This month a fantastic group of Safety, Injury Management, and Risk Professionals joined us this week for a discussion on the challenges and opportunities in front of them now and in the year ahead.
It was a great conversation with various topics covered.
There was a focus on mental health and the need to make wellness and mental health initiatives more meaningful and practical.
About 50% of the room had done some sort of mental health first aid training and it was clear that this was becoming a requirement in most businesses.
Wellness Ambassadors were being implemented in some businesses while others were hiring health and wellness staff to deliver yoga and other wellbeing classes.
On the subject of remote work, some managers had completely transitioned into a remote role, others were eager to get back with their teams and out into the field.
One company had implemented ‘anchor’ days as a point in time to bring their teams together with flexible arrangements outside of those days.
The topic of fatigue was a big one, both for those at executive level and line staff. Executives highlighted the difficulty of taking ‘real’ time off when they were basically on-call given the current environment.
Fatigue was also highlighted around process and protocol, especially around the wearing of PPE with some companies recently increasing the PPE requirement.
From a recruitment point of view, there are definitely more roles available than specialists to fill them, so attracting and retaining talent is a top priority. While at the same time, managing expectations was important with many roles starting to have an unsustainable salary creep moving into 2022.
We will be running one more Safety People Forum for the year in November and we would love you to attend.
