On October 7 2016, Victoria’s trade union movement held a Young Worker Conference.  The major public statement from that conference was the launch of a survey report called Young Workers Health and Safety Snapshot.  The report has received some mainstream press which is not unusual for this type of trade union member survey.  Almost twenty years ago a similar type of survey from the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) launched the issue of workplace bullying into the Australian consciousness.

The media article mentioned above focussed on the sexual harassment elements of the survey report which is unsurprising as sexual harassment cases have been a mainstay of workplace relations reporting but it overpowered some of the other more recognisable occupational health and safety (OHS) issues.

The recent Victorian report found that:

“Young people are beginning their working lives without the education needed to identify workplace bullying and health & safety hazards and their employers’ obligations to address them. Young people are not being equipped with the tools to confidently question unsafe practices in the workplace and confidently raise issue when needed. This has led to a normalisation of unsafe work practices as the status quo.”

Where is a young worker to receive such information?  The school curriculum is already bursting with subjects and there is constant pressure for more.  As has been written elsewhere in this blog, school-based bullying is significantly different from workplace bullying due to the very different power relationships between a student and their teacher and a worker and their employer  different laws, different rules, different environment, different culture…

Students may receive some exposure to work through a placement or “work experience” but whether that person undertakes a full set of safety inductions is unlikely.  The process is usually one of supervision and workplace exposure.  In such situations which, formally, only last five working days students may witness workplace bullying but their attention is on work tasks more than on the complex relationships that underpin work.

Employers have the responsibility for providing a safe and healthy work environment.  What is not overtly stated in safety legislation is that this obligation is to every worker from their first day to the last.  The employer and their managerial system is the principal source of OHS information for young workers.  If the worker is in a unionised workplace, their health and safety representative is likely to play a role in this induction process but that is an increasingly rare situation in Australia.

The body of the Young Worker report offers a different take on the prevalence of workplace bullying.  It asked

“Have you experienced bullying or harassment from any of the following?”

The categories were Customer/Client, Boss/Supervisor, Co-Worker, None of the above, or I’d rather not say.

Harassment

Thirty-nine percent said none of the categories listed.  Does this indicate that bullying is less of an issues than is often made out?  And are workers really getting bullied by clients or are they being harassed?  It is sloppy research to combine harassment and bullying in survey questions as bullying and harassment are two different interactions although the mental health impacts on workers may be similar.

This overlap of harassment and bullying continues to complicate OHS interventions, has existed for some time and is continuing to be ignored. (This blog wrote about the issue in 2011) Safe Work Australia (SWA) defines workplace bullying as

“Workplace bullying is repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or a group of workers that creates a risk to health and safety.”

It is difficult to see that this definition applies to the relationships between workers and customers due to the requirement for repetition however it may be possible.  More likely the client/worker relationship may involve harassment but clarity on how workplace harassment is determined is more difficult.  Sexual harassment is discussed in the SWA guide:

“The type of behaviour occurring may need to be determined to develop an appropriate response. For example, if the behaviour involves physical violence or what appears to be unlawful discrimination or sexual harassment, whether it is repeated or not, it will require a different response to workplace bullying.” (page 17)

Given that the issue of “incivility” has been gaining ground as a workplace psychosocial hazard, it may be a useful to consider this in client/worker relationships.  However harassment at work may involve stalking and cyberbullying.  This mess of potential workplace hazards makes it even more important for surveys like the one conducted with young workers to be very clear on what is being asked so that the responses address the intent of the question.  The survey question above on workplace bullying is unhelpful.

Incident Reporting

Another of the findings is

“Health & safety issues and workplace injury or illness are underreported. 1 in 3 young people who sustained workplace injuries or illnesses did not report them to their boss or supervisor. When asked to perform an unsafe task more than half will do it rather than raise it with their boss or supervisor. Young people reported fear of retaliation – such as losing their shifts or not having their contracts renewed – and fear that health & safety issues or workplace injuries or illnesses would not be taken seriously by their employer. Taking action to report an incident is seen as an extraordinary course of action, rather than the commonplace response to hazards.”

Underreporting of injuries is a perennial problems at all levels of any workplace.  If you report an injury, you are seen as careless, unthinking and/or untrustworthy and a failure.  You feel like you made a mistake and that it is your fault.  Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t but that should not be a relevant consideration in most OHS circumstances.  The negative shameful feelings are most likely to appear in an organisation that does not understand their workers and their work practices.  The managerial focus is likely to be on production outcomes, or deadlines, rather than on the quality of the work or the safety of their workers.  Yet it is the managers and employers who are in charge of managing those deadlines and resourcing the production process.

