The Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) has tried a new format for its occupational health and safety (OHS) seminars. It is not a lunch with a single presenter and it is not a Three-Minute Thesis. It is five safety researchers in one hour, seven minutes per person and a single question from the floor – and it worked. Continue reading “5 experts in 60 minutes”
Any blog about occupational health and safety (OHS) will write repeatedly about leadership. Safe Work Australia advocates leadership as beneficial to OHS:
“When leaders make sure all business risks, including work health and safety, are effectively managed, and continually monitor and review all areas of their business’ performance, they will be open to opportunities for innovation, and alert to emerging hazards.”
But leadership requires someone to apply it and often, in the OHS sphere, people wait for others to show leadership rather than seeing their own potential.
The attention given to the recent draft report of the
The quest for accurate determination of the costs of poor occupational health and safety (OHS) has been a regular discussion point in this blog but the quest may be a never-ending one and ultimately pointless.
Recently the UK’s HSE Chairman, Judith Hackett took the Forum for Private Business (FPB) to task over estimates of OHS compliance costs. FPB stated that
“The cost of compliance for the UK’s 1.2 million micro, small and medium sized businesses is £20 billion of actual costs and £41 billion if you include opportunity costs’.”
Hackett was unable to look at the claims as the FPB report was only for members. This is a common marketing tactic where some information is released publicly in order to generate a demand which can be satisfied only with a membership or payment. The downside of this tactic is that the carefully constructed statements become accepted as fact without allowing those facts to be independently verified.
Australia’s Productivity Commission (PC) has released its draft report into the Workplace Relations Framework. All morning talk radio has been discussion the issue of penalty rates but there are safety-related elements that should not be forgotten. Bullying is the most obvious of these.
The overview of the Draft Report hints that the level of resources required to administer the bullying provision in the Fair Work Commission (FWC) may be excessive given the tidal wave of applications did not eventuate. Continue reading “PC report questions bullying processes”
The Age newspaper’s front cover for 15 July 2015 was dominated by an article about happiness. The article is worth reading as it is built upon statistics from the long-term HILDA survey (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia) that is used by many Australian researchers but, significantly, HILDA makes no reference to happiness. Various elements in the article relate to the workplace and work activity generally but a couple are of direct relevance to occupational health and safety.
“4. Be a workaholic
Work-life balance is overrated, the survey suggests. In fact, the more people work the better their health is. Employees can work more than 51 hours in paid work and 81 hours of total work (that’s more than 11 hours a day) without any detrimental effect on their wellbeing, according to the report.”
As the Australian Government analyses the productivity of the workplace it is vital that that analysis reflects the modern workplace and management practice. At the moment Australian workplaces are awash with training programs focusing on resilience and happiness, implying that each individual can change and improve a workplace culture but there has always been an undercurrent of manipulation to these courses and seminars. A new book by William Davies provides a fresh perspective that, rightly, questions the motives behind this modern trend and provides an important historical context. (For those who can’t purchase the book but want to know more, look at this series of articles)
Davies’s book, “