human resources – Page 27 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

OHS and workload – follow-up

SafetyAtWorkBlog has had a tremendous response to the article concerning Working Hours and Political Scandal. Below are some of the issues raised in some of the correspondence I have received from readers and OHS colleagues.

The Trade Union Congress Risk e-bulletin has a similar public service/mental health case which has been resolved through the Courts. The site includes links through to other media statements and reports.

Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations has launched its work/life balance awards for 2009. The information available on the awards is strongly slanted to a work/family balance which is very different from work/life and excludes employees making decisions for the benefit of their own mental health – a proper work/life balance which is the philosophical basis underpinning OHS legislation. SafetyAtWorkBlog is investigating these awards with DEEWR.

SafeWork in South Australia is working on a code of practice on working hours and has been providing OHS advice on this matter since 2000.

The WA government has had a draft code on working hours for some time.

A legal reader has pointed out that “the 38 hour week issue is not set in stone …[and] is not a maximum for non-award employees.” So expect more industrial relations discussion on that issue over the next two years.

One reader generalised from the Grech case about decision-making at senior levels, a concern echoed by many others.

“The Grech case illustrates the gradual disintegration of effectiveness, and the employee’s own inability to recognise that it is not a personal failing of efficiency, rather an unrecognised systemic risk.

When the employee is at senior level, there is more likelihood there will be poor attention to the warning signs. Any ‘underperformance’ would be seen as a personal failing. For those of us in the safety business, it is obvious that the system itself is in need of urgent risk management.”

There were congratulations from many readers for raising a significant and hidden OHS issue.

“Many people in industry work more than 70 hour a week. This affects their health and personal relationships.”

“Overwork and under-resourcing lead to poor decision making, adverse business outcomes, and in the long term psychological and physical ill health. Both the government and corporate sectors are paying little attention to this issue.”

The workplace hazards resulting from fatigue are being addressed in several industries such as transport, mining and forestry, where attentiveness is hugely important because of the catastrophic consequences of poor judgement.

One of the issues from the Grech case is that the quality of judgement in non-critical, or administrative, occupations can be severely affected by fatigue, mental health and other psychosocial issues. These may not affect the health and well-being of others but can have a significant effect on the individual. OHS does not only deal with systemic or workplace cultural elements but is equally relevant to the individual worker.

Kevin Jones

[Thanks to all those who have written to me and continue to do so. KJ]

Handling trauma

The Rural Health Education Foundation (RHEF) produced a DVD recently as part of its professional development program on managing trauma. It is an introduction for rural medical practitioners on how to identify trauma and how to advise on management. The video was produced in conjunction with the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health and is unavailable at the moment due to a lack of funding. However, the video, and others, are available online through a free registration at the RHEF website.

Health and safety practitioners rarely prepare themselves adequately for handling a traumatized worker whether it is from a work experience or an issue outside the workplace. OHS practitioners often have a linear perspective where an incident occurs, the personal damage is handled or referred on and the avoidance of recurrence is prevented.

The cycle of incident, rehabilitation and reintegration to the workplace is not widely understood in the OHS field. The “Recovery From Trauma: What Works” video illustrates the personal and psychological cost of an incident. Through a case study it also shows the early signs of trauma, when a worker may “not be himself” – the clues to a possible bigger problem. One case study, John, specifically includes the impact of his situation on his work performance.

In the early stages of trauma, around a week after an incident, the video advises that people avoid

Alcohol and drugs
Keeping overly busy
Involvement in stressful situations
Withdrawing
Stopping yourself doing things you enjoy
Taking risks

If the worker is out of sorts for longer than a week, professional assistance should be sought.

The video was broadcast in February 2009 so the information is current.

The program continues with issues of post-traumatic stress disorder with additional case studies including a policeman talking about his counseling and the therapy he undertook after a traumatic event.

RHEF does not try to do everything by itself and draws upon subject matter experts on trauma and recovery. The video is a very professional production and RHEF should be supported in its initiatives. Readers are encouraged to watch the videos online and, if you can, consider supporting RHEF financially so that these important resources can be made available to medical professionals throughout Australia.

Kevin Jones

Drugs in the workplace – small business blog

The Age newspaper included a short article on drugs in the workplace in a small business pages on 4 August 2009. For OHS professionals there is little new information but it’s a nice summary of some of the legal and management challenges on this workplace hazard.

Sadly some of the reply comments to the article online are demoralising.

Kevin Jones

Australia’s “Find a Psychologist” directory

Several OHS regulators in Australia, OHS professional associations and trade union have directories for OHS advisers. Most of them are in the traditional OHS areas of guarding, engineering, chemical safety….. Psychosocial issues such as work stress or workplace bullying haven’t featured as much.

The Australian Psychological Society (APS) has a very good searchable directory for its members. The search results provide a brief table of those psychologists for the subject area in your region with a good amount of information on individual listings on the click-through.

A great feature is to locate someone within a radius of one’s town or suburb. The Society has thought about the geography if Australia by including a 200 kilometre radius option.

On a brief search for psychologists who specialise in work stress or workplace bullying, the large Australian capital cities had plenty of listings. Darwin came up empty as did Cairns, Alice Springs and Broom but these are remote locations and there may be psychologists in those areas who could provide assistance on workplace psychosocial issues, just not as specialists.

The “Find a Psychologist” directory is very easy to use and could be used by other member organisations as a template for their own databases. The APS website should be flagged by Australian OHS professionals who need he services of psychologists for workplace psychosocial assistance.

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

Absence management data misses the OHS mark

Managing workplace absenteeism often ignores the OHS issues that are integral to the issue.

On 20 July 2009 the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development released its findings on the issue in its annual Absence Management Survey.

