Importance Of Healthy Workplace, Health And Safety Representative, Employer-Employee Consultation, Safety Visits, And Psychosocial Workplace Hazards

Definition of a Healthy Workplace

According to the definition provided by The World Health Organisation, a healthy workplace is that where employees, as well as employer, coordinate with each other to develop a continental improvement process in order to promote and protect safety, health, and well-being of the workers of the organization and to maintain the sustainability of the workplace. In different words, a healthy workplace can be understood as a workplace that keeps the safety and health of workers in consideration and ensures the fulfillment of the same. There are many benefits of healthy workers, out of which the two important ones are as:-

1. Productivity: – A healthy worker is three times more productive in comparison to an unhealthy employee. Productivity is something that is far significant for any organization. Apart from the employer, productivity is always a concern for the individual workers too as the same affect them economically as well as mentally. Therefore, this would not be wrong to state that a healthy worker can focus on productivity and can better serve his/her employment (Queensland Government, 2018).
2. A number of complaints: – Another benefit of having healthy employees is that the number of safety claims reduces. A healthy employee remains satisfied with his/her employer. The downfall in the number of compliant proves beneficial, for the organization. In addition to this, a healthy worker takes fewer leaves in compare to the unsafe/unhealthy worker and is able to pay full concentration to his/her work (healthyworkers.gov.au, 2018).

Health And Wellness Initiative At Work: – Creation and development of workplace wellness policies are one of the best modes of health and wellness initiative. Such policies state the vision of the company and inform the employees that what their organization thinks of safety and health of employees (kareliahealth.com, 2018). Such policies define the duties of the employer, the right of employees and the expectation of organization from the employees.  

Question 2

A health and safety representative is a person who represents a group of a worker in the matters related to workplace health and safety. Work Health and Safety Act 2012 is the core legislation that defines functions and powers of such representative. Sub-division 5 of the subjective act identifies the powers of a Health and Safety Representative. According to section 68 of the act such representative has power:-

• To monitor the steps taken by the person conducting the respective business, in relation to the compliance of this act.
• To held an investigation of the complaints related to workplace health and safety received from the members of the work group.
• To enquire the things and activities of an organization that can be held dangerous for the workers of the relevant workgroup (sa.gov.au, 2018)

In order to fulfill the powers and functions described above, a health and safety representative also may use the following powers:-

• Such representative can access and inspect the whole workplace or part thereof where a worker of the workgroup works, after giving a reasonable notice.
• Accompany an inspector while an inspection. Such accompanying can be done for the whole workplace or a part thereof where the worker of workplace works.
• Can attend an interview conducting between the worker and an inspector or between a worker and the person conducting business, with the consent of the worker representing by such representative.
• Can request for the establishment of a health and safety committee

All the aforementioned powers are secondary that a health and safety representative can use to give the effect to his/her primary powers and functions.

Question 3

As the name implies, an employer-employee consultation is a two-way communication that happens between employer and employee (Hughes and Ferrett, 2015). The purpose behind such consultation is to listen to the concerns of each other and to resolve the same with the help of mutual friendly discussion.

There are many circumstances when consultation is required in an organization. For person conducting business activities, it is required to conduct a consultation while:-

• Identifying and assessing the risk and hazards to health and safety arising out of work carried out or to be carried out at a workplace.
• Deciding the ways to minimize those risks and hazards.
• Introducing any changes that may affect the health and safety of the workers.
• Making decisions about the effectiveness of the facility for the wellness of workers (Safe Work Australia, 2018b).

Aforesaid are some of the examples of the matters in relation to which consultation should take place. However, if the person conducting business activities think fit and required then he/she can also plan a consultation for other matters.

Conducting a consultation is not enough but the same also must be effective. An effective consultation is that where the employer asks the expectation of employees, listen to their concern and share the prospective plans with the same. An employer must provide an employee reasonable opportunity to express his/her views and to contribute to the development of plan and policies. By taking the views of employees in consideration, an effective consultation can take place.

A consultation can occur in many ways. Regular meetings can prove an effective way of consultation. In this mode, employer and employee meet at the specified gap of time and discuss the concerns with each other. Toolbox Talks is another way of consultation. It is a kind of informal meeting of 15-20 minutes that is focused on the safety aspects with respect to a specific job (Copeland, 2018). Such kind of meeting includes the topics related to workplace hazard and safety practices.