It may sound naive but a production urgency in any work process is indicative of poor planning and poor preparation.  Such a situation increases a range of business risks, including the encouragement the sacrifice usual safety practices.  Workers should take responsibility for their actions but that is different from accepting the blame.

Some companies have instigated alternative incident reporting measures where an anonymous report can be sent to a senior supervisor if the incident report is discouraged, or not attended to, at the level of line managers and supervisors.  Such systems are well-intentioned but only operate in industries or companies where there is a level of organisational maturity that can guarantee no repercussions on the reporter.  This situation remains rare.

Incident reports are an important element of OHS but they are seen more as generators of unnecessary work instead of an opportunity to improve.  This fear of being seen as a failure is a powerful emotion with which OHS needs to contend.

Refusing unsafe work

The report shows that almost 56% of young workers asked to perform unsafe work did so and that the remainder raised their safety concerns with a supervisor.  The report gives emphasis to the first of the statistics but the statistics can be read positively as the number of workers raising concerns is considerably higher than one would expect.  It would wonderful if this level of safety awareness was representative of the whole young workforce.  Although the survey is not confined to trade union members as earlier surveys were, the level of safety awareness in the respondents is likely to be higher due to the manner the survey was conducted.

The statistics also do not indicate what the consequences were for those who raised safety concerns.  Two respondents quoted say they were relocated and the issue remained and the other says they were fired (page 8)

Mental Health

Teenage can be a stressful time of transition into adulthood and, in many ways, work is an established path to progressing that maturity.  The move from school to work can be equally disorienting as the daytime rules of one’s life over the last twelve or so years disappear, change or are tweaked.  It is understandable that new work experiences may generate mental health issues and that relationship and family pressures may impinge on the workplace.

However, employers who target young workers are well aware of this transition and should have detailed and strong managerial processes to ensure that the young worker works well in their first job but are also set up for the rest of their working life.  It may feel okay to discuss personal issue with a teacher you have known for over a decade or a parent you have known all your life but how do you talk about personal issues with your boss or manager?  It can be a daunting experience but shouldn’t be.

According the Young Workers’ report

“Mental Health issues related to work are not correctly understood and dealt with as workplace health issues for which employers have responsibilities. Starting work is a significant developmental milestone for young people, but if the experience comes with stressors related to mental health its many benefits are undermined. Young people reported self-censoring the injury as they weren’t sure work-related mental health issues were valid workplace health issues, or they felt their employer would not see their issues as valid. Young people also cited precarious work, either through casual or temporary contract employment, as a trigger for stress and anxiety.” (page 3)

Older OHS professionals should take some responsibility for young workers being unsure of whether mental health is a valid workplace issue.  The OHS profession has neglected workplace psychosocial hazards for decades and still remains unsure about how to incorporate them into their safety management systems.  Unless mental health issues manifest themselves in visible ways, they remain largely invisible to employers, showing a fundamental misunderstanding on the psychology of workers.  (This week is Mental Health Week in Australia which is campaigning on the mental health of youth, so there is likely to be some good advice in the press.)

The other issues raised – precarious work, etc – are likely to get some attention through the Labour Hire report that is currently awaiting release from the Victorian Government and the inquiry into WorkSafe Victoria’s enforcement strategies.  Similar inquiries have occurred in other Australian States and will strengthen the calls for better interventions and additional funding.  And, of course, there is the ongoing broad concerns over pay rates and safety conditions in a broad range of Australian workplaces like 7Eleven and others.

Sexual Harassment

The issue of sexual harassment was touched on above but one of the report’s findings addressed this issue specifically.

“Young people, particularly young women, report sexual harassment in the workplace is commonplace, unaddressed and preventable. Young people and particularly young women receive it from all directions – customers, bosses or supervisors and co-workers. Young women reported a normalisation of sexual harassment in the workplace, citing it as an everyday occurrence that was treated by employers as a ‘non-issue’. They also reported being placed in unsafe work situations which resulted in sexual harassment, such as working alone early in the morning or late in the evening.”

Sexual harassment, dignity, respect, objectification and discrimination are broad social issues that are being addressed in many ways.  The workplace is part of society so there is some degree of overlap but the solutions to these concerns will not come through occupational health and safety but OHS can stop these social issues becoming worse through safety culture and organisational improvements.

