Occupational health and safety (OHS) is increasingly being touted as an integral part of a company’s organisational culture. Sometime this is described as a workplace, or safety, culture. If OHS is to be considered thus, it is important to understand other cultural perspectives. One of the most prominent in Australia, at the moment, is the culture of the banking sector.
Episode 47 of Andrew Barrett’s Safety On Tap podcast consisted of an interview with Jonathan Lincolne of Pockets of Brilliance. Several comments are of note.
Psychology
Around the 47 minute mark, Lincolne is asked about the level of psychological knowledge that the occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals should possess. Lincolne refreshingly describes himself as a skeptic about a lot of the recent psychological discussion, particularly the promotion of neuroscience.
Workplace bullying has a strict and clear definition in Australian occupational health and safety (OHS) laws:
“…repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or group of workers that creates a risk to health and safety.”
According to Mr Peter Katsambanis, a Liberal Party member of the West Australian Parliament, the slashing of tyres, paint damage on a car and an exploding tin of baked beans is a
“terrible issue of workplace bullying”.
Being a member of a local safety group provides nuggets of occupational health and safety (OHS) information from speakers and members in a broad range of industries and occupations. The May 2017 meeting of the Central Safety Group at which Wayne Richards spoke provoked several OHS thoughts about safety, leadership and culture. One was that Transdev…
The latest broadcast in Safe Work Australia’s Virtual Safety Seminar (VSS) series is aimed at the executive level of management and entitled “Why big business needs to lead work health and safety“. One of the attractions of the VSS is that Safe Work Australia is able to draw upon senior and prominent business leaders who do not often talk occupational health and safety.
This seminar included contributions from Diane Smith-Gander, Dean Pritchard, Marcus Hooke and was hosted by Jennifer Hewett.
Several important perspectives were discussed that would be helpful to the intended audience but there were also some comments that deserve contemplation.
In mid-April 2017, Safe Work Australia (SWA) filmed its latest webinar at an inner-city hotel in Sydney on the theme of “Why big business needs to lead work health and safety”. SWA has established a strong place in the online safety media by providing unique information in a professional presentation.
I flew up to Sydney for the event as I had heard that SWA was looking for audience members. There were a few familiar faces in the SWA team and they were excited about the filming. But it is very hard to determine just how successful this type of webinar is. Performance statistics should be available but they are rarely shared.
It is common for people to play cliché bingo, where one notes down all of the cliché’s a person, usually a boss, is using and when all of the clichés have been used, BINGO! You’re job may end at that point so a silent BINGO may be best.
This exercise can be fun, particularly at conferences, but clichés can be hazardous as they can reinforce poor understandings and compound the simplification of complicated ideas or ideas that should be complex and addressed. Occupational health and safety (OHS) has some major clichés that need to be called out and examined.