Reflect on failures before jumping into change

Gabrielle Carlton, Director & Principal Consultant at Resylience, recently published an interesting article about her experience with a former Australian soldier who was struggling with work-related mental ill-health. The mental health of defence personnel is a hugely important and complex situation that questions the core function of defence and our expectations of defence personnel. However, …

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Calling something an accident hides the truth

Jessie Singer published her book called “There Are No Accidents” last year. It is a pivotal book about safety and our understanding of the social and legal impacts of calling tragic events “accidents”. On June 13 2023, Singer spoke on Carnegie Council’s From Another Angle podcast about her book and the consequences of its publication. …

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Progressive mental health perspectives continue to emphasise workers’ need to change

This blog has been critical of many current strategies to reduce workplace mental health risks. Many strategies continue to be based on changing the worker rather than changing the system of work. The well-being advocates who have almost entirely focussed on individual-level interventions are broadening their scope to organisational or systemic resilience, but they still …

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Grievance Culture and Responsibility

Julian Baggini is a philosopher less well-known in Australia than in the United Kingdom but his writings can add to some of the current discussions about occupational health and safety (OHS) and business ethics. In his 2010 book, Complaint, he analyses our grievance culture and how complaints can and should result in positive outcomes. OHS …

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Another business survey that (sort of) mentions OHS

Much of the discussion about working from home (WFH) focuses on the number of workers in the office, at home or working a combination of both. The production issues of connection, collaboration, management supervision, and productivity are also the focus, particularly of media articles based on some small survey that is principally a marketing exercise. …

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A European counter to the United States’ OHS propaganda

One of the most useful occupational health and safety (OHS) publications is HesaMag, “the health and safety magazine with a European view”. (It is a hard copy, free and excellent. A must-have) Its latest edition has a feature on psychosocial risks (PSR) at work. I know that some of us are “over it”, but it …

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Who’s to blame?

All occupational health and safety (OHS) advocates should be reading the work of Jordan Barab. His latest article on “blaming the workers” for their own incidents is a great example of his writing. The article also illustrates one of the things about OHS that really gets up the noses of employers – if we don’t …

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