OHS already has form in addressing the hazards identified in the last sentence in the quote above. No worker should be placed in a position of risk whether that is in the context of being alone or unsupervised.  OHS regulators have long had Guidances and Codes about these risks but they have often been ignored as soon as the control measure includes additional cost or disruption, such as is likely to occur when buddying up or adjusting a roster to give safety equal or higher priority to productivity.

Recommendations

The Young Workers Centre has called on an improved high school curriculum on workplace hazards.  Such calls have been made repeatedly by a range of OHS advocates for decades and they have rarely been taken up for several reasons including that the curriculum is already full. Curricula, in Government Schools at least, are determined by the various Departments of Education so this is where the major lobbying should be aimed.  Schools are unlikely to give workplace bullying much attention when they need to address school- and cyber-bullying and school bullying programs are entrenched in many educational areas.

The Centre recommends

“Sexual harassment in the workplace must be specifically defined and recognised as a workplace health & safety issue by WorkSafe and other government bodies.”

This recommendation illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of sexual harassment.  As mentioned above sexual harassment is a consequence of a broad range of social and workplace factors that have existed for decades and will require a broad social movement.  Trade unions have a tendency to believe that regulations can solve all the problems but regulation can only go so far, particularly on issues that may require generational change.

The trade union agenda may be more obvious when the rest of the recommendation is considered:

“State and federal governments must collect data on sexual harassment and gender-based violence in the
workplace so that resources for prevention are correctly allocated. The introduction of recognised Women’s Advocates in the workplace will raise the profile of sexual harassment as a workplace issue at the workplace level. Advocates would be entitled to training on gendered workplace health & safety issues and recognised as participants in consultation processes alongside other representatives.” (page 13)

Governments are already collecting what data is available but as with all workplace data, particularly if it is self-reporting, it is unreliable.  The call for sexual harassment data collection will face the same under-reporting problem of more traditional injuries that the survey identified.  There are also some lessons to be learnt by the Fair Work Commission’s bullying data which indicates that workplace bullying may not be as big an issue as some advocate or expected.

The call for “recognised Women’s Advocates” seems like a clear call for a different type of health and safety representative (HSR) with regulated training requirements.  And why “recognised”?  Recognised by whom?  If sexual harassment is such a workplace issue, cannot this be handled with the cooperation of the current HSRs?  If not, then the training of HSRs needs a substantial revision to accommodate this new generation of psychosocial workplace hazards.

Other recommendations include the introduction of

“…. a bullying code to improve employer [OHS] compliance …”

This is a surprising recommendation in some ways as trade unions know that Codes of Practice are just codes almost like the Pirates’ Code – “more a set of guidelines”.  The Victorian trade union movement has been grumbling about the lack of a bullying code of practice ever since the employer advocates demanded that what was intended to be the first bullying code earlier this century was “downgraded” to guidelines and has remained that way ever since.

The Young Workers Centre also calls for an incident reporting system that supports anonymity.  How is one expected to report a workplace bullying incident without identifying the bullied party?  Is a WorkSafe inspector really expected to enter a workplace to investigate a bullying accusation from an anonymous report?

The only information that has been made available about this research to date is a fifteen page report which is not available publicly at the time of writing.  It is hoped that the Young Workers Health & Safety Snapshot is just that, a snapshot, and that a more detailed body of research work and analysis is available and that this will be publicly available.  This detail should be able to provide clarity on young worker perspectives and the realities in which they work, that is, the legitimacy of the perceptions.

The research should also provide justification for the recommendations which at the moment are under developed and seem to relate more to broader trade union safety campaigns than to the young worker survey responses.

As a contribution to the safety discussions in National Safety Month and Mental Health Week, it is useful but could have been so much more.

Kevin Jones

October is National Safety Month in Australia and episode 5 of the Cabbage Salad and Safety podcast discusses a range of topics to mirror the diversity of National Safety Month.

Siobhan Flores-Walsh and myself talk about:

• Conferences
• Culture
• Gender in Safety
• Mental Health
• Simple Safety vs Complex Safety
• Innovation
• Marketing and social media

The Gender in Safety conversation is one that I intend to expand upon in the coming weeks and is useful to notion relation to the increasing number of “women in safety”- type events.

This podcast is a mixed bag but I am interested in hearing your thought on the podcast and the topics it contains so post a comment here or email me.

Kevin Jones

Recently the Victorian Women Lawyers conducted a seminar into the outcomes of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence.  SafetyAtWorkBlog attended even though the topic seems, initially, to have a tenuous link to occupational health and safety (OHS).  Family violence is relevant to OHS through its influence on workplace mental ill-health, productivity and the need for cultural change.

