Jennie Trinder
Hello. I’ve listened to Sidney (Professor Dekker) speak this morning and two things
struck me. He said, “people are the solution”, and they are. No organisation can function
without their people. We often talk about people being a company’s greatest asset, and
it’s certainly something we should be looking at as far as risk management goes. The
second thing he mentioned was that policies and procedures don’t give you a better safety
outcome, don’t give you a better safety culture, and he’s exactly right. This is not
something you can do from the sidelines. It’s not something you can do from a remote
area. People management is something you have to do with your people all the time. It’s
a constant thing. It’s not something you can do once and then put away. So speaking in
this context I’m going to be talking about psychosocial injuries.
Psychosocial injuries - some people will call it stress. There are certain levels of stress
everyone has in their lives; personal stress, workplace stress. From a workplace
perspective there are good stresses, there are bad stresses and we all need a certain
amount of stress to function every day. In ‘reality’, stress is something people can’t cope
with. So if it’s a demand of a job, (and these are all individual demands - it’s not one size
fits all) if they can’t cope with those particular demands that’s what causes workplace
stress. Stress is not an illness. Stress can manifest into physical symptoms; such as
presenteeism - people are at work, but they’re not at work, they don’t really want to be
there so their productivity’s low. People can have changes in attitude and the inability to
cope with possibly simple tasks.
Pressures at work are sometimes essential parts of your job. Everyone has certain time
pressures or pressures of the work environment. They help motivate us and they help us
achieve our goals and objectives. When there is an imbalance of the skills and
knowledge that you have, compared to the stressors or pressures that are placed on you,
this is what can manifest in workplace stress.
Stress isn’t a lot of things. It’s not being asked to do the role you’re employed to do, and
it’s not being asked to complete tasks in a timely manner or to complete tasks in a
particular way. ‘That’ is not workplace stress. ‘That’ is being asked to do what you’re
supposed to do. What we have to do as Managers and Supervisors, anyone who relates to
people in any sort of capacity, is to look out for the physical manifestations of those
demands and what that does to people in our teams.
The other thing Sidney (Professor Dekker) talked about this morning was having
procedures and policies and all of those things we put in place, which box people in.”
Telling people how to do a particular job and that they must follow those guidelines and
not get out of that. In Safety (OHS), like in many other areas, there is a reason we have to
do that. It’s because we have a legal case and a moral case. Legally we have to, under the
Work, Health & Safety Act 2011, provide people with a safe environment in which to
work and that includes keeping them free from illness and injury. It’s a compensable
illness under WorkCover. So if you’re a worker and you are found to have a
psychosocial injury, it’s a compensable matter. It’s very costly. There’s not only an
organisational cost, but for the worker, they can’t go out and find another job. They have
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a low confidence level, they can’t integrate easily back into the workforce. So there’s a
moral case of making sure we keep people in a safe and healthy environment at work.
We’ve got an Employee Assistance Service (EAS). Last year it reported 41 staff
presented to them because of workplace concerns. The majority of those were about
workplace conflict and operational demands. How can we say that’s true? We can’t
because it’s a perceived state of mind. If you feel stressed at work, no-one can tell you
you’re not, as that is how you feel. That’s your perception of the work environment. We
have things in place to help people with those (feelings and perceptions), but we still have
to work with them.
Talk to anyone in any industry these days, and certainly the university sector across
Australia, ‘everyone’ is saying the biggest risk in the future is psychosocial claims. Our
biggest claims are still slip, trips and falls, which we can mitigate and do something about
by fixing a concrete path. Psychosocial claims are in that area of dealing with people on a
one-to-one basis and being in tune with your team. It’s quite difficult to do something
about that and then put it away.
Costs involved - there are direct costs and there are indirect costs. The indirect costs are
very hard to manage because sometimes they’re intangible. You can’t put a number on
morale, you can’t put a number on work performance or efficiencies. You can’t put a
number on how someone feels. You need to take into consideration all of those things.
