Why is workplace safety such a burden on the everyday worker? And how do we change that?
Workplace safety information is not available to the everyday worker as it could be. Worker engagement in workplace safety is laborious. Why aren’t every day workers able to access the best safety practices for the work they are doing? Why isn’t workplace safety driven by workers giving their management ideas on how to improve workplace efficiencies and work safer?
These are the questions we need to answer in order to have a worker-driven safety system.
The past 50 or so years of workplace safety in Australia has been derived from complicated legislation that is written in a language that most workers are unable to implement.
It is then passed on through a network of OHS consultants, in-house safety managers, unions and industry bodies such as National Safety Council of Australia (NSCA), and finally through to the everyday worker.
The first the worker hears of a change is when they are confronted with a change in company policy, or a new work method statement is introduced – all of which are generally seen by the worker as an obstacle to doing the work they have been employed to perform.
Education and engagement has been seen as the key to improving workplace safety for some time. But it is a hard sell from the OHS manager.
OHS meetings, where workers are encouraged to voice their concerns and discuss any safety issues are usually more of a monologue than an interactive discussion. These workplace meetings are rarely a situation where workers take a keen interest in improving safety, and most small business operators simply don’t have safety meetings at all.
Is it really true that workers are not interested in their own safety and wellbeing? Do most of them wear a seat belt to drive to work? I think so. Do most of them want to come home to their families each day? Of course they do.
So why is workplace safety such a burden on the everyday worker? And how do we change that?
The answer is in a collaborative approach. From the outset it appears the sharing of safety information is limited to industry bodies and the individual experiences of safety professionals working from one company to another. Big business has an invisible wall that surrounds their safety procedures, as it rests on their internal company computers, filing cabinets and log books.
But in a trickle form, that information is being shared. Colleagues that move from one company to another often ‘borrow’ safety documentation and modify it to suit their needs. This happens every day, but can be hard to find, particularly for people moving into new roles.
Smaller contractors, particularly builders are better at sharing information. They often photocopy documents, forward documents on emails and have their workers sign off; but often this occurs without employers taking the time to even explain what the documents contain.
It is just a formality so they can satisfy a workplace inspector should one appear. How far does this go to actually working safer? It often takes a complete investigation into an accident before employers realise that just getting workers to sign off falls short of managing a safe work site.
While we continue to have a lack of safety information widely available to all workers, it will always have to pushed from managers onto workers.
Since 2006, 3,416 news articles have been written on my website (www.safetyculture.com.au) regarding workplace accidents, prosecutions and related matters in the past three years.
But recently we are noticing a trend as to the type of people who are subscribing to our news. More and more, it is everyday workers who want to know how and why people are being injured at work.
Where did they get this information 10 years ago? Government statistics on an obscure website perhaps? A handful of OHS Industry websites that required payment for access?
Now through sites such as Facebook workers are subscribing to product updates and innovations that relate to their work. They are sharing that information with their Facebook friends, and taking ideas back to their managers about how they can work safer.
The power is shifting. We are about to see a paradigm shift in workplace safety. The workers are empowering themselves with information, they are educating themselves on industry trends, best practices and learning about what accidents are occurring in their industry.
The next 10 years will see a shift from an employerdriven push for workplace safety, to a genuine interest from workers on how they can work safer.
Software for safety management has been limited to the industry elites. Often costly outlays are required by companies to access safety management software, software that every day workers were not privy too, much less interested in using.
As collaboration improves and the cost of accessing workplace safety information moves closer to zero, the willing engagement from workers performing the work will follow.
Currently, a near miss or hazard at work activates at least a page of paperwork and often a lot more. Given the choice, most workers avoid having to fill out paperwork. If workers are able to take a photograph with their phone to report a hazard, and email the photo to their OHS Manager, the incidence of reporting will increase.
Companies need to incorporate modern technology to share information within their company and outside of it. The current climate of completing paper work for every step of workplace safety is not efficient and hinders productivity. A simple photo with a phone can provide enough information for a manager to act on, and either repair or replace a faulty part or investigate further. This is the kind of ease of use that workplace safety needs to be embraced by workers.
The sharing of what has been considered to be in house information needs to expand exponentially. Safety improvements should be made available to your network of friends, colleagues and industry networks. Options need to be available to share the information anonymously where applicable, so the information channels can open up to the collaborative.
Desktop computers, filing cabinets and class room inductions will be replaced with handheld tablets, cloud computing and on-the-job multimedia training and an increase in field-based safety inductions.
OHS will move from the realm of the OHS Professional to a more balanced shared responsibility of the workplace managers, workers and OHS professionals.
With the National Harmonisation laws coming into effect from January 2012, the state-by-state variances in workplace safety are removed, paving the way for best practices to be shared more easily than ever.
Data sharing needs to be opened up. The benefits we enjoy from the Internet are available to us because of the data that is shared freely. Search engines organise the data in ways that allow us to make use of it in an infinite array of possibilities.
We need to be sharing this information freely so the data can be integrated into applications, measured and used for improvement processes.
Who would have thought that Google would become a portal to find missing people in recent natural disasters such as the earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand?
Medical research is using data sharing to drive research into key areas, such as Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Pharmaceutical companies are posting compound problems to chemists across the globe with a reward for solutions. In 2008, BMW opened up its in-car software to open source developers when they realised proprietary software doesn’t innovate fast enough, and it makes no sense for each individual car company to reinvent the wheel.
Workplace health and safety needs to stop reinventing the wheel – we need to see the same innovations mentioned above applied to the safety industry – but we need the data to do it. We need your data, and then the collaborative can go to work with it to create tomorrows safety systems.
Luke Anear managed 3,500 workers compensation matters as practise manager for Lee Kelly & Associates in Sydney until 2002. He has been invited to speak at Australia’s leading insurers on workers compensation investigations.
Luke founded SafetyCulture in 2004 with now over 9,000 clients across Australia and New Zealand, where he works as the CEO focusing on helping the OHS Industry work collaboratively to improve efficiencies and work safer.
Luke is also the director of GoSafety.net, an initiative to help safety professionals and workers share their information.
Contact Luke Anear at info@safetyculture.com.au for more information.
Add Comment