On 30 March 2016, Melbourne hosted a Workplace Wellness conference organised by Informa. (SafetyAtWorkBlog attended as a guest.) The reason for attending was to see how occupational health and safety (OHS) is growing, or needs to grow, to accommodate workplace wellness issues and how the wellness sector looks on OHS.
Some say occupational health and safety (OHS) is all about common sense. This is a tempting fallacy, particularly as it relates to the risks of sedentary work – what earlier generations would describe as “sitting down”. This month Safe Work Australia (SWA) entered the debate about the health risks of sitting down for too long. …
Zero Harm was an enormously popular motivational aim for OHS. It originated as a response in some large organisations where safety performance was plateauing and who felt that they had achieved as much as they could in redesigning work and improving physical safety. The plateauing led to frustration and a reassessment of safety practices. The remaining variable …
2015 has been a big year for public attention on the exploitation of workers. In May, the Four Corners program revealed the exploitation of, largely, migrant or illegal workers in the food processing and vegetable growing sectors. In the last month, 7Eleven workers have featured, also after a Four Corners investigation in conjunction with Fairfax …
Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a justifiably respected business publication but it often sells occupational health and safety (OHS) short. A new HBR article, “Stress Is Your Brain Trying to Avoid Something“, is a case in point. Too much of the contemporary approaches to psychosocial hazards at work focus on the individual without addressing the …
Any new book by Andrew Hopkins is a cause for excitement. The latest book co-written with Associate Professor Jan Hayes* focusses, primarily, on two pipeline disasters in the United States but has sufficient information and thoughts for those OHS professionals outside this sector and jurisdiction. “Nightmare Pipeline Failures: Fantasy planning, black swans and integrity management” … Continue reading “New book on pipeline safety has OHS lessons for all”
Professor Andrew Hopkins‘ frequent appearances at safety conferences are always fascinating as he does not simply trot out the same presentation each time. He is certainly not a priest with the same 52 sermons each year. At the Building Safety conference Hopkins spoke briefly about mindfulness but grounded this in how executives and others should … Continue reading “The practical manifestation of safety leadership”