The guest speakers included Rob Hulls, Rosie Batty, and Antoinette Braybrook (pictured).

Progress needs Trust

Batty stated early in the seminar that we are a “victim-blaming society”where victims do not know who they can trust and therefore hesitate to raise issues of abuse or injustice.  The importance of trust in establishing a functional workplace culture has been discussed elsewhere.  Raising issues with managers or authorities is a crucial element of OHS law based on the assumption that the issues will be taken seriously and be controlled to some degree; an assumption that varies with each workplace.

Batty also said that

“unless we see perpetrators being held accountable, why would you want to come forward and expose yourself, be vulnerable and unsafe?”

Accountability is a crucial element of establishing and maintaining a suitable workplace safety culture as reinforces fairness and justice.

Justice

Rob Hulls, a former Minister for Workcover and now the Director of RMIT University’s Centre for Innovative Justice, addressed the issue of perpetrator accountability (readers may want to listen to a podcast on this issue) with echoes to the OHS principle of implementing higher orders of control with the intention of eliminating the hazard.  Violence prevention does not fit the OHS hierarchy of controls but the moral basis is the same – to eliminate harm.

Hulls also promoted the importance of a holistic approach in the criminal justice system with many of his comments sounding similar to those advocating that workplace safety be managed and approached “differently”.  In each situation, people are calling for a rethink of the way we deal with people because, primarily, the old ways are behind society’s current expectations.

Given his role at RMIT, it should be no surprise that Hulls mentioned restorative justice, a mechanism that is underutilised in workplaces but continues to have great potential.  Hulls repeatedly mentioned “therapeutic restorative justice” as if restorative justice needs an additional context to clarify its intention.  He went on to explain that the retribution sought through the current justice system is an indication of its outdated structure.

Rob Hulls made one statement about a shocking reporting of crime statistic that highlighted a ratio that may be worth investigating in the workplace:

“[in relation to sexual violence] did you know that only one in one hundred victims of sexual assault end up reporting to police, being believed, going through committal, going through trial, and resulting in a conviction against the perpetrator?”

This critique of the structure of the justice system shows how the system deters victims reporting incidents due to its complexity and provides opportunity and benefits for the perpetrator to avoid punishment.  Many company OHS Issue Resolution policies and processes may have a similar deterrence on the reporting of workplace incidents and may be due for review as such processes contribute to natural justice, accountability and the reinforcement of trust in a suitable and productive workplace culture.

Gender and Work

There was less discussion about gender as expected, primarily, because as Batty said at the start of the seminar, family violence is a genderised issue that overwhelmingly victimises more women and children than men.  The figures are undeniable but who is responsible for the social change required is more difficult to discern.

Rosie Batty said that the violence will not stop until men choose to stop.  This is true but needs to acknowledge that this will take a long term, even generational, change.  Any change based on a single strategy will be a long one but few issues have single causes or single controls as workplace investigations have shown.

Michael Flood of the University of Wollongong recently wrote that

“Violence prevention efforts often have focused on changing men’s attitudes, rather than also seeking to transform structural and institutional inequalities.”

Flood focuses on the criminal justice system but acknowledges sporting groups and workplaces.  More attention to family violence is required at workplace level.  The violence may not occur at work but the ramifications of it does, and not only in presenteeism and poor productivity.  If the worker is in a safety critical position, for instance, the risks to others are increased.

Business owners are often aware of the socio-economic context of their business – who buys products, the cost of labour, regulations, the cost of transport etc – but needs to be just as aware of the socio-economic context of its workforce.  Family violence may never encroach on one’s workforce but it must be acknowledged as a potentiality as it be one of the factors contributing to other OHS issues.  This is a major reason why incident investigations need to be more than a simple cause-and-effect review that shows the worker did the wrong thing.

Such investigations also provide a better understanding of the type of culture a workplace has.  The investigations themselves and how the findings are addressed also contribute to the culture and the effective governance of the business.

Family violence rarely manifests at work but the pain, distraction and mental stress does and businesses need to have appropriate measures in place for what could be an uncomfortable, but necessary, conversation.  It needs to have the resources or networks to back up whatever action is required for the worker’s benefit.

All of the discussion about the social context of family violence should not forget the economic realities that both perpetrators and victims are likely to continue to work during any journey through the justice system and that work relations may become fragile as a result.  These relationships will have OHS impacts and will test OHS and human resource processes and resources. OHS professionals and business owners need to be ready.

