workplace – Page 43 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

New Work/Life Research

There seems to be new institutes and academic schools popping up regularly over research into the issue of work/life balance. Recently one of the oldest and most prominent of the institutes, the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, released new research data.

The latest Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) was released in late July 2009. The executive summary identifies several important issues relevant to OHS:

“Three years of data about work-life interference in Australia tell us that many employees experience frequent interference from work in their personal, home and community lives, many feel overloaded at work and feelings of time pressure are also common and growing.”

“Work hours are central to work-life interference….. Many Australians are a long way from their preferred working hours and the 2008/09 economic downturn has not made any difference to the incidence of this mismatch.”

The work by Barbara Pocock and others at the Centre is characterised by recommendations for improvements rather than simply describing a situation. In this data the researchers say

“Our AWALI reports over the past three years suggest that employers and public policy makers can help workers deal with work-life pressures. This involves improving the quality of supervision and workplace culture, controlling workloads, designing ‘do-able’ jobs, reducing long working hours and work-related commuting, increasing employee-centered flexibility and options for permanent part-time work, improving the fit between actual and preferred hours and increasing care supports.”

It is obvious from these comments that OHS professionals need to work hard on these matters to create, or maintain, their workplace safety cultures.

Kevin Jones

New Cleaning Standard

The Victorian Government has released a revised cleaning standard for the hospital and healthcare sectors but many others would find the information of direct relevance, particularly those who like to state they meet “world’s best practice”.

The standard is supported by a good short newsletter.

Many businesses and industry OHS professionals can feel like they are audited to death. This is particularly so in the healthcare sector so it is with interest that the government has dropped the lodgement of scores for internal audits. However the benchmarking exercise will continue with three annual external audits.

Those SafetyAtWorkBlog readers who are also auditors, inside and outside the health system, may find the overview on auditors of interest.

Kevin Jones

New Bachelor degree in OHS

A new Bachelor degree in OHS is being offered at the University of Queensland. Professor of Occupational Health and Safety Mike Capra says in a media release that

“graduates would become a new generation of highly-trained OHS specialists who would be in demand due to a workforce shortage.”

The New South Wales WorkCover has had to remind employers not to cut corners on safety due to the tough economic climate. With the unemployment rate increasing in Australia, the demand claimed by Professor Capra is disputable.

The issue of employability was raised in a discussion forum recently. One person pointed out that employers are able to be more selective. When they have to choose between a graduate fresh from university or an applicant with experience, experience will win every time.

It will be interesting to see what programs the Bachelor Degree has in place to provide the necessary practical experience.

Hopefully on graduation in 2015, the career opportunities have improved with a stronger economy.

Professor Capra is quoted further.

“The program was developed at the request of the OHS industry, including peak body the Safety Institute of Australia, which saw the need for a professional qualification in the field,” Professor Capra said. “The lack of well-qualified OHS professionals is causing alarm among members of major OHS associations, government authorities and employers.”

The biggest motivation for improved professionalism has come from WorkSafe Victoria through the Health and Safety Professionals Alliance, and only within the last couple of years. It is is the “alarm” of the OHS regulator that seems to have been the biggest factor. At least WorkSafe is willing to fund the development of such a program having provided a grant of almost $A400,000 recently.

Some of the claims in the promotional video for the course are dubious (“never be out of a job”, for example) and the video could pass, in parts, for a tourism ad, but if the target audience is school leavers, the focus on fun, sun and job variety is probably relevant.

If it is the first course of its kind in Australia, as claimed, it will be very interesting to watch how it is received.

Kevin Jones

BHP Billiton’s safety record is again in the Australian media

BHP Billiton’s production report has generated some OHS-related interest in the Australian business media on 23 July 2009, but not all. [SafetyAtWorkBlog has written several pieces about BHP Billiton‘s safety record]

The company’s iron ore production has fallen short of its May 2009 guidance. Iron ore is the only division where production has dropped. The Age newspaper reports that the five deaths “forced a production slowdown” and noted the Western Australian government’s review of BHP’s safety management.

Malcolm Maiden’s commentary in the same newspaper mentions the BHP production results but describes the five workplace fatalities as “production glitches”. He writes

“Production glitches for both companies [BHP Billiton & Rio Tinto] might have been handled better if their iron ore operations were merged, as is now proposed.”

Safety management may have been improved. Rio Tinto’s OHS performance is considerably better but the description of the fatalities as “production glitches” is cold.

This contrasts considerably with the coverage provided to the BHP results by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) which listed the issue on the front page with the headline “Poor safety record hits BHP output” (full article not available online without a subscription). AFR says

“the safety issues overshadowed better than expected results from BHP’s petroleum and metallurgical coal units….”

There was no overshadowing according to the writers in The Age.

The AFR article identifies a raft of safety matters that illustrates well the OHS status of BHP Billiton and emphasises just how serious the workplace fatalities are.

“Tensions with the WA government [over a variety of issues, including safety] have escalated…”
Seven BHP workers died in Australia and South Africa in 2008/09.
“Eleven BHP staff… died while on the job in 2008.”
On 22 July 2009 WA Minister for Mines & Petroleum, Norman Moore, praised BHP’s efforts to improve safety but said “It is very difficult to understand sometimes why fatalities occur within the safety frameworks that operate in most major mining companies…” said on 22 July 2009

Warren Edney, an analyst with the Royal Bank of Scotland and occasional media commentator, spoke in relation to the safety record of BHP’s Pilbara operations, where five workers died. He said in the AFR article:

“It’s better than Chinese underground coalmining but that’s not a big tick, is it?… In part you’d say that we’ve undergone this mining boom in WA so you’ve got workers who haven’t had the safety brainwashing that other parts of the workforce may have had over the last 10 years. Part of it reflects that and part of it may be that people get pressed to do things quicker.” [my emphasis]

It seems odd to compare the safety performance of an open-cut Australian iron ore mine with “Chinese underground coalmining”. Similarly describing safety education and training as “safety brainwashing” is unusual. SafetyAtWorkBlog has contacted the Royal Bank of Scotland for clarification of Warren Edney’s comments.

