The South Australian government has launched a website focusing on young people at work, not surprisingly called Youth@Work.
South Australia has a habit of marching to a slightly different beat to the dominant Australian States on OHS. They did not follow WorkSafe Victoria’s “Homecomings” ads and they have been well ahead of anyone in researching and explaining the relevance of wellness as an OHS issue.
In 2001 the House of Lords was presented with a Dignity At Work Bill. This seemed a great idea for unifying different elements of the workplace that can contribute to psychosocial hazards. This would be a similar approach to using “impairment” to cover drugs, alcohol, fatigue and distraction. However, it never progressed.
Regular readers of SafetyAtWorkBlog would note an undercurrent of humanism in many of the articles but it is heartening to see this in other articles and blogs. Maud Purcell of Greenwich Times provides an article from early May 2009 on dignity in the workplace in a time of economic turmoil that you may find of interest and use.
Victoria’s WorkHealth program is due to roll-out its next stage of worker health assessments. However, the program has been seriously curtailed by the failure of its funding model. According to The Age newspaper on 18 may 2009, employer associations have begun to withdraw their support compounding the embarrassment to the Premier, John Brumby, who lauded the program in March 2008.
The Master Builders Association will not be supporting the program due to WorkHealth’s connection with WorkSafe. The Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC) thinks likewise. There are concerns over the privacy of worker health records and that data from health checks may affect worker’s compensation arrangements or future claims.
The VACC is also concerned that employers will be blamed for issues over which they have little control – the health of their workers.
Many of these concerns could have been addressed by locating WorkHealth in the Department of Health, where health promotion already has a strong role and presence. It is understood that the funding of WorkHealth from workers compensation premium returns on investment caused the program to reside within the Victorian WorkCover Authority. There has also been the suggestion that WorkHealth was a pet program of the WorkCover board.
The program aims of free health checks for all Victorian workers was admirable and still achievable but the program was poorly introduced, poorly explained, based on a flawed funding model and now seems to be, if not dead, coughing up blood.
It is rare for anything of great relevance to occupational health and safety to come from the annual budget statement of the Australian government. There is nothing directly relevant from the statement issued earlier this week except for the lifting of the retirement age to 67 in 2023.
Compulsory retirement age does not mean that people stop working. If that was the case, farming and the Courts would be very different organisations. The retirement age has more to do with financial independence or the pension eligibility than anything else but the government’s decision has focused the media and commentators on the fact that people will be working beyond traditional retirement age.
The announcement this week also supported the reality that has been increasing for many people for over a year now that the level of retirement income has plummeted because of the global economic recession. People have a growing financial need to work, not simply a desire.
This will change the way that worker health will be managed by companies and by the individual. Watch for even more interest in “the best companies to work for” campaigns. In fact it should not be long before someone starts marketing on the theme of “is your health up to working into your seventies?”
This morning a package of interesting statistics were presented to a breakfast seminar held by Douglas Workplace & Litigation Lawyers. One of the regular speakers, Ira Galushkin, provided the following Australian statistics
- High risk employees (5+ Risks) are at work but not productive 32.7% of the time compared to low risk employees (0-2 Risks) who are not productive 14.5% of the time.
- The productivity difference between health and unhealthy employees is therefore 18.2% or 45 days per annum.
- High risk employees average 5.1 hours/month absence versus 2.4 hours/month for low risk employees. This amounts to 32.4 hours (over 4 days) days per annum.
- Healthy employees average 1-2 sick days per annum versus 18 days for those in the lowest health and wellbeing category.
- The unhealthiest employees are productive for only about 49 hours out of each month compared to around 140 hours/month for the most healthy.
- Poor health can account for an average 5% loss in productivity across the entire Australian workforce with the unhealthiest group reporting a 13% drop in productivity. About half [of] this is related to chronic conditions such as headaches, hay fever and neck/back pain,whilst half can be accounted for by lifestyle factors such as inactivity, smoking, obesity etc
All of this information shows the importance of workers maintaining their own fitness in order to live longer, but also to be able to present a case, if necessary, about their own productivity levels and how they have been saving their employer big dollars.
If we need to be able to work till older than previously, we will want to stay in a job we enjoy and that values us. Some longterm health planning may be required by all of us.
A United States report draws a parallel between increasingly difficult economic situations and an increase in workplace bullying. This video report is lightweight but is a recent airing of the issue with a different approach.
The angle taken in the story is that of a “pink elephant” that women are just as likely to bully their workmates as men are. Some of the speakers in the video try to relate female bullying to issues of female empowerment but bullying is more often a reflection of personal nastiness than a social movement.
Bullying received increased focus when workplace culture emerged but rather than a gender issue, our increasing intolerance for bullying is coming from a broader cultural movement than just through the workplace.
The video report originated through research undertaken by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an organisation that has existed for sometime and has very recently upgraded its website.
Smoke-free workplaces have gained considerable attention over the last few years but many countries allow exemptions for casinos. This makes no health sense but considerable political and revenue sense. The American Lung Association has released a video story about one non-smoking casino worker who has suffered lung cancer, Vinnie Rennich. (The 16meg flash video is available for download)
Safety professionals should be suspicious of many management trends. Over the last decade behavioural-based safety has been popular and more recently workplaces have been subjected to the application of amorphous concepts such as leadership and engagement. Many of these are dressing up old approaches to management in new jargon, some have little evidence to back up their claims.
At the end of April 2009 the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) identified limits to the application of employee engagement. A SIOP statement said
Study after study has shown that an engaged workforce is considered desirable in any organization and leads to greater productivity and profitability. In short, There seems to be no downside to employee engagement. However, Thomas Britt, an industrial-organizational psychology professor at Clemson University, cautions there are some limits to employee engagement that managers should consider.
Britt acknowledges that employees who are actively involved in the management and decision-making of their company provide greater productivity and profitability. In modern parlance, engagement is good. But he identifies several issues that should be considered.
“If [engaged workers] are not getting the resources they feel they need to perform at their best, their engagement may be diminished.”
So worker enthusiasm and initiative needs to be adequately supported.
Britt said performance could be restricted by
- lack of budget and equipment support,
- access to important information,
- work overload,
- unclear objectives and goals, and
- assigning employees’ tasks that don’t fit their training.
SIOP said
Britt’s research shows engaged employees are likely to become frustrated and dissatisfied and may blame their supervisors if they do not have the systems and support necessary to be effective. Given the higher pro-activity and energy levels of engaged employees, this frustration could lead to turnover as they begin to look for more supportive work environments. “The ones who stay behind may well be the ones who just don’t care,” said Britt.
Work overload can lead directly to burnout. According to SIOP, Britt said
“highly motivated employees are willing to go beyond the call of duty to help the organization, but when temporary overload continues and they repeatedly fail to meet their own high expectations, their motivation becomes directed at locating other job possibilities, leaving the organization at risk of losing key talent.”
The impediments to an engaged workforce can often be missed in the enthusiasm of the engagement evangelists It is important not to dismiss the enthusiasm but to temper it so that any benefits are long term. For any new management approaches to work, there must be adequate groundwork so that the participants know the reasons for change, this will help the new approach succeed.
In short, business needs to acknowledge that consultation is a basis for improvement not a communication method of telling people about change. As SafetyAtWorkBlog has said consultation occurs in preparation for change as well as during and after. Thomas Britt and SIOP have provided excellent ideas of the areas of threat for an employee engagement program.
More information may be available at www.siop.org.
