Wellbeing programs and resilience training can support employees, but they aren’t a substitute for addressing workplace risks at their source. That was a key message from WorkSafe Victoria’s webinar on psychological health and safety for small and medium businesses.
The legal profession has spent decades asking why lawyers are burning out, becoming depressed and leaving practice. The newly released Mental Health and Wellbeing in Legal Workplaces: A Global Guide may have inadvertently provided the answer. As is becoming clear elsewhere, the “mental health crisis” is less a psychological problem than an organisational and systemic one, even in a profession with a strong institutional culture, high legislative awareness and a sense of sophistication.
Asma Khan’s criticism of the word “curry” in a recent Instagram post offers an unexpected warning for occupational health and safety (OHS) people, and me in particular. A convenient collective term can make a complex subject easier to discuss, but it can also strip away its layers. In much the same way, “safety” is routinely asked to encompass machinery, chemicals, occupational disease, fatigue, bullying, violence, excessive workloads and other physical and psychological hazards.
The problem is not necessarily the word. The problem arises when the umbrella becomes the entire explanation.
The release of Safe Work Australia’s Best Practice review left me wondering whether Australian work health and safety policy has reached regulatory overreach, or whether it is finally catching up with the realities of contemporary work.
Much of the discussion has focused on the report’s individual recommendations. What interests me more is an assumption that seems to underlie almost every recommendation: that occupational health and safety (OHS) should become the nation’s principal framework for preventing workplace harm in all its forms, not merely physical and psychological injury.
Many Australian employers, managers and executives take inspiration from counterparts in the United States. When it comes to occupational mental health, they are looking in the wrong direction and could benefit from looking more locally. But there is merit in evaluating the US perspectives.
Below are responses provided by several Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents on my own PC to the question in this article’s title. There is considerable overlap in many, but I start off with the most confronting response, provided by the World Socialist Web Site‘s Socialism AI:
Continue reading “Why don’t US employers focus on preventing psychosocial hazards?”Michael Plowright and I have launched a new limited-series podcast in support of National Safe Work Month.
Safe Work, Real Talk offers a plain-English discussion of the major issues around managing psychosocial hazards and psychological safety at work, bridging the HR and OH&S silos.
We bring together OHS practice, bullying research and real workplace stories to unpack how mental harm happens and how organisations can prevent it.
Continue reading “Psychosocial Conflict & Confusion”Occupational health and safety (OHS) people talk a lot, but often they preach to the choir when they need to reach a new audience. Last night, philosophy academic Dr Peter Brace provided a lecture on psychosocial hazards and psychological safety to over 50 members of a diverse audience in an upstairs room of a Richmond pub. This is what he said and what I learned.
