The last ten years have clearly seen the lifting of the taboo around mental health, including mental well-being in the workplace and, more generally, mental health in society and across many demographics. There is more to do, but the change has been demonstrable. The 2017 Thriving at Work Stevenson/Farmer review on mental health and employees put the cost of poor … Read More
Let’s Hope this Post Helps You Sleep
It’s not every health and safety blog post that links Baader-Meinhof, Inspector Morse and has the express intent of helping you sleep, but this one does. The post’s genesis is in the seeming deluge of articles on driver safety over the past few weeks. Driver safety is an extremely important topic with the focus here being on driving for work … Read More
Megatrends, Wellness and Safety
Buried in our Halloween post were some wellness and safety ideas that came out of the latest Euromonitor International megatrends analysis and which deserve expansion here. Firstly, the megatrends analysis. What is it? It’s a lifestyle survey of 1,000+ people in each of 40 countries, conducted annually and aimed at identifying the megatrends shaping consumer markets. These megatrends are driven … Read More
Halloween, Megatrends and Wellness
It’s Halloween! The day of ghosts and ghouls, apple-bobbing and trick or treating. It’s actually ‘New Year’s Eve’ from ancient Celtic times and a day when the worlds of the dead and the alive came together, a day when the Druids (the Celtic Priests) were better able to predict the future because of the presence of the dead. The origins … Read More
Why Cycle to Work Day is Important for Workplace Safety
Thursday 8th August is Cycle to Work Day in the UK. What has this got to do with safety in the workplace? Quite a lot actually. A 2018 Decathlon survey of more than 7,600 UK adults found that only 7% currently cycle to work. For the reader musing that you’re more likely to get killed cycling to work than through … Read More
Why Keeping People Safe Improves Business Performance
Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week. Of course, it’s an on-going issue within society as well as the workplace so we thought we’d touch on stress here within the context of changing the health and safety culture within an organisation. And, yes, we’ll get to the reciprocity of safety and business performance. We’ve covered stress in the workplace extensively … Read More
How Health and Safety Innovations Can Reduce Mental Health Illnesses
At best, poor mental health is costing the UK economy the equivalent of 4% of GDP, or close to the annual spend on education. At worst, it’s killing us. As reported in the HSE provisional statistics for 2016/17, ‘work-related stress, depression or anxiety cases (new or longstanding)’ has now become the UK’s biggest work-related illness, overtaking musculoskeletal disorder cases. The … Read More
Mental Health – You Own It! Or Do You?
2017 saw the publication of Thriving at work: The Stevenson/Farmer review of mental health and employers and, with it, the staggering estimate that the annual cost of poor mental health to the economy as a whole in the UK is between £74B and £99B. That’s more than £1,200 per capita, around 4% of GDP, twice the spend on defence and … Read More
Stress, Stress and More Work-Related Stress
The HSE figures for 2016/17 are out and the headline is that “for the first time, stress became the UK’s biggest work-related illness, overtaking musculoskeletal disorder cases.” The HSE attribute an annual cost to the UK economy of £14.9B from all work-related injuries and ill-health with around 65% of the total arising from new cases of ill-health. These costs include … Read More
It’s Official!! Your Employees Are At Greater Risk Than Your Contractors.
At the beginning of last month we posed the question, “Are Employees Really Safer than Contractors?” Anecdotally it seemed to be the case and the HSE fatality stats for 2015/16 supported the statement. On the face of it. However, digging into the data and removing the agriculture sector yielded a different picture, although an inclusive one due to what appeared … Read More
Work Related Stress – What About Health and Safety Professionals?
In our last post we put corporate governance in the spotlight and started to explore whether or not British companies are taking health and safety seriously enough at board level. Two very interesting branches came out of that post. Firstly, does the current state of corporate governance explain why the fatality rate for employees is higher than that for contractors … Read More