The AFR has almost been leading the Australian media pack on reporting of safety management in 2009, partly due to the OHS harmonisation regulatory program and its impact on business costs. This may also be due to some of the concerns about increased union activity on worksites under the new industrial relations legislation. The AFR should be congratulated for discussing the OHS context of BHP’s iron ore production figures and providing a front page prominence.

Kevin Jones

Behavioural-based safety is no different to traditional safety management

Sometime ago SafetyAtWorkBlog wrote that “engagement” was just a new term for “consultation”. Rebadging or rebranding occurs in the safety discipline as much as any other but our internet ears pricked up at some recent comments in a Canadian podcast from Safety Excellence.

Shawn Galloway and Terry of ProACT Safety is discussing traditional approaches to safety management and how they fit into his philosophy of safety excellence. They say this about behavioural-based safety (BBS):

“[People] come back in with advanced strategies, like behavior-based safety and it’s the same old thing. Everything on the behavior-based safety list is already covered by a rule or procedure in traditional safety.

A lot of times it’s an admission of failure of their traditional safety program…”

It is refreshing to hear a BBS specialist acknowledge that the role for BBS is to progress safety beyond compliance and that compliance strategies, what Galloway describes as “traditional safety”, are fundamental to a company’s safe operation.

For those enlightened safety professionals who seek a deeper understanding of their discipline thr0ugh alternate perspectives, this particular podcast is very good.

The full podcasts are often worth listening to as they discuss safety culture issues, performance indicators and many more of the current safety management concepts.

Kevin Jones

A study of violence

Australian writer, Jeff Sparrow, recently recently a book that looks at violence and killing , “Killing: A Misadvanture In Violence“. As part of promoting the book he has been interviewed on several radio shows, the one most relevant to SafetyAtWorkBlog, is the 3CR program, Stick Together, about his book.

Sparrow says that he wanted to investigate the “normalisation of killing” and l0oks at occupation which have killing as part of the job. He analysed the killing of animals through the first-hand experience of kangaroo-shooting and visiting an abattoir.

Sparrow says that the abattoir was very much a factory that deconstructs animals rather than manufacturing items, such as cars. This will be no revelation to anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation, in which he analyses abattoirs, particularly meatpacking, in the context of food production. Schlosser’s section on the worker safety and compensation processes in the US meat industry is confronting.

They are also possibly more directly relevant to OHS (or heartless capitalism) than Sparrow’s take on abattoirs, although Sparrow does mention how the structure of the workplace “controls the workers”. This harks back to the dehumanisation of workers for the purpose of productivity where repetition makes the reality of the action of killing or dismemberment, mundane.

In comparison, the roo-shooters have a more detailed understanding of their “craft” because they are working in the wild, where things can go wrong, instead of on the killing floor.

Sparrow also looks at killing that is undertaken in other occupations, such as the defence forces, and workplaces, such as deathrow. In these contexts Sparrow talks about the industrialisation of the war processes.

Ultimately, from the workplace perspective, Sparrow’s book sounds like an interesting resource for those who study the depersonalisation of the worker, or industrialisation. For those who work on, or have responsibility for, production lines, this psychological approach to the book may help.

Kevin Jones

A sample chapter of the book is available for download.

Absence management data misses the OHS mark

Managing workplace absenteeism often ignores the OHS issues that are integral to the issue.

On 20 July 2009 the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development released its findings on the issue in its annual Absence Management Survey.

The media statement identifies the reasons for short- and long-term absences.

“The main causes of short-term absence are minor illnesses such as colds and flu, stress and musculoskeletal conditions

The main causes of long-term absence are acute medical conditions, stress and mental health conditions and musculoskeletal conditions and back pain.”

However, the media statement identifies no measures to counter these workplace hazards, preferring to focus on ancillary factors such as job security.

Willmott focuses on a comparison between absenteeism in the public and private sectors. The difference is statistically interesting, perhaps, but does not address the causes of absenteeism.

Willmot also illustrates the dominant HR position on absenteeism.

“Effective absence management involves finding a balance between providing support to help employees with health problems stay in and return to work and taking consistent and firm action against employees that try and take advantage of organisations’ occupational sick pay schemes.”

This manages the effect of the problem but not the problem itself which CIPD’s own research has identified as musculoskeletal conditions, stress, mental health and, to a lesser extent, colds and flu.

The comments by the Senior Public Policy Adviser for the CIPD, BenWillmott, are a good example of how some human resources or management organisations miss the health and safety element.

The CIPD does acknowledge the importance of workplace health and safety as illustrated by its reply to the Health & Safety Executive’s draft strategy. It also says in the Absence Management Survey that, in the return-to-work context:

“The involvement of occupational health professionals is identified as the most effective approach for managing long-term absence…”

However even though it sees itself as the “professional and accreditation body for the UK HR profession [which represents] over 130,000 HR professionals at every level of business and in every sector”, it hesitates to take a leadership role in health and safety. It’s a pity because applying the apparent professionalism of the Institute and its membership strength to OHS could achieve great social and business efficiencies.

For those wanting to look at comparison data, CIPD makes available its previous surveys for download.

Kevin Jones

Tag: workplace

New Work/Life Research

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New Cleaning Standard

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New Bachelor degree in OHS

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BHP Billiton’s safety record is again in the Australian media

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Behavioural-based safety is no different to traditional safety management

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A study of violence

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Absence management data misses the OHS mark

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