Kevin Jones

*Michael Flood (2015) Work with men to end violence against women: a critical stocktake, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17:sup2, 159-176,

I once had to stop a potential fight on a construction site between a works supervisor and a safety professional.  The verbal abuse and niggling occurred for several minutes before the men’s chest were inflated like roosters and it was at this point I stepped in to diffuse the situation by asking some questions as…

Kirstin Ferguson has been an amazing advocate for occupational health and safety (OHS), good governance, Board responsibility, and gender diversity.  She is receiving a great deal of media attention lately for her Celebrating Women campaign on social media. Ferguson has inspired, and been inspired by, many people in the OHS profession in Australia and is an example of how OHS blends with issues of leadership and governance in a way that is very different from the Trojan Horse analogy recently discussed by John Green.

On March 8 2017 Australia’s ABC Radio in Australia broadcast an interview with Ferguson about the campaign.  Ferguson said that part of the purpose of the campaign, which was only thought up over the recent Christmas break and has been evolving, was to give an opportunity to speak, or afford some recognition, to women who have no social media profile or at least minimal online presence.

Discussion about gender in the workplace peaks each year around International Women’s Day on March 8.  Occasionally there is renewed localised interest when an issue pops up but the issue of gender permeates our thoughts, our planning and our conduct all the time.

Recently, SafetyAtWorkBlog had the chance to ask some questions about gender and diversity and the relevance to the workplace and the occupational health and safety (OHS) profession to Alena Titterton (pictured above), a fascinating workplace relations lawyer with the Australian offices of Clyde & Co.

Gender diversity seems to be more prominent than diversity generally.  Should gender diversity be given priority over, or be separated from, other categories such as ethnicity or sexuality?

Recently Huffington Post Australia posted a video about male suicides called “Men are killing themselves to be real men”.  Many of the speakers talked about their experiences at work or with work.  The video is highly recommended.

SafetyAtWorkBlog had the opportunity to talk with the Associate Video Editor, Emily Verdouw. Below is an edited transcript.

On 6 June 2017, headspace, the common name for the National Youth Mental Health Foundation which is funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Health, launched its latest campaign on the mental health of young men, in this instance, and the importance that Fathers can play in starting conversations with their sons.  It is a worthy campaign but one that fails to consider the role of work.

One online news site in Australia has suggested that sexual harassment is an occupational health and safety (OHS) issue.  At first blush, it should be.  Sexual harassment can create mental ill-health and can certainly be harmful. But from the early days of discussions about workplace bullying and occupational violence in Australia, sexual harassment has been consciously excluded from OHS.

Is It or Isn’t It?

Some of the best discussion on bullying, harassment and violence was written by Dr Clare Mayhew for the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2000.  These included a practical handbook on prevention. (It’s peculiar that some of the most perceptive works on OHS occur outside the OHS profession.  Well perhaps not so surprising.)  In the handbook, Mayhew points out that harassment has always been an element of workplace bullying but excludes sexual harassment from her discussion:

“The Australian Institution of Criminology believes that prevention, rather than post-incident reaction, is the key to improved outcomes. However, the handbook needs to be adapted specifically to each organisation for best results. The discussions exclude activity that could be described as sexual harassment, which is extensively dealt with elsewhere.” (page 1)

This position is reflective of the OHS literature yet, on reflection, this position may have been wrong for it contributed to a fractured approach to managing workplace psychosocial hazards. 

Being International Women’s Day, the media is awash with articles about pay rates, gender equality and sexual harassment.  One of those articles is written by Sarah Ralph of Norton Rose Fullbright. Ralph provides a good summary of the current gender issues and recent media attention (may require registration but it’s free).  She makes several recommendations for how to reduce the risk of sexual harassment and unwanted media attention.  Below those recommendations are looked at from the occupational health and safety (OHS) perspective to see how OHS can help reduce the psychological harm.

Culture: It is critical that from the top down, the workplace culture does not support sexual harassment, bullying or discrimination. Further, the culture should encourage employees to report inappropriate behaviour and foster confidence that if inappropriate behaviour occurs, it will be properly investigated and the person engaging in the conduct appropriately dealt with.

There is an assumption in OHS legislation that incident reports will be seen as constructive criticisms and acted upon.  That was never the reality.  The lack of reporting is even worse when the issue is not a physical or traditional hazard but one that involves the mental health of a worker, or personal psychological harm, or that goes the impression of personal weakness.

