Workplace Health and Safety

Assessing the Workplace and Boosting Employee Health

Regulations aside, great offices have superlative internal procedures for safety and environmental standards and employee health promotion. They go the extra mile in workplace health and safety and they know that eliminating job stress leads to happier, more productive employees.

Look for favorable consideration of questions like those in this assessment.

Assess your Awareness:

Safety and Environmental

To what degree do you:

Address any adverse impacts of your products on society?
Address any adverse impacts on the surrounding community?
Design office ergonomics into your workplace?
Assess workplace stress?
Design processes into your company that address these impacts and create a predictable, reliable way of dealing with them?
Provide safety training for employees to look for any safety or environmental concerns?
Ensure that Safety and Environmental issues are a part of the strategic plan of the company?
Conduct safety audits or employee health and welfare so that you know where you rate?
Discuss emerging environmental issues at leadership and strategic planning meetings?
Thoroughly train employees in accident prevention and certify some to be local experts?

Wow. That really is going the extra mile.

Must you do those? .... no.
But to differentiate yourself from the run-of-the-mill organization .... you should.
To retain exceptional employees .... you must.

What about managing stress in the workplace?

Workplace stress occurs when outside factors (such as issues at home) affect the performance at work OR factors at work are out of balance.

Common causes include unrealistic deadlines, unfair workload, lack of resources to properly get the job done, hazardous environment, improper training, mismatched expectations of performance standards with capabilities, or bullying behaviors by co-workers.

A great office tends to the stress factors provides individuals with stress management techniques.

Job stress statistics from recent studies:

Northwestern National LIfe

"One-fourth of employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives."

Princeton Survey Research Associates

"Three-fourths of employees believe the worker has more on-the-job stress than a generation ago."

St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Co.

"Problems at work are more strongly associated with health complaints than are any other life stressor-more so than even financial problems or family problems."

Source: National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health

Some great ideas for employee health promotion

Group stretch time twice a day in a common hallway
Ergonomic furniture
Support groups for nutritional talks
On-the-spot awards for anyone caught carrying handweights or doing lunges down the hallway
Cafeteria information readily available
Fun lunchtime competitions for sports and games
Promotional products with company logo like water bottles, pedometers, colored shoestrings, sweatbands
Yoga onsite
DVD’s for checkout
Company discount at gym or club
Wear your athletic garb day
Limbo contest for flexibility
Corporate Olympics annually
In-house health fairs or group expeditions to local health fairs
Exercise time
Fit Boss award
Shrink the waistline project

Organizational Change

Great resources for assessing your standards is the Malcolm-Baldrige National Quality Award criteria, a complete approach in building excellence in business ad tying key aspects all together. Use the site’s First Step as a way to conduct a more comprehensive assessment.

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