Just a bit of background on stress; as I said stress affects different people in different
ways. You can’t box someone in and say, “that’s a stressful situation”, when someone
else can cope with that quite well. Some people thrive under certain amounts of stress.
As Leaders and Managers we need to be observant. We need to look at our teams. We
need to talk to our teams, and this is getting back to having conversations, understanding
what pushes their buttons, understanding what’s happening in their area and being really
mindful of the things that are changing.
Some of the physical signs and symptoms of stress; physically are people changing? Is
there weight loss, is there sweating, is there shaking? Cognitive; how are people coping
with their work environment? You have to take all these into context. Sometimes people
will exhibit some of these symptoms and they’ll be completely out of character. So when
that happens that’s a prompt for a conversation.
Some of the most common reasons for workplace stress - lack of clarity, control and
support. People want to have a feeling of belonging. They want to have a feeling of
contributing to the environment. They want to know that they’re making a difference and
it doesn’t have to be a huge difference. They need to have some control over what they
do in the workplace. They need to be supported in all of that. It doesn’t help if you say,
“can you please do this task, this is how I want you to do it, you’ve done it, that’s not
really what I wanted”. Be clear about what you’re asking people to do, how you’re
asking them to do it because sometimes they have better ideas than you. Your idea may
not be the best, it’s just the way you know how to do it.
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These are management standards that, if not managed properly, can result in poor work
health and lower morale in the workplace:
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Demands - workloads
Control - how much ‘say’ does a person have in what they’re doing?
Support - do they have support and are relationships conducive to a positive
environment?
Clarity - do people understand what they’re here to do, do they understand their
role?
Change - how do we manage change in a positive way and how do we
communicate that change? A lot of times with change people will say nothing
because they don’t have a lot to say. It’s better to say, “I don’t have a lot to say, I
don’t have anything to tell you”. That will alleviate a lot of workplace stress.
What we shouldn’t do is tell people to just get on with it, “this is what you need to do,
just get on with it, just do it”. This doesn’t help. What we should do in a positive way is
have conversations, get with our staff and start to talk around those management
standards. It’s okay to have conversations and not have an outcome. It’s okay to sit
down with your staff and say, “I don’t know how to handle this, what do you think”, or “I
don’t know which way we’re going with this, but as soon as I know something I’ll tell
you”. A conversation doesn’t have to have a prescribed outcome. It’s also okay to go up
to a staff member and say, “I notice you’re off the boil, is there something wrong, is there
something you want to talk about, is there something that’s happened that you’re not
clear about?” It gets people out of their comfort zone to have these conversations
because it could result in conflict. I think, as Managers or Supervisors or as Leaders,
that’s something we’re all scared of. We don’t like conflict. We try to avoid it at all
costs. So when we open ourselves up to say, “is there something I can help you with”,
we’re inviting something back and it might not be what we like, but we have an
obligation because we have people we have to look after and make sure they’re working
in a positive environment.
With demands we’ve got to give people clarity. They have to have an agreed workload.
It’s peaks and troughs. Another way of confronting that is saying, “I know you’ve got a
lot on your plate at the moment, but we need to do this. How can we do it better? How
can we share the workload?” Give people some freedom to control and have some scope
of their work. Give them the ability to do their work and take their own initiative to
complete that work. It doesn’t have to be done exactly how you want it to be done.
In Health and Safety we talk a lot about consultation. When we’re doing work
procedures and risk assessments we consult with staff. We involve the staff. We ask,
how do you currently do this task? Is there a better way of doing it? Is there a safer way
to do it? Are there risks we haven’t taken into consideration? Like Sidney (Professor
Dekker) said, “you can’t manage this stuff from afar, you have to actually talk with
people, you have to consult with people”. It gives people that feeling of control, it gives
people that feeling they have some say in how they do things. It might not be how you
thought it should be done, but it would still work. Give support, actively listen to people,
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encourage people to have conversations. Listen to what they’re saying and do something
with it. Listening is not hearing something and then dismissing it. Listening is hearing it,
internalising it and doing something with it even if doing something with it is, “I’ve heard
what you’re saying and I don’t think we’ll do that”. It’s okay to do that as well, but at
least you’re upfront with people and you’re being transparent with them.