An organisational culture must include the ability to report incidents without fear of criticism.  It must also guarantee that incidents are investigated promptly, thoroughly and fairly, and that the findings are communicated to the effected worker(s).  Watch for increased calls for restorative justice in the context of resolving sexual harassment issues and strengthening a workplace culture.

Policies: Policies must not only exist, they must clearly set out the standards of accepted behaviour and employees must have ready access to these polices and know that they will be followed and enforced.

Policies are favorite topics for legislators and lawyers, partly, because such documents provide a point in time for reference when things go wrong.  They set the boundaries for workplace behaviours but are usually seen as showing ideals rather than practices, words rather than actions. To take an OHS concept, these can be seen as “lag” documents.

The critical part of Ralph’s recommendations are the last three words – “followed and enforced”.  Following and enforcing policies equitably throughout the entire workforce’s is the “lead” action – enforcement is on a pan infringement that has already happened, but the outcome is intended for the future.  The process applied must be aimed at future benefit as well as present satisfaction.

Training:Training about workplace behaviour must occur at all levels – from the Board, to senior management and all employees. The training should be real and engaging, using examples, case studies and questions to test knowledge and understanding. The training should be tailored for, and targeted at, the particular audience. The training should be mandatory, documented and regularly refreshed.

Training is always seen as putting people in a room and talking to them, with them, if you’re lucky.  Even though, training on sexual harassment, bullying etc is mandatory, my experience is that those managers and people who do not believe the issues relate to them, don’t participate.  This is like many fire drills where executives refuse to participate because the meeting they are intending is far more important than practicing safety.

The best “training” on sexual harassment and respect comes from seeing inappropriate actions in the workplace being called out when they happen, or very shortly after.  The actions of ethical bystanders are enormously powerful, especially when done in an active working environment.  However, this must be done in an appropriate manner so that other tensions are not generated inadvertently and that all parties understand the intervention was fair.

Next time you see inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, instead of wondering why someone said or did what they did, perhaps ask why everyone who saw the incident did nothing.  This will reveal the type of workplace culture your company has.

Response: Being prepared to deal with allegations of sexual harassment can be critical for businesses, now more than ever. Managing the initial complaint, including dealing with the victim and the respondent are critical first issues. Where the allegations get into the public domain, other strategic planning issues such as legal professional privilege, advising Boards and stakeholders and media management/public relations can all impact on reputational risks and any future litigation.

OHS laws have long included “issue resolution procedures”.  Sadly, these have usually been structured to include the involvement of Health and Safety Representatives (HSRs) and, as most workplaces no longer have HSRs, these procedures and obligations are overlooked and dismissed as irrelevant, however they remain “on the books”.  Issue resolution procedures and obligations are worth revisiting in the light of workplace mental health issues and the psychosocial harm that often results from sexual harassment.  Replace HSR with a different employee representative and these procedures could provide a pathway to resolution.

Have a look at this procedure from WorkSafe Victoria and drop out all references to HSRs and Designated Work Groups.  What remains is a process, supported by the OHS legislation, that could resolve sexual harassment problems outside of the traditional Human Resources processes.

Investigations: Conducting workplace investigations can be extremely complex, particularly when allegations might give rise to a complaint to police, or litigation against the employer for its part in the alleged misconduct. An investigation must be impartial, thorough and give confidence to the complainant and respondent that a proper process will be followed, and the outcome will be fact based.

OHS is not great at investigating workplace incident involving psychosocial hazards.  This incident investigation advice from Work Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ) belies its traditional incident approach but strip away the physical hazards and replace it with psychosocial, and the advice provides a rough process of consultation and investigation.

Investigations of psychosocial harm are often aimed at a resolution of a particular incident rather than also aiming to prevent recurrences and achieving organisational change or procedural clarity.  It is here that the OHS approach to incident investigations can really help in progressing necessary cultural change.  For instance, the WHSQ guidance states that:

“… the main objective of an investigation is prevention. A good investigation aims to establish a series of events that should have taken place and compares it to what actually happened to identify areas that need changing.” (emphasis added)

#MeToo and #TimesUp movements are at risk of petering out unless the rhetoric becomes action.  This fading is familiar to many in OHS where good intentions slide into normalcy because, largely, there is no clear management of change process.  This is changing and will change more with the entrance of the ISO45001 OHS Management Standard which includes auditable measures for management of change beyond major hazard facilities.

Many ask why OHS is getting involved in an issue that has traditionally been handled by Human Resources.  It seems that HR has not been successful in achieving organisational cultural change on sexual harassment over several decades (but then neither has OHS on a range of other issue), and the recent discussions on sexual harassment have pointed the finger at HR as being part of the problem.

