Little to fear in new safety law

By MAURICE O'BRIEN*

Since yesterday, employers have been obliged to contend with the Health and Safety in Employment Act.

Many have expressed concern that the amended act lists stress and fatigue as workplace hazards that employers need to manage, and that the Employment Court has made large awards to employees found to be suffering from work-related stress.

Should employers be concerned about the change?

The short answer is that good employers have little to worry about.

The reality is that stress and fatigue have always been covered by legislation.

What the amended act does is spell this out in detail. It is an exercise in reminding people of their existing obligations and the fact that employers do have a duty of care towards their staff.

Society and the workforce in New Zealand have changed significantly in recent years.

Many businesses have to spend time and money inducting new staff and explaining the values and standards expected. It is no longer a reality to expect people to have the values that were common when we were a much more homogenous society and people lived in standard family units. Things we once took for granted must now be codified.

The amended act spells out responsibilities that previously would largely have been taken as a given by the great majority of employers and their staff.

The way we experience stress as individuals has been likened to a bucket with holes in it, in which stress is heaped.

How much individuals can cope with depends on the size of bucket they are born with. For those with small buckets, the danger of an overflowing situation is ever-present.

Clearly stress can be either work-related or come from a person's private life, through illness, relationship and financial problems, or a range of other causes.

In practice, these home problems often become work problems because performance, attendance and attitude may be affected.

The test for employers is whether or not they might reasonably be aware that such problems exist and how they should set about addressing such issues.

The answers to this are largely common sense.

Treat staff as people, not worker units; have systems and structures that enable people to tell their managers about factors that are affecting them; encourage open communication between everyone involved and set work expectations that are realistic and achievable.

The great bulk of factors causing stress are short term in nature and can often be largely solved with minor changes in working requirements or a few days of leave.

One effect of the changed legislation may be that it encourages people to speak up about things affecting their lives, and that's not a bad thing - after all, we need to know about problems before we can set about fixing them.

Employers need to have a system and an attitude that allows people to feel they can bring factors that are affecting their work performance to the attention of those to whom they report.

This should allow problems to be discussed before they escalate and have an even larger impact on the individual and the business than might otherwise be the case.

This approach is not something that will condone the actions of difficult staff, but is aimed at creating an environment in which expectations are fair to both sides.

It is important that managers realise that the great bulk of people who are in jobs want to get it right.

At Drake, we employ many people who work in environments that are outside our day-to-day control and it is our experience that employers want to do the right thing by those working under their direction.

Good staff are a valuable part of any business.

So if the amended health and safety requirements do no more than cause employers to stop, look and evaluate their systems to help and monitor their staff, then that is a great benefit.

That is something that should not be forgotten in emotional debate about penalties that are part of the act.

The possible penalties are high, but employers should not lose sight of the fact that they will lie at the end of a long and difficult process, which only the most unreasonable of employers will wish to travel.

So for the good employer, it's business as usual after a health and safety check to see if their people systems are in place and readily accessible to their staff.

* Maurice O'Brien is special projects manager at Drake International