support those who rebut the “glory of the high-achiever” and emulate those who love their family enough to spend time with them through their career. Maintenance is easier than repair in life as in safety management.

Kevin Jones

Category: culture

Fatigue, impairment and industrial relations

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Firefighter trauma

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Leadership, stress and performance reviews – interview

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New Work/Life Research

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Behavioural-based safety is no different to traditional safety management

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A study of violence

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Maintain instead of repair

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