OHS looks at the harm from an incident and supports employers in their duties to reduce that harm, usually by reducing or eliminating the incidents. Those subjected to sexual harassment often suffer psychological harm, so OHS is required to be involved finding solutions and reducing occurrences.  Often these individual experiences generate organisational ripples of disruption and distress, so the favoured OHS descriptor is ‘psychosocial harm.  Here is what OSHWiki says about OHS and psychosocial harm:

“Psychosocial risk management is central to occupational health and safety practice as psychosocial risks underpin every business activity. The management of psychosocial risks is about people, their health and safety status, and business and societal interests. For psychosocial risk management to be effective it is important that it is … systematic, part of normal business operations and that managers and workers assume ownership of the process.”

How can OHS NOT be involved in reducing the harm from sexual harassment?

Kevin Jones

Recently Australian media was entranced with an argument over gender politics between two Senators, David Leyonjhelm and Sarah Hanson-Young.  One of the elements in the argument concerns sexual harassment in the workplace but is the Australian Parliament a workplace like any other Australian workplace? And does this really matter?

In the aftermath of the initial argument, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said:

“David Leyonhjelm’s offensive remarks should have been withdrawn the moment they were uttered and he should have apologised. And it’s not too late for him to withdraw and apologise.

That type of language has no place in Parliament and it shouldn’t have a place in any workplace. We have to treat each other with respect, we must do that. Respect for women in particular is one of the highest priorities that we should be focused on. I just want to be very clear about this.

It is a, you know, we often talk about domestic violence and our concerns there and all the measures we’re taking to address it. I just want to say this, it’s a reminder to everybody that not all disrespecting women ends in violence against women, but that is where all violence against women begins. So you need to have respectful workplaces where we treat each other with respect. Where we disagree, we disagree in respectful language……” (emphasis added)

At the recent Scientific Meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Occupational Medicine (ANZSOM), Allison Milner stepped in for an ill Tony La Montagne and added value to his intended presentation on workplace mental health. This meeting is different from other conferences in one particular way, in relies on evidence and not marketing for its presentations.  This difference made Milner’s presentation very powerful.

Milner set the scene with a broad picture of mental health:

“1 in 5 Australians have a mental illness, which equivalates to about 1.5 million.  And over 3000 people lose their life to suicide every year, and the vast majority of these people being men.  But suicide affects far more people than those people who attempt or sadly lose their life.  It affects their work colleagues, it affects people in our community and it affects our family.”

Day 1 of the Australian Labor Party conference was fascinating but unsatisfying in terms of debate on occupational health and safety matters so I spoke with one of the many exhibitors at the conference.

Glen Poole is the CEO of the Australian Men’s Health Forum and the podcast below includes a brief discussion of the importance of men’s health and the relevance of the workplace in generating and managing workplace mental health.

Kevin Jones

The occupational health and safety (OHS) profession is being affected by demographic changes as much as any other profession. Younger people seem to have a very different expectation on how to interpret and apply OHS, and older people are tired of being lectured to, and this is putting pressure on those who organise events, seminars and conferences and those who mentor and educate in a range of ways.

Some organisations and conferences are responding by reconfiguring the provision of information away from the lecture format of an expert to a mix of communication methods. This blog has written about some of those that occurred in the last two years. These conferences are less academic than in earlier days. Rarely is a conference accompanied by a handbook of research-based conference papers; some provide no papers at all and slideshows delivered a fortnight after the event are devoid of context and next to useless.

If the best way to implement health and safety changes is through a multidisciplinary approach, surely conferences and seminars must also be multidisciplinary. An OHS conference that includes occupational hygiene, ergonomics and other sub-disciplines is not multi-disciplinary. When was the last time that you attended a conference that included health and safety experts from both the OHS and Human Resources disciplines? If we are to develop informed, rounded safety professionals and to implement research into practice, surely, we have to provide the mix of knowledge that our professionals need to apply in real world circumstances.

The HR and OHS combination is one area that needs attention but OHS and its conferences need to be even more multidisciplinary. Here is a list of subject matter experts that I want to hear from (Safety includes Health and Wellbeing):

• Safety Economist
• Safety Philosopher
• Safety Ethicist
• Safety Entrepreneur
• Safety Gender researcher

Some of these already exist but rarely get an invitation, partly because OHS is obsessed with Safety Leadership. I refuse to attend another conference that invites a speaker who has been to the Antarctic, or survived a similar extreme experience, and seems to think that this insight helps manage health and safety in a small factory in an outer-suburban industrial estate. Too often conferences purchase someone from a Speaker’s Bureau who have the keyword “Leadership” in their listing. Instead we should be looking for the keyword of “Workplace Safety”. But speakers in this category are not offered. We should ask why this is.

