We are also looking to engage employees more, not just on what they should be doing to advance a safety culture, but also to increase awareness about their rights. We would like to see a culture in which people look at everything they do to assess the risk involved, both on the job and in their daily lives. Right now, that’s not a habit that is ingrained in all of us, particularly outside of the workplace, unless there’s a structured program in place that includes daily meetings, job risk assessments, and workplace hazard assessments.
One underappreciated stakeholder group that has been proven to drive positive safety behavioural change is the family. We are working hard to connect our safety message with the spouses, significant others, parents, and children of employees. None of them ever want to experience the profound impact that a tragic accident can have on a worker and their family, and a worker’s family has a unique power of persuasion that we can’t match. This insight inspired our recent advertising campaign focused on the message that “Workplace Injuries Hurt the Most at Home.”
I don’t know if we can consider the media as stakeholders in the truest sense, but they certainly play an important role in helping to create a culture of workplace safety, so that is another avenue for us to explore as we raise awareness on this topic.
Do you find that safe and healthy workplaces are being embraced to a greater degree than ever before?
While I am seeing significant improvement in some areas and incremental improvement overall, there’s still a long way to go. It’s interesting to see how the whole concept of safe workplaces is evolving. Traditionally, for many people, safety referred to protection against a physical injury or exposure to dangerous chemicals, for example. But there is growing appreciation that safety in the workplace must also address issues such as drug impairment, violence, harassment, mental wellness, and the like. That opens a whole new world of hazards that need a very different skill set to manage.
That’s a challenging pursuit given that it isn’t always easy to spot or detect those hazards.
That is true. Supervisors and managers aren’t necessarily trained in how to recognize these issues or offer help. Too often when faced with these kinds of hazards, the necessary action to resolve the issue is unintentionally deferred, which can end up making the problem more difficult to resolve.
I believe that it is very important for management and supervisors to fully embrace employee engagement on an individual basis. Not just having perfunctory conversations but also working to establish a level of mutual trust so that you develop an understanding of some of the important things that are going on in your employees’ lives. In doing so, you achieve a level of awareness that enables you to identify potential issues earlier and that provides you with the opportunity to offer the right support at the right time. Regardless, for the next few years it’s likely going to be very challenging to fully address issues such as mental wellness or post-traumatic stress in the workplace until we remove the stigmas associated with so-called invisible injuries and better train all employees on this subject.
As workplace demographics shift and technologies continue to evolve, how will they potentially impact implementation and practice of workplace health and safety?
It’s going to be easier to achieve adoption from young people entering the workforce because they will consider any new standards to be part of their job. There may be resistance from more established employees because new approaches will clash with the way things traditionally have been done. The key is to look at how you communicate change management. It’s not just about telling people what to do; it’s about taking the time to explain why we’re doing this, what it means to the employee, and so on. We must recognize that different demographics may require different approaches to ensure buy-in.
