Building a Safe & Healthy Workplace in Today’s Climate

It’s a truth to say that a safe and healthy workplace is a happy, productive one. Unsafe work environments significantly impact worker well-being and morale, staff retention, and the costs associated with workplace injuries and productivity losses. 

The good news is that organisations are recognising the importance of having a workplace health and safety strategy, but the key to success is ensuring yours is agile enough to navigate a landscape that is ever-changing due to the myriad of global and economic factors.

Keep agility front and centre

COVID-19 is the first pandemic to enforce mandated social isolation, and as a result, has driven unprecedented change globally across the work environment. We are still grappling with the fallout of this transformation.

Businesses can measure their success on their ability to adapt, survive and thrive whilst maintaining and safeguarding people, operations, assets, and brand, in the face of evolving conditions. We have put together key points to help you create an agile health and safety workplace strategy:

It starts with management:It’s important that employers don’t just ‘talk the talk’; they need to lead by example. Demonstrating a genuine commitment to making health and safety a priority in the workplace, includes visible change, such as allocating budget and personnel to enhance workforce safety. This is crucial to building employee trust.

Open and clear communication: Review and continually improve how you communicate with your employees. It’s more important than ever for managers to be honest and frank on health and safety issues, and make them part of an ongoing workplace conversation. These initiatives can be supported by an OHS management system that’s comprehensive, effective, and easy for all to access and use.

Mental health takes a front row seat: Changes in the economic landscape have impacted mental health in the workforce, and strategies need to be put in place to manage this. A soaring increase in mental health issues comprises the fallout of COVID-19. Survey results reveal that:

• 38% of supervisors and 27% of workers reported feeling mentally unwell by the end of the first COVID year, and of these:
•  53% and 45% respectively said this negative change was due to COVID-19

Remote working: Working from home was once the domain of a select few. The pandemic, as we know, resulted in an overnight roll-out of this model across the general population. 

Whilst issues of productivity were once foremost in the minds of managers of remote workers, these have been replaced by issues of safety. Today, managers continue to struggle to connect with their work-from-home employees, and to monitor their physical and psychological safety. Concerns such as these will continue in our post-pandemic world with hybrid models of work slated to become the norm.

A trained workforce is a safer workforce: Critical to a safe and healthy work environment is the provision of relevant, timely and ongoing information and training for staff, in the following key areas.

• Job-specific skills and practices
• OHS
• Stress management
• Mental health awareness
• Bullying and harassment
• Communication
• Diversity and disability awareness

Cultural Transformations

The 2021 State of Safety and Beyond White Paper surveyed 314 EHS professionals for insights on how their companies were grappling with issues of safety, and how they envisioned the future. The top five challenges that emerged were:

• Engaging and motivating employees (72%)
• Balancing production pressures with safety efforts (59%)
• Getting supervisor cooperation (45%)
• Providing effective training (34%)
• Employee unwillingness to follow rules (31%)

Thought leaders noted that 2022 will see COVID-19, inflation, changing employee expectations, and the labour shortage, continue to test organisations and fuel cultural transformation.

It’s a team effort

Managers also need to set explicit expectations and forge a climate of accountability. Workers need to ‘buy in’ to safety, and understand their role in keeping themselves and their co-workers safe.

In the early 2000s, a Hartford Financial Services Group survey found that 90% of employees believed that employees should caution others when they were operating at-risk, however only 60% said they actually provided critical feedback themselves. There’s little to suggest that much has changed in 2022.