We like to pretend OHS begins with a regulation or a checklist, but the truth is far less glamorous: it starts with the basic childhood lesson of “don’t hurt people.” Everything else is just the paperwork society builds around that idea. Part of that “paperwork” is the process of socialisation. There are several definitions of …
Harvard Business Review (HBR) is an active publisher of articles on business management. In 2024, it released a collection of essays on psychological safety as part of its Emotional Intelligence series. HBR’s psychological safety advice is written for a U.S. corporate audience. It largely ignores the legislative duties that shape psychosocial risk management in Australia, …
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers and economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz are old friends. One of their conversations was turned into the lead article in the February edition of The Monthly (paywalled). Several of their thoughts impinge on how occupational health and safety (OHS) laws are applied and may be reformed....
Until recently, Donna McGeorge‘s book “Red Brick Thinking” passed me by, but her perspective aligns closely with the occupational health and safety (OHS) concepts of “safety clutter” and the Swiss cheese model....
British Standards Institute has just published BS30480, a standard called “Suicide and the workplace – Intervention, prevention and support for people affected by suicide – Guide”. It has come at the right time to show that the changes in psychological health at work in Australia are not in isolation. Note: this article discusses workplace suicide …
Mental health in the construction industry is a perennial occupational health and safety (OHS) concern – high levels of suicide, suicide ideation, depression, anxiety, etc, – the usual suspects. Research into this has been robust in Australia, with the work of Professor Helen Lingard and the Construction Industry Culture Taskforce, among others. Recently, I heard …
Adam Smith was a prominent Scottish 18th-century economist and philosopher, sometimes referred to as the “Father of Economics”. What relevance could he have to occupational health and safety (OHS) in Australia? The modern OHS concern of psychosocial hazards, psychological safety and worker wellbeing should cause us to read Smith’s works on the morality of capitalism. …