The absence of those specialists listed above is a problem but one that is solvable. If these people do not exist, we should be encouraging people to enter these areas of study. Some OHS organisations offer grants for OHS research but much of this research remains within the narrow OHS interpretation. Grants and other encouragement should be offered to non-OHS disciplines.

Imagine if OHS supported an analysis of the economics of OHS. Does OHS save a company any money, really? We think it does, but we are not sure. We should know by now.

Imagine if OHS developed a philosopher who was equally knowledgeable in OHS as they were in Socrates, Aristotle, de Botton, and others. Preserving life and health has a moral foundation but does OHS reinforce this morality or weaken it?

Imagine if OHS was able to identify how the level of risk varies in relation to the sex and gender of the worker or the demographics of a workplace or of a company. Gender is a neutral term that includes male, female and others. Does gender affect how OHS is interpreted and how it is implemented? The gender context of Australian workplaces was closely examined in 1984 by Anne Game and Rosemary Pringle but there is a desperate need for an update for this century.

Part of the persistence of old models of information sharing is that the OHS profession quite often focuses too much on itself rather than on the issue that it was intended to address. The focus of this blog is on workplace safety in its broadest sense. The OHS profession needs to look beyond its membership to what the members do, what values they apply and whether the advice furthers Safety or just safety management. Provan’s research on safety clutter and Gregory Smith’s Paper Safe are indications of some self-analysis by the safety profession, but the OHS profession would benefit from being challenged on its own ethics, its philosophy, its gender structure, and its economic assumptions.

Such challenges may generate heated debate, arguments, bruised egos, embarrassment, uncertainty and disruption but re-evaluation of core beliefs and values usually leads to improvement and OHS professes to be about continuous improvement. Continuous improvement should lead to enlightenment, but this only comes from an expansive view of the world of work, and an expansive view needs to be worked on.

Kevin Jones

Last week I mentioned two work-related films at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Tomorrow’s Castlemaine Documentary Film Festival is screening Happy Sad Man a film about the mental health of Australian men. There is an overlap with work-related mental health, especially farmers, so I’ve bought my ticket.

Kevin Jones

2019 was always going to be a Year of Mental Health for Australians as there are various official inquiries and investigations occurring. Last week alone, the Royal Commission into Mental Health Systems focused on suicide prevention. This overlapped with the National Suicide Prevention Conference (NSPC) and on Friday one of Australia’s National Mental Health Commissioners, Lucinda Brogden, spoke at a VIOSH 40th anniversary seminar.

The “evidence” of Lived Experience dominated the Conference and has been a regular feature of the Royal Commission, but the much more robust evidence of work-related mental health has also been on show. This evidence supports the harm prevention strategies advocated by occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals, researchers and Safe Work Australia and continues its peer-reviewed strength, even if the audience seems less than it should be.

There are strong parallels between the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces and others addressing workplace issues, such as the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental and the Productivity Commission’s mental health inquiry, but there is also a connection to the Royal Commission into Banking and Financial Services which has focused the minds of some of Australia’s corporation s and leaders into examining their own workplace cultures and, for some, to reassess the role and application of capitalism.

This is going to become even more of a critical activity as the National Sexual Harassment Inquiry completes its report prior to its release in the first month or two of 2020.

Cultural analysis, and change, is often best undertaken first in a microcosm or specific social context. The experiences of sexual harassment of rural women in Australia is one such context, a context examined in detail by Dr Skye Saunders in her book “Whispers from the Bush“.

Australia’s trade union movement has been at the forefront of many of the occupational health and safety (OHS) changes, especially workplace stress and bullying. Other than Industrial Manslaughter laws, its most recent campaign targeted to a workplace hazard has revolved around work-related gendered violence. Last week WorkSafe Victoria released a guide to employers on “work-related gendered violence including sexual harassment”. The advice in this guide is good but does not go far enough and is less helpful than it could have been.

“Coercive control” is getting attention in New South Wales in relation to domestic violence but there are similarities to workplace behaviours such as sexual harassment and bullying.

The Chief Psychiatrist of Victoria’s “guideline and practice resource: family violence” says

“Family violence is understood as a pattern of repeated and
coercive control, aiming to control another person’s thoughts, feelings and actions.”

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