In the first part of this two-part post we looked at the evidence for mental wellness suffering among those working from home. We covered the results from two recent surveys which highlighted a ‘disparity’ between the 84% of those experiencing mental health issues and the 9% of managers who were spending the majority of their time supporting mental health issues. … Read More
The Mental Health Challenges of Working from Home (part 1 of 2)
I had dinner with a really good friend a couple of weeks ago. She sat there with tears in her eyes. I know her well enough to be able to ask what was wrong and to get an honest answer. Did she have family problems? Was it something else? No, nothing specific, just “the situation”. Which made me think about … Read More
Working from Home Guidance
There have been many good, well-intentioned articles in both the print press and online over the past week about how to successfully work from home. The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday (March 17th) advocated working from 9am to 5pm to maximise overlap with colleagues and speed decision making. Google recommend creating “work” triggers for your brain such as establishing a designated … Read More
2020 Health and Safety Webinar Series
Following is the 2020 schedule for our ongoing series of health and safety webinars. Mark your calendars as appropriate. You can access/register for past/upcoming webinars via the left sidebar of this page. 12th March – Contractor Compliance, Needs Vision not Hindsight As technology advancements and global political and macro-economic trends continue to impact the worker landscape, so we’re already seeing … Read More
The Stress Tsunami
Since Christmas I’ve read two books: John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and Andrew Yang’s ‘The War on Normal People’. Steinbeck tale of the Joad’s displacement from their 1930s dust bowl farm in Oklahoma and migration to the promised land of California is probably well known to the reader. That their displacement was caused by automation and greedy landowners/big business, … Read More
The H&S (Swiss Army Knife) Manager
In the heat of the summer of 2018, we discussed how technology could become the rallying call to attract younger people into the health and safety profession. Eighteen months on we revisit the subject, but more broadly with the remit of exploring the changing role of the Health and Safety Manager. The original post coincided with SHP’s launch of New … Read More
Flexible Working and Finnish Trust
I don’t know what the commute is like in Finland but I doubt it comes close to that suffered by the majority of us in the UK. Yet, while the Finns brought the latest version of their Working Hours Act into effect on Jan 1, 2020, I spent 3 hours driving the 50 miles to Southampton last week through the … Read More
Ruminating Cows, Trojan Horses and More Reasons to be Cheerful in 2020
This is the third in the trilogy of posts taking an optimistic look at UK health and safety issues in 2020. The first focused on Brexit, the second on the role that data and technology can play in improving health and safety outcomes, while this one is all about ruminating cows and trojan horses [really? – Ed]. OK, seriously, we’ll … Read More
Mental Health – A Pinch of Optimism
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
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