Category: Leadership

Awards Night speeches

The WorkSafe Victoria Awards Night for 2022 contained three main speeches:

Pearson

Pearson’s speech contained a couple of elements that implied it was written by someone without a deep understanding or history of OHS in Victoria. He mentioned “Kaizen” which was a blast from the past, being associated with lots of Lean managements and Six Sigmas. These concepts are rarely heard of in OHS circles now, perhaps because the Kaizen focus in Australia was often on individual workers and efforts rather than systems of work. Pearson said:

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Plenty of sparkle but little spark

The latest awards night for WorkSafe Victoria achieved its scope – present awards for people and organisations who do occupational health and safety (OHS) well. Some categories are for extraordinary effort, achievements or innovation, and winning any award from WorkSafe is important to the winners, but some were flat.

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Good construction and mental health article that fails to go far enough

A recent article by Aurora B. Le, Doug Trout, Ann Marie Dale, and Scott Earnest is a good introduction to the psychosocial hazards faced by construction workers in the United States.  It is typical of many articles written about work health and safety generally – good information but with weak or timid solutions.

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Work hazards generated by the Prime Minister

An employment dispute over working hours has entered the mainstream media as it relates to the office of one of the crossbench independent members of parliament, a favourite target of some of the media. The dispute over the meaning of additional reasonable working hours illustrates several occupational health and safety (OHS) issues.

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Another burnout book from the US that ignores OHS duties

Advisory books about how to manage Burnout continue to be published. Another one that, due to the format and publisher, could be influential is Burnout for Dummies by Eva Selhub. Sadly, Selhub consciously downplays the occupational health and safety (OHS) role in preventing Burnout. Her choice sidelines OHS, the organisational context and the employer’s duty of care, but that seems typical for Burnout authors from the United States.

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Organisational and self-help advice on burnout

One of the best books about burnout is Jennifer Moss‘ “The Burnout Epidemic“, which this blog wrote about in April last year. A recent book on burnout and self-help caused me to revisit Moss’ book, and one of the chapters that I missed last year seems to explain the popularity of the self-help approach.

Moss writes about the organisational and structural workplace factors that create and perpetuate workplace stress and related poor mental health. However, one of the last chapters is titled “Take Care of Yourself, Too”. Moss writes:

“Self-care won’t fix broken organizational systems, but it’s the part we can control in a world full of the uncontrollable.”

page 213
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Mental health book should be influential due to lack of bullshit

Some of the recent guidance on mental health at work from occupational health and safety (OHS) regulators is not scintillating or even engaging. Their purpose is to provide information with the hope it is presented in a workplace by someone super-communicative and influential. (C’mon, really? We’re talking about OHS here.)

Luckily there is a recent easy-to-read book of fewer than 150 pages that reads like a conversation over a single afternoon with the reader about Mental Health At Work.

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