This week Australia has been experiencing a safety roadshow built around the Deepwater Horizon movie and two guest speakers. The afternoon sessions have been well attended and the discussion fruitful but does the film improve the viewers’ understanding of safety or misrepresent it?
Continue reading “Is the Deepwater Horizon movie good for safety?”
Over the last 9 years SafetyAtWorkBlog has established a solid presence in the OHS online world. It has gained international notice and awards and has a voice much larger than its pool of subscribers and followers. Occupational health and safety needed voices after years (decades?) of OHS professionals being overly cautious about expressing their well-informed opinions and creating debates and, sometimes, controversy.
Now it is time for the SafetyAtWorkBlog to take the next step in its sustainability.
Subscription
For the SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue to grow, a subscription model will be introduced from February 4 2017. For an annual subscription, followers will be able to access exclusive safety articles and interviews. Occasionally articles will be published for free but over 90% of content will be available only to subscribers. Continue reading “Important changes to SafetyAtWorkBlog”
As 2016 comes to a close, I have dipped into the statistics and found the two SafetyAtWorkBlog articles that had the highest readership in 2016 were articles discussing the thoughts of Michael Tooma and Andrew Hopkins. Both of the articles were challenging – one of the existence or relevance of safety culture and the other about how occupational health and safety (OHS) is desperate for a change and struggling to start that change.
The statistics should not be surprising as both Tooma and Hopkins have a high recognition rate in the Australian OHS field and both have and international context – Hopkins through his analysis of industrial disasters and Tooma through his “safety differently” world tour. Continue reading “SafetyAtWorkBlog’s top two articles for 2016”
The media is full of lists of Christmas reading, usually in order to sell books. Below is a selection of the safety-related books that are in my Summer reading pile. (No, I am not going to list the Batman comics or Star Trek books. That would be embarrassing.)
I first met Robert Sams at a book launch of one of the Rob Long’s books. Sams’ approach to risk has some similarity to Long’s, which is acknowledged in the Forewards, but those who develop or apply a theory are often more interesting than those who created the theory. The the format of the book is a “reflective journal” also makes this nook more intriguing. It is part diary, part blog, part journal but above all it is a journey of learning with the occasional epiphany. Continue reading “SafetyAtWorkBlog’s Christmas reading list”
On November 15, 2016, the NSCA Foundation (NSCAF) and Westwick-Farrow Media (WFM) announced a new publishing deal for one of Australia’s few remaining occupational health and safety (OHS) publications, National Safety. The media release was very upbeat about the change but the reality is that Australian OHS professionals and business operators will lose a free, hard-copy source of safety information, Safety Solutions.
National Safety magazine is a good magazine that, although long promoted as the journal of the NSCA Foundation, has a good reputation for independent and informative OHS articles and seems to have had a loyal readership amongst OHS professionals. There had been no hint that the magazine was “in trouble” or that a change was warranted. Safety Solutions has more of an advertorial approach and seems to appeal more to the small business owner and OHS professional who is more focused on the manufacturing industry sector. The magazine has existed since 2002 and has been a consistent presence. Continue reading “Another safety magazine bites the dust”
The Spring 2016 edition of National Safety magazine includes a cover story on leadership written by me. In it John Lacey insists that safety leadership begins at the top. This position is supported by many business and occupational health and safety (OHS) advocates but this seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of leadership.
In response to a question about leadership in small- to medium-sized businesses, Lacey said that leadership “applies to all”:
“[Leadership] is not different but how to apply it will be different. The start must be from the top down. The basic values, behaviours, knowledge and systems will be defined by the organisation no matter how large or small it is.”
This is remarkably like safety culture and my response is that leadership can be displayed by anyone at any level of a company or society and can manifest at any organisational level. The fact is that it is easier to sell a commodified leadership to executives as they are expected to show leadership in times of crisis or stockmarket uncertainty and most of us translate that into leadership of safety.
Leadership, as with most elements of OHS, takes time and effort – sometimes over generations. This is particularly so with anything concerning corporations that are wary of change unless that change supports profit and shareholder returns. (I would argue safety increases profits and company value but this is an argument than struggles for traction)
The most abused aphorism used to justify this focus on executive leadership is that “a fish rots from the head down”. Nonsense. As this website states, it is the guts of a fish that rots first.
The attention given to senior executive leadership is an organisational echo of the economic trickle-down theory which has been roundly dismissed as flawed and, in some instances, has contributed to increasing socio-economic inequality.
Lacey acknowledges that anybody within an organisation can lead although leadership starts from the top. He supports my contention that leadership occurs at all levels of a business and that actions show leadership and safety, probably, more effectively and cheaper than any training session. Lacey says
“…even the gesture of picking-up litter or wearing the correct [personal protective equipment] in front of others in the work team can be seen as a form of leadership. Leading by example is an old but such a true saying.”
These actions are the best way of improving workplace safety and showing leadership, and for the least cost. Safety should be improved by actions rather than PowerPoint.
[Note: please support National Safety magazine if you can. It is not available online and only through subscription but it is one of the few hard copy OHS magazines left in Australia and one of the few, if not the last, that actually pays its writers (not as much as we’d like but that’s the continuous battle of the freelance writer). This stance is keeping advertorials at bay and gives National Safety an integrity that is often missing in other safety publications]
As Australia’s Safe Work Month closes, the media is focussed on the four fatalities at Dreamworld theme park in Queensland. That situation is complicated as, although the incident is being investigated partly under Work Health and Safety laws, the decedents were visitors to the workplace. On the other side of the continent in Perth, prior…