Health and Wellness Initiative at Work

Question 4

Safety visits are the activities that the manager does in order to check out the level of risk involved at a workplace and to check that whether the safety measured decided by the organization are properly working or not. In order to make a safety visit success, such manager needs to keep some factors in consideration. These factors are also known as learning for the managers who conduct safety visits.

Firstly they should plan their visits and motive of the visit must be clear to them. Before going on a site, they must be sure about the topics that they are going to review. They should review that what is going on at the workplace in order to plan some more auditing opportunities (Hopkins, 2011). By doing so, they would be able to ask the people for an explanation about their manner of working. Further, the behavior of employees and other managers is an important thing to take into mind. Visitors must review the same because that can be helpful for them to develop further question-answer session.

They must check out some controls that should be in place in order to prevent the dangerous events. Before going on a safety visit, it is required at the end of a manager to review and study the last occupational safety incidents so he/she may be able to check that whether the decided safety lessons have been transferred to the employees or not (Do Research, 2018). The purpose of such visit is to ensure that the health and safety measure and process are into place.

The most important lesson for the manager conducting a safety visit is to not let the same being a mud monitoring. At least one of the visitors should be instructed to review the working process using by the workers in order to audit mistakes and to guide the workers with the correct procedure.

In conclusion, this is to state that managers who are conducting a safety visit must be aware of the purpose of such a visit and must ensure fulfillment of the same in every best possible manner.

Question 5

Psychosocial workplace hazards are those risks that have an impact on the mind of employees. Such kinds of hazards are way much related to the mental health of employees. Psychosocial workplace hazards are of many types (OHS Body of Knowledge, 2012). What four psychosocial workplace hazards can be there in a retail environment, what are their possibilities and the justification behind such possibilities are mentioned in the following matrix.

Title of risk	Likelihood	Impact	Category	Reasoning
Work-Related Mental Stress	Likely	Moderate	Medium	In a retail business organization, the workers have to deal with customers directly. At the time of extreme sale or festivals, may customers visit the stores that can make a pressure on the mental health of the workers? Stress can result thereof.
Body Stressing	Likely	Moderate	Medium	In a retail environment, sometimes workers need to do more physical work for instance placing and moving heavy parcels. Although there are not so many chances of this happening yet if happen such incident can lead an issue of body stress. Back injuries, chronic pain, and bone injuries are some of the examples of body stress issue.
Driver Fatigue	Very Likely	Major	Extreme	Driver fatigue is a situation where a worker feels exhausted, feel sleepy or feel physically and mentally tired (Australian Government, 2018). This is a risk for the workers that put an adverse impact on their mental health. In a retail organization, the nature of work leads such issue. There is always consumer dealing and workers have to deal with them for 8 hours per days, therefore the risk always remains there and has a very dangerous impact.
Bullying	Unlikely	Major	Medium	A situation where one or more employees treat the other employee in a negative manner on the basis of his/her gender, marital status, race or any other such ground, is known as bullying (Fairwork Ombudsman, 2018). However in a retail organization, there is always a floor manager and cameras are also exist in a place, yet some chances are that this risk can exist. Impact of the same can lead to a very high negative result to the worker if exist.

Question 6

Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LITFR) refers to the total number of lost injuries during an accounting period, in conjunction with the total number of hours worked in that specified period. There is a particular formula to calculate LITFR, and the same is mentioned as hereunder:-

In the calculation of LITFR, the severity of the injury will not be considered. The definition of lost tome injury does not include the pre-existing terms that were not sustained during the subjective reporting period. To make the calculation easy, the number of injuries per hour is required to be multiply by one million. 

Role of Health and Safety Representative

LITFR rate is very significant for the mangers to benchmarks the occupational health and safety (OHS) performance. As the name implies, the subjective rate indicates the number of lost injuries, the same let the manager knows that how safe their workplace is.

The Workplace Injury and Disease Recording Standard provide a guide to every organization that how the same can create an easy to use the method to record the data and information related to work disease and injury. Study of LITFR is one of them.

