April 28th, 2022 is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, it provides employees with an opportunity to reflect on their preventative approach to mitigating deaths, injuries, diseases and illnesses in the workplace.
This year’s theme encourages workplaces to “Act together to build a positive safety and health culture”.
OzHelp agrees this is a crucial foundation of WHS and encourages employees to also consider the role psychological health plays in building a positive health and safety culture.
Speaking to our Director of Partnerships and Engagement, Carolyn Parish noted that, “psychological safety is a shared responsibility and should be approached systematically into the way we do work.”
Carolyn has shared four steps we should be striving to implement within our workplaces on an ongoing basis to help build a psychologically safe culture.
This includes:
- Ensuring good work design and safe systems of work,
- effective risk management of psycho-social risks,
- adequate training and knowledge to ensure that individuals know where to access support, and
- genuine leadership and management commitment across all organizational levels to create a supportive and understanding place of work.