Notes

Three Work Health and Safety TOPICS WE RARELY SPEAK ABOUT

WHS experts pursue numerous typical objectives and adhere to comparable rules. Whether you are a company owner, a PCBU, a Site Safety Officer, or part of my Occupational Safety Solutions group, we have specific subjects we typically handle, as well as things we hardly ever go over. It's those underlying things that I wish to concentrate on today.

Sad to say, my father passed three weeks back, and beyond the sorrow and mourning, his passing has me believing outside the boxes we usually live in. He was an excellent man, and I would've liked him to have actually had more time to buy my kids and myself, but that's not how it played out. He had a long innings, and he batted with tactical singles, noteworthy boundaries and even had actually a number of "smacked out of the premises for six" moments. But death, and specifically his death, has actually got me considering deeper concerns.

We live in complex and extremely misleading times. In the midst of this, the problems being placed on employers are increasing, not just demanding more of our resources but likewise significantly requiring compliance to frameworks of thinking we and our workers might not always agree with. We're being forced off the well-worn courses, tracks and tracks we're used to, and onto side-roads and goat tracks and into uncertain surface.

Do you as a busy individual, as I do, wrestle with managing work, workers, household and friends? Do you also find it hard at times to believe beyond the apparent and the essentials?

THREE METHODS OF DESCRIBING WHS
The WHS role can be explained clearly, drastically or with street-level bluntness:

Stated plainly ... Work Health and Safety has to do with foreseeing what can go wrong, Strategising to avoid it happening, and helping keep people safe.

Stated more dramatically ... I can metaphorically discuss the snakes of disaster that are loose in a workplace. Most people range from snakes, however safety specialists act differently. WHS needs us to expect the snake, keep it in view, know how to react, train others to do also, keep unnecessary snakes out, manage the snakes that are already inside, and prepare for the ones that are birthed every day. It's a huge job!

Mentioned bluntly ... Work Health and Safety activities are about helping entrepreneur cover their arse, abide by the law and keep their people safe.

These are the WHS components that are obvious. Let's talk about 3 subjects that don't get offered much time.

A FEW WHS ASPECTS WE DON'T TEND TO SPEAK ABOUT
At a top level, we see requirements, checks, protocols and balances. Beneath these surface behaviours, guiding principles are at work, with duty of care and due diligence leading the way. If we look even deeper, we see a prolonged range of elements, ideas, motivations and philosophies, of which, there are three I want to discuss:

1. Ethical awareness,
2. Wrestling with morality, and
3. Permitting and managing feeling,

Consider them as path guides to assist you navigate when government, circumstances, or your people require you off the well-worn paths that you are used to.

Work Health and Safety INTEGRATES ETHICS

If you've read this far, you very likely already have an operating ethical compass. You might not have actually thought much about its application in the safety context. 'Application' is what ethics is about. Ethics is the application of morality in a provided scenario. Simply put, morality is a system that tells us what is wrong and ideal, and ethics is the application of those rights and wrongs in a given circumstance. It can be fairly argued that ethics change in time, but morality is constant.

Where does this fit in the WHS context? Ethics resembles a path guide that tells you to pick up the speed, decrease, or step carefully. The virtue or morality remains in reaching the destination; ethics is worked out in arriving properly.

While many employees think it is right to comment on hazardous scenarios (morality), however not all do (ethics). Most also know it is right for them to correct a supervisor who is directing them to do something hazardous (morality), but many would not follow through on this conviction (ethics). There is often a space between morality and ethics and I have a strong suspicion that gap was narrower in my father's day.

The take-away: don't assume that morality is enough, or that the ethical behaviour seen in one work domain will likewise be evidenced in another. Efficient WHS isn't practically what is right; it's also about developing a work area where ethical behaviour is the norm. A few of the ideas that follow will assist.

Work Health and Safety IS UNAPOLOGETICALLY MORAL

We've currently pointed out that morality is the art of understanding the distinction in between ideal and wrong, even when the right thing is less advantageous. It's the ethical equivalent of having 'an individual truth' - and in a workplace safety situation, that is a catastrophe waiting to take place.

Our workers may disagree on how ideal and incorrect is chosen, but workers require to come together when it comes to WHS. It's alright for an employee to understand that their viewpoints and their morality have value, but when it comes to safety decisions, in all but the most remarkable of cases, the moral thing to do is what the legislation states to do.

What if a supervisor, a fellow employee or government authority acts, demands or manoeuvres in an immoral way? Plainly, there are times when what is legal is likewise unethical; for example, both before and throughout World War 2 the Nazi SS assembled Jewish, Polish and homosexual people for damage. They did this within the law. It might be argued they were compelled by it. Was it ethical?

The take-away for me, and possibly for you, is that something does not become ethical or immoral due to the fact that the crowd or the law says it is. These days, I am aware that individual morality varies exceptionally from person to person - perhaps more than ever in the past. Since I require to battle with the implications of a morally unclear truth, that brings a difficulty to my workplace. Clear communication and decisions will assist - but sticking my head in the sand won't.

Morality provides none people a free pass, and I reckon my dad's generation understood that much better than we do.

Work Health and Safety INCLUDES EMOTION
When it comes to emotions, there are 2 groups (or extremes) that tend to dominate. These emotions cause hesitancy and trepidation, leading employees to not speak when they should. These emotions get in the way of reliable communication, shut down open discussion and increase the probability of mistakes and risks taking place.

What are we to do? The office requires all types of personalities, so all these emotions will make a look. We need to find a way to handle emotional extremes.

My father's generation was big on personal obligation and simply "getting shit done". My generation was more interested in self-esteem and understanding ourselves within a team-oriented context. Today's young people seem to believe the world revolves around their wants, their requirements, and their fact.

Maybe there's a winning balance to be found in between, and I reckon sincerity is an excellent location to begin. A team leader can reveal the way by prefacing his comments to motivate emotional awareness and self-management. For example:

"I feel a little worried raising this, but I'm going to ..."
"Wait! Give me a minute. I'm too f 'n mad and I'm gon na state something we'll both remorse."
"I do not mind if you do 'you' at home. Heck, I do 'me' at home. When we're here, we do 'us'! Do you understand that?"

WHAT'S THE TAKE-AWAY?
Whatever the specifics of your Work Health and Safety role, understanding these 3 underpinning issues will certainly help your results. It appears to me that there is little to lose and much to acquire. Ethical awareness, the desire to wrestle with morality, and emotional responsiveness are all areas of financial investment, not cost.

As we close, you might have kept in mind that I have not even discussed a product - and I'm not going to. Today, my product silence is my way of strolling the talk. What I've shown you is so fundamental it is worthy of an undistracted focus.
Work Health and Safety
anonymous

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