In terms of LITFR, the best industries are service industries and the worst ones are manufacturing and processing industries. The reason behind is that in service industries such as IT, educational and legal and advisory industries, workers work in a very safe environment. They do not use any heavy plants and machinery and therefore risk of lost time injuries does not exist. On  the other side, in the industries of infrastructure, mining and manufacturing,  workers have to use high technological machinery that contain several risk and therefore there are more chances of lost time injuries in such industries. Hence they prove as worst industries in terms of LITFR.

Question 7

Rehabilitation and Returns to work co-ordinators are the people who help the employees to remain at or return to work after a work injury. As the name suggests the lead role of such people is to coordinate with the employees and help them to return to their workplaces. They are liable to coordinate among the injured employer, employee, and case manager and to develop a return to work situation for the employee.

Moving on to the roles and responsibility of such person, this is to state that following are the same:-

• Monitoring the condition of the injured worker and to check his/her capacity to return to the workplace.
• Dealing and coordination with a return to work and medical professionals.
• Preparation and implementation of return to work plan.
• Development of a measure to prevent the future possible risk and injuries.
• Identification of suitable duties (Return to work SA, 2018a)

The aforementioned roles are defined by the law. The coordinators are also responsible for the other tasks that are supplementary to their primary functions.

Many trainings are there that the rehabilitation and return to work coordinators need to do in order to be more effective in their roles. The lead training is named as certificate training. In this training, coordinators are provided with necessary resources to assist with effective communication, identifying return to work facilitators and barriers and so on.

The other training that is available for return to work coordinators is skill building session and webinars (Return to work SA, 2018b). Skill building session provides additional skills and knowledge to coordinators and makes them enable to maximize their role in the process of return to work. The webinars are focused on different terms such as how the coordinators take actions, what are the different medication effects, workplace consideration and so on.

As any training do some positive addition in the skill of a person, similarly by taking these training, return to workplace coordinator can be more effective in their job.

Question 8

Safework Australia provides guidance on the matter of safe design. The approach of safe design focuses on to minimize or eliminate the risk involves throughout the life cycle of a structure, building, vehicle or equipment.

Safe design principles is a 5 steps process to make a structure safe by integrating risk identification and assessment methods at the very first stage of designing. According to the subjective principles, designing is the most important part of every development. One needs to identify the risk involved in a development, minimizing those risk at every stage of development, applying the risk assessment methods and sharing information related to risk control with every person involved in the phase of the lifecycle (Safe Work Australia, 2018a). Taking an example of a building, this is to say that many of the risks can be involved there. For instance, the stairs of the same can be dangerously designed. This risk might be introduced to the building while constructions due to the lack of proper planning are care.

Applying the provisions of safe design, the risk could be prevented. A safe design model provides a process by using the same one can deal with the involved risk. The following process needs to be done to eliminate the risk of dangerously designed stairs:-

1. Identification of the exact issue
2. Defining the hazard and gather proper information about the same.
3. Evaluation of risk and generation of multiple solutions.
4. Select the correct solution
5. Application of the best possible solution.

By taking aforesaid steps, a person could know that what exact issue is with stairs of the building and how dangerous the same could be. After that by looking after the solutions and by applying the best solution, the risk could be dealt with and the same could be eliminated.

References

Australian Government. (2018) Body Stressing. 

Copeland, J. (2018) Toolbox Talks: Keys To Ensure Effectiveness. 

Do Research. (2018) Health and Safety: Principles, Responsibilities and Practices. 

Fairwork Ombudsman. (2018) Bullying & harassment. 

healthyworkers.gov.au. (2018) Why a Healthy Workplace?.

Hughes, P., and Ferrett, Ed. (2015) Introduction to Health and Safety at Work: for the NEBOSH National General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety. Oxon: Routledge.

kareliahealth.com. (2018) 9 Great Wellness Initiatives in the Workplace.

Legislation.sa.gov.au. (2018) Work Health and Safety Act 2012.

Queensland Government. (2018) Benefits.

Return to work SA. (2018a) Return to work coordinators.

Return to work SA. (2018b) Training.

Safe Work Australia. (2018a) Safe Design.

Safe Work Australia. (2018b) Work health and safety consultation, cooperation and coordination.