Business Bullshit – and how this relates to workplace health and safety

This is an edited version of my presentation to delegates at the inaugural NSW Regional Safety Conference & Expo in Newcastle, Australia on March 17, 2018.

The current approach to occupational health and safety (OHS) is that we shouldn’t separate it from business operations. One of the motivations for achieving success in business is to build a strong organisational culture that integrates safety.

Companies often start this task by developing Mission Statements or Pledges.  Quite often these are done by talking to a lot of different people in the organisation.  And I don’t know of any mission statement that hasn’t been already run through Legal and Marketing – they don’t always get run through Safety.  What happens is that these statements can become more florid and more inexact, and more unclear.  Some of them descend into Business Bullshit.

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#MeToo, #TimesUp and #OHS

Being International Women’s Day, the media is awash with articles about pay rates, gender equality and sexual harassment.  One of those articles is written by Sarah Ralph of Norton Rose Fullbright. Ralph provides a good summary of the current gender issues and recent media attention (may require registration but it’s free).  She makes several recommendations for how to reduce the risk of sexual harassment and unwanted media attention.  Below those recommendations are looked at from the occupational health and safety (OHS) perspective to see how OHS can help reduce the psychological harm. Continue reading “#MeToo, #TimesUp and #OHS”

Victoria is ripe for Industrial Manslaughter laws

The Victorian trade union movement is preparing for the November 2018 State Election with one element of that campaign being the advocacy of Industrial Manslaughter laws.

At the end of January 2018, the unions “kicked off” their campaign with a meeting which reviewed the challenges and wins for injured workers in 2017 and outlined their intentions for 2018. The Industrial Manslaughter Action Kit included a petition which says: Continue reading “Victoria is ripe for Industrial Manslaughter laws”

Action on insurance for OHS penalties slows down

In all of the discussion about the new industrial manslaughter laws in Queensland, the topic of directors and officers liability insurance has been overlooked.  As mentioned in an earlier article

“….the Queensland Government has promised to ban insurance products that pay occupational health and safety (OHS) penalties imposed against employers.”

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Can flexible work arrangements apply in the construction sector?

On 30 October 2017, the Safety Institute of Australia and RMIT University held their annual OHS Construction Forum.  This year’s theme was flexible working arrangements – a brave choice that did not really work but was indicative of safety in the construction industry generally.

Several speakers discussed well-being generally and how flexible working arrangements were critical to fostering an appropriate level of  wellness.  One, a labour lawyer, outlined the legislative obligations that companies have to those types of arrangements with reference to equal opportunity laws, industrial relations and anti-discrimination obligations – sadly the workplace safety laws and obligations were not mentioned.  In all of the wellbeing-themed discussions, the application to the on site construction workers was rarely, if ever, mentioned.

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Model for improving safety reporting

A lot of safety professionals “froth up” about aviation safety. Challenging occupational health and safety (OHS) concepts have originated in this sector so it is worth keeping an eye on aviation safety research.  A new article has been published called “A holistic approach to evaluating the effect of safety barriers on the performance of safety reporting systems in aviation organisations” (not Open Access, sorry) by Muhammad Jausan, Jose Silva, and Roberto Sabatini from RMIT University’s, School of Engineering – Aerospace and Aviation Discipline.

Jausan, Silva and Sabatini developed a new model that

“… can help to determine the cumulative effect of organisational, working environment and individual barriers on the performance of a safety reporting system in an aviation organisation.”

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The big accounting firms are due to shake up the OHS sector

On 15 August 2017, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) ran an article (paywalled) that should have sent shivers up the spines of occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals throughout Australia. The article titled “Audit chief sound warning on big four rush to consulting work” in the hard copy newspaper discussed the future consulting strategies of the “big four – Deloitte, Ernst Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC):

“The four firms are all aggressively chasing growth by moving into management and technology consulting work. They are also hedging their bets by branching out into other types of professional services ranging from law through to strategy work and even marketing advisory.”

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