The media statement identifies the reasons for short- and long-term absences.

“The main causes of short-term absence are minor illnesses such as colds and flu, stress and musculoskeletal conditions

The main causes of long-term absence are acute medical conditions, stress and mental health conditions and musculoskeletal conditions and back pain.”

However, the media statement identifies no measures to counter these workplace hazards, preferring to focus on ancillary factors such as job security.

Willmott focuses on a comparison between absenteeism in the public and private sectors. The difference is statistically interesting, perhaps, but does not address the causes of absenteeism.

Willmot also illustrates the dominant HR position on absenteeism.

“Effective absence management involves finding a balance between providing support to help employees with health problems stay in and return to work and taking consistent and firm action against employees that try and take advantage of organisations’ occupational sick pay schemes.”

This manages the effect of the problem but not the problem itself which CIPD’s own research has identified as musculoskeletal conditions, stress, mental health and, to a lesser extent, colds and flu.

The comments by the Senior Public Policy Adviser for the CIPD, BenWillmott, are a good example of how some human resources or management organisations miss the health and safety element.

The CIPD does acknowledge the importance of workplace health and safety as illustrated by its reply to the Health & Safety Executive’s draft strategy. It also says in the Absence Management Survey that, in the return-to-work context:

“The involvement of occupational health professionals is identified as the most effective approach for managing long-term absence…”

However even though it sees itself as the “professional and accreditation body for the UK HR profession [which represents] over 130,000 HR professionals at every level of business and in every sector”, it hesitates to take a leadership role in health and safety. It’s a pity because applying the apparent professionalism of the Institute and its membership strength to OHS could achieve great social and business efficiencies.

For those wanting to look at comparison data, CIPD makes available its previous surveys for download.

Kevin Jones

An OHS look at the Fair Work book

On 9 July 2009 I wrote in SafetyAtWorkBlog

“The Fair Work Act has no relevance to occupational health and safety, so why mention this on SafetyAtWorkBlog?”

The Fair Work Act changes the negotiating and consultative structure of Australian workplaces stemming from changes in industrial relations law.

A book that came across my desk this morning suggests several other overlaps of OHS and IR in the new regime. Federation Press sent a copy of “Fair Work – The New Workplace Laws and the Work Choices Legacy“, a book edited by Anthony Forsyth and Andrew Stewart.

In Andrew Stewart’s chapter he talks of how the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission made several extreme rulings on the application of State OHS laws to federal employees. He states that the government of Kevin Rudd has progressed OHS legislative reforms considerably by the government has “not indicated any interest in taking over the field itself”. The reticence has seemed strange and I was one of those who tipped a greater role for Comcare as a body for national OHS oversight.

Stewart has interpreted the government’s suspension of Comcare licences for national workers compensation coverage as illustrating the government’s interest lies

“in streamlining workers compensation for multi-State employers, rather than imposing a national regime”.

Ron McCallum is an Australia labour academic who always demands attention. Stewart includes a particularly salient reference

“Ron McCallum, for example, has argued that labour laws that are centred around corporations are unlikely to retain a ‘wholesome’ balance between employers and employees. Ultimately, he suggests, such laws are likely to become ‘little more that a sub-set of corporations law because inevitably they will fasten upon the economic needs of corporations and their employees will be viewed as but one aspect of the productive process in our globalized economy.”

The path to fairness is likely to continue to be rocky even during the terms of a government that originated from the labour movement.

NES

Jill Murray and Rosemary Owens write a chapter focusing on the Safety Net, a set of legislated minimum standards – National Employment Standards (NES). These standards are not “lines in the sand” and have purposely been given inherently flexibility. One of the issues discussed by Murray & Owens is maximum working hours.

This is particularly important to those of us who are trying to manage the issues of fatigue and impairment in workplaces. The authors state that it remains between the employer and employee to determine what hours, additional to the 38-hour working week, are “reasonable”. Some of the relevant safety factors in determining reasonableness are listed as

“Occupational health and safety risks”

“Personal circumstances, including family responsibilities”, as well as

“Needs of the workplace or enterprise” and

“any other relevant matter.”

Murray & Owens say that to determine reasonableness is almost impossible to negotiate between individuals because there is no priority allocated to each of the eleven criteria. The authors say

“… this kind of conflict is exactly what the provision must confront: a business might have urgent demands on production, yet an individual worker has to get home to cook tea for the family.”

Murray & Owens go on

“By placing the potential to expand working hours in the hands of the parties at the workplace, the NES, like WorkChoices, really mean that whoever holds the greater power (and, perhaps, knowledge of their rights) is likley to prevail, notwithstanding any calculation of reasonableness.”

Here is the opportunity for the union movement to generate additional members and in an industrial relations climate that allows fro greater access to employees. It is rare to find any individual who understands their own employment rights sufficiently to negotiate by and for themselves. The union movement could again become the “Friend of the Workers” by actually being the friend of workers and doing some solid footwork.

The Fair Work book is far more than this short article indicates. I only received the book this morning but am promising myself that I will read the rest.

As safety management broadens itself to cover psychosocial risks, it increasingly overlaps industrial relations, a workplace element that, with luck and a bit of work, could have been avoided by OHS professionals in the past. That is no longer the case and OHS professionals must understand how industrial relations changes will affect their own workplace and how they do their jobs. The Fair Work book is a great place to start.

Kevin Jones

Category: human resources

OHS and workload – follow-up

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Handling trauma

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Drugs in the workplace – small business blog

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Australia’s “Find a Psychologist” directory

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New Work/Life Research

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Absence management data misses the OHS mark

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An OHS look at the Fair Work book

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