One of the most important things is to lead by example, you have to be consistent and
you have to be fair. I think you have to have that one rule for everybody. So if you say
one person can’t wear shorts to the workplace, no-one can wear shorts to the workplace
and you certainly can’t wear shorts to the workplace. If you observe a behaviour, then
you accept that behaviour good, bad or otherwise. What you see is what you accept, so if
you see someone being inappropriate to a staff member, whether it’s in a bullying or
harassment context, if you see that and don’t pick it up then you’re saying, “that’s okay,
that’s alright”. You can’t go back two months later and say, “I noticed three months ago
you did this and that’s not acceptable”. That’s not how we’re fair and consistent. We
have to pull people up consistently. Cathy (Blunt) mentioned it in her talk, it’s about
leading by example, declaring what you need to declare and then doing something with it.
Providing role clarity; that’s a big thing. Why are you here? Why are we here? We all
need to have a purpose. Why am I employed? If I’m employed to provide advice and
have input, that’s what I do. Whether people take that advice or not is irrelevant. I can’t
internalise that and I can’t say, “you should have listened to me”, because that’s not my
job. My job is not to tell people what they have to do. My job is to provide advice.
Providing role clarity to people and how they feed into the organisation gives them
control and respect.
And then change; we have to be open about change. We need to provide the whole story.
If we don’t know it we tell people we don’t know the whole story. It’s one of the biggest
stresses in workplaces when people don’t know what’s going on, they feel they’re being
shut out and not communicated with because the story’s not good. We create a lot of
stress unknowingly by saying nothing. So a lot of the time it’s about communicating, it’s
about keeping those communication lines open and putting yourself out there and being
willing to take what comes back to you.
In your little packs there is a little questionnaire. It’s called The Stress Management
Competency Indicator Tool. It’s a checklist to assess your behaviour. It’s a tool for you
to go through, ask yourself the questions and be honest with your answers. For example,
do you communicate openly? If you do, say yes. If you think maybe you don’t, then tick
yourself down, it’s okay. One of the good things about doing something like this is it
gives you some self-reflection. It gives you the ability to question how you are perceived
and how you operate as a Manager, and if that’s good or bad? There’s no such thing, it’s
a tool for improvement. If you’re really brave you might use it as a 360 degree tool and
give it to your staff and ask how do you reckon I do here? You might be surprised about
the answers.
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The ladder of inference; It’s a model of assumptions. Cathy (Blunt) mentioned one of the
fastest forms of communication is gossip. The ladder of inference says you take in
information based on what you know has happened before, then you filter some of what
you don’t want to talk about or think about, then you make an assumption on the
information, draw a conclusion and refine and update your beliefs. Your beliefs become
fact, and you end up in a loop because you filter based on what you see or what you
know. You don’t go back to observing the data and analysing it. Just check and think, do
I have all the information, have I filtered the information properly or am I just making an
assumption?
How do we do this, how do we get it right? We need to have a conversation, and that’s
how it all starts. Sometimes it be very difficult to have, sometimes it can be simple.
Sometimes the one you think is simple turns out to be really difficult. So be cautious, but
it’s something you need to do. You have to be honest with how you portray yourself. Do
you have a double set of standards? Do you treat people fairly and consistently or do you
say that you do? Look at your staff and look out for signs of stress. Look at how they’re
operating. Check for things that are odd; e.g, if someone is usually really punctual and
suddenly they’re turning up half an hour late and it’s consistent, then it’s probably time to
ask a question. It’s not an accusing question, it’s just you want to find out if there’s
anything you need to adapt - it may not have to be a 9 to 5 job. If you model the
behaviour you expect then you’ll get that behaviour.
Further information; the Health & Safety team, that’s our generic email. If you approach
anyone in the Health & Safety team or the HR team we’d be happy to talk to you about
this (psychosocial risk). One of the things we’re doing in our team this year is putting a
Wellness program together. We’re going to base our Wellness program around stress.
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