People want information about their own health and fitness. Many are turning to wearable technology and activity trackers for that information, but information requires decisions or actions to gain benefit. The limitations of activity tracking and decisions was reinforced recently with some US research in the area. The University of Pittsburgh School of Education’s Department…
An article from the January 2016 edition of the Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine (JOEM) has been gaining some attention through social media networks. The article, Tracking the Market Performance of Companies That Integrate a Culture of Health and Safety: An Assessment of Corporate Health Achievement Award Applicants, is being interpreted as evidence that health and safety programs lead to “superior market performance”. Yes and No, but mostly No. Continue reading “Health program impact on corporate share price is overstated”
Many Australian newspapers include articles about workplace health in their job ad or professionals sections. On May 3 2014 the Weekend Australia included an article called “Working harder for health“. The article touches on most of the usual elements of such articles
But (finally) the interviewee acknowledges the importance of looking beyond corporate well-being programs to larger organisational issues.
The Australian Government has released its report into a review of its national workers’ compensation scheme, Comcare, and the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation (SRC) Act. Some of the media (and politicians), as it often does, has focused on the seemingly absurd compensation claims. Few cases have gained the same degree of national and international attention as the sex case for instance, and although most workers’ compensation reports focus on post-incident treatments, there is a glimmer of hope on occupational health and safety (OHS) in this latest review.
The report, the latest undertaken by Peter Hanks QC, states that one of the guiding principles of the SRC Act should be an acknowledgement that
“The benefit and premium structure should promote incident prevention and reduce risk of loss.” (page 25)
This would be a wonderful benchmark to apply but is likely to be overshadowed by the compensation and rehabilitation issues of the review, unless OHS professionals and practitioners continue to remind regulators that prevention is better than cure.
Peter Hanks admits in a 2012 video interview on his review that injury prevention is not part of the terms of reference but there are elements of his report that require serious consideration by OHS professionals in consultation with their Human Resources (HR) colleagues. Continue reading “Latest review into workers compensation provides OHS clues”
The corporate wellness advocates have been able to estimate the return-on-investment (ROI) for their programs but there has been little research on the return-on-prevention, until recently. In 2012 the International Social Security Association (ISSA) determined that, in microeconomic terms,
“…there are benefits resulting from investment in occupational safety and health… with the results offering a Return on Prevention [ROP] ratio of 2.2.”
This means that for every one dollar spent per employee per year the potential return is 2.2 dollars.
The report also found that OHS provides, amongst other benefits:
But why bother costing harm prevention when there is already a legislative requirement to provide safe and healthy workplaces? Such a question usually comes from those whose understanding of OHS is principally compliance and who believe compliance equals safety.
The calculation of ROP, in the ISSA report at least, counters the belief that safety is always a cost with no economic benefit to the company. A positive ROP provides an opportunity to actively participate in the economic debate over productivity and, in some countries, austerity.
Yossi Berger writes:
We’re all familiar with the notions of focus and attention, and selective attention. We’ve all experienced how difficult it can be to attend to target information when background noise is distracting. The issue can be referred to as the signal-to-noise ratio.
I often find its effects in discussions with managers and workers during workplace inspections. That is, I hear animated discussions of hazards, of risks, of risk assessments and risk management and various systems and theories. The conversations over flow with these concepts whilst most of workers’ daily problems aren’t even raised, they don’t reach the level of a signal.
Thankfully in most workplaces, most managers and most workers have not experienced any fatalities. By far most of them will not have experienced or witnessed a serious injury or serious disease. Nor have most experienced their local hazards actually seriously hurting anyone.
But most workers will have experienced some dangerous working conditions, mostly not mortally dangerous, but dangerous. Continue reading “Just workplace hardship”
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.