Last week this blog reviewed the book Job Quality in Australia emphasising how worker safety, health and well-being is a vital element of job quality which, in turn, is crucial for Australia’s productivity. In preparation for a book launch in Sydney on 23 June 2015, the University of Sydney has released a media statement (available…
Successful safety management relies on communication. Sometimes this is informal, as in prestart meetings or toolbox talks; sometimes it is formal, such as with Annual Reports and legacy documents. It is important for occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals to understand how to communicate in these two formats and to address different audiences and readerships.
The latest Australasian Reporting Awards were handed out last week with the Civil Aircraft Safety Authority garnering the Work Health and Safety Reporting Award for 2015. Safe Work Australia’s Chief Executive Officer, Michelle Baxter, said, about the award:
“By including high quality work health and safety information in your annual report, you can establish your organisation as a leader in work health and safety, one in which work health and safety is not an ‘add on’, but integrated into business decisions and processes.”
In terms of Annual Reports, the OHS professional needs to be involved early in the report writing process rather than, as seems to happen most of the time, leaving it to the company secretary or the Communications unit. Annual reports need a consistent
On housing affordability this week, Australia’s Treasurer, Joe Hockey, suggested a solution would be to get a “good job”. This occurred a month or so after the publication of a terrific book (that Hockey obviously has yet to read) called “Job Quality in Australia“, edited by Angela Knox and Chris Warhurst for Federation Press. The editors write about the importance of job quality which “…affects attitudes, behaviour and outcomes at the individual, organisational and national level” (page 1) and job quality’s political context:
“While the current Abbott government is primarily concerned with improving Australia’s macro-economic position, such a position is unlikely to be achieved and sustained without a policy agenda focusing on job quality.” (page 2)
Significantly for this blog’s readership, the book has a chapter, written by
In June 2015 a research report was presented to a traffic safety conference in Gothenburg, Sweden that is set to reignite the debate on quad bike or all terrain vehicle (ATV) safety in Australia.
The paper entitled “The Australian Terrain Vehicle Assessment Program (ATVAP)” (Paper No.15-0144-W in the Technical Papers section of the
The decline of newspapers and other mainstream media is well-established (an excellent recent analysis of this has been undertaken by Ross Gittins), as is the increase in the influence of online or digital media. The information sources for occupational health and safety (OHS) have undergone a similar change, often due to the same technological and economic factors affecting the mainstream. But OHS has ALWAYS been a niche issue in communications and the media and it will continue to be so except that the niche can increase in size and the new media technologies could increase OHS’ influence in managerial and business decision processes, if someone accepts the challenge.
It is important to look at a major fault in communication strategies related to OHS. The mainstream media never covered workplace safety issues to the extent possible. OHS was almost always covered by the industrial relations reporter, if the newspaper had one. The tripartite nature of industrial relations (IR) negotiations – government, business, unions – provided the main sources for OHS content and OHS was always communicated in or with the IR context. Rarely was OHS seen to merit its own story.
There is a clear link between the modern take on occupational health and safety (which includes psychosocial health) and productivity. However, there are seriously mixed messages coming from the Productivity Commission (PC) in its current inquiry into Australia’s Workplace Relations Framework.
In Senate Estimates on 3 June 2014 (draft Hansard), the Chair of the Productivity Commission, Peter Harris, and Assistant Commissioner, Ralph Lattimore, briefly discussed OHS. Harris acknowledged that some of the submissions to the current inquiry discussed OHS matters (page 65) but Lattimore stated:
“….we did say that we would quarantine the inquiry away from workforce health and safety issues unless they were directly related to, say, enterprise bargaining or some feature of the relationship between employers and employees. We were aware of the large amount of regulation in that area, and we were not planning to revisit that.”