The New National Health & Safety at Work Legislation defines the Health of Workers as including their “Physical & Psychological Wellbeing”. Accordingly, all PCBU’s must give serious consideration to and develop plans for ensuring that Worker Health together with their Physical Safety in the work place is protected and monitored.
Workplace conditions can and more often than not do, affect the way in which a worker approaches their work place activities. A harmonious work place with reasonable levels of worker participation and interaction assists greatly in generating a work place environment in which the wellbeing of workers is safe guarded.
Bullying / Harassment / Violence and worker discord will in a short space of time lead to workers feeling victimised, picked on, intimidated etc, and these feelings create mental instability.
Mental instability in its simplest form appears in all workers from time to time in a human trait known as “Inadvertence” and this state of mind leads inevitably to accidents and near misses which can in some cases also result in serious illness or even death especially when human inadvertence plays a role in persons working with moving plant & machinery.
Therefore, the better the work place conditions and the more stable the minds of our staff the more likely the business is to avoid such incidents.
PCBU’s MUST measure worker satisfaction and wellbeing, it is a normal an necessary part of a holistic approach to Risk Management in the workplace and assessing physical risk is myopic (short sightedness) which leads to less effective controls being placed on hazards in the work place especially when those hazards include the “man/machine interface.”
RMF Consulting can assist you and your staff with training and awareness sessions on wellbeing and on the way in which risk management must include not only consultation with workers as required by the new legislation but also with creative cost effective ways to engage with workers, improving workplace culture.
Why not “call us today” to discuss work place culture at your workplace, “Worker satisfaction” isn’t just a clique, a worker who is happy to come to work and who goes home at night without feeling stressed and pressured by work place unrest is far more likely to buy into the business health & Safety Management processes.