Workplace Safety: Time for a New Definition—And a New Solution
Most employees know they are protected when it comes to their physical safety at work. In fact, there’s a litany of procedures, programs, laws, and regulations in place to ensure that work environments are physically safe and support the workers’ performance.
Many of these labor laws came out of the industrial revolution. By the late 1800s, more than 1,000 laws regulating work conditions and limiting or forbidding child labor were passed. With the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
OSHA’s early work focused on creating standards limiting workers’ exposure to asbestos and other carcinogens. By the 1980s, OSHA introduced new health and safety standards related to fire protection, electrical safety, field sanitation, hazardous waste operations, and emergency response. Today OSHA continues its focus on reducing injuries, illnesses, and fatalities in traditional industries.
In fairness to the fine folks at OSHA, today they recognize that they must look ahead to the challenges of the future—new chemicals and other hazards in the workplace, growing service sector industries, and changing workforce needs.
Outside of reducing the potential for physical hazards, what’s really happening to address workers’ needs? Not a lot . . . and for a lot of reasons—not least of which is the fact that we live in a vastly different and evolving world than we did even a decade ago. “Workplace safety” can no longer be defined in purely physical terms.
Pssst . . . while most of what I share next applies to specific workplace environments where workplace stress is high, the fact is, EVERY ENVIRONMENT, with the right combination of stressors, can end up in that undesirable high-stress place.
Thinking Beyond Physical Safety at Work
What about emotional safety? What’s in place today to ensure workers’ emotional safety?
We have several decades-old laws, mostly borne out of the Civil Rights Movement, prohibiting discrimination against a job applicant or an employee during a variety of work situations including hiring, firing, promotions, training, wages, and benefits—e.g., Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).
But, if an employee is feeling emotionally unsafe at work, these protections aren’t relevant. Where else can we look?
Harassment in the workplace for the foregoing protected classes is also prohibited under state and federal law. These protections prohibit harassment when it is so severe or pervasive that it creates a hostile work environment. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), “although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).”
Although no federal law directly addresses bullying, in some cases, bullying overlaps with discriminatory harassment when it is based on race, national origin, color, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), age, disability, or religion. Today, only federally funded schools (including colleges and universities) have an obligation to resolve harassment on these bases.
In every case of workplace harassment, it is worth noting that only certain classes of people are protected. If we get rid of the word “harassment” and all the baggage that comes with it, isn’t freedom from distress, intimidation, torment, maltreatment, and abuse something every human being should rightfully expect at work?
What the Data Says
According to a study fielded by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), one in seven employees feels unsafe at work. EWING’s most recent Workplace Stress Study backs this up and takes it one step further:
In enterprise environments characterized as a “high workplace stress environment” (i.e., exhibiting the qualities and stressors that create an environment with unhealthy levels of workplace stress), 77% of employees felt physically safe at work, but only 38% of employees felt emotionally safe at work.
What can we take away from this?
As employers and leaders, we’re doing a good job helping folks feel physically safe at our places of work, regardless of the overarching tone of our organizational culture – in other words, even in “ugly” social environments – the majority of employees feel physically safe. OSHA’s and everyone’s fine efforts to uphold the standards over the decades are working. And that’s clearly something to celebrate.
But guess what? With the way our harassment laws are defined today, we’ve made the protected classes so narrow, the hurdle so high, and the measurement criteria so nebulous (“severe and pervasive”) that the laws are failing to truly detect harmful environments, much less protect workers from emotional harm.
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No, I’m Not Calling for Laws—I’m Calling for You.
We’re not in the industrial age anymore; we’re in the information age. And today workers spend as much time working in their own environments (home office, co-working space, coffee shop) as they do in your headquarters or regional offices. Excluding workplace violence (which, by the way, is exacerbated in high stress environments), threats against employees’ physical safety are not the critical issue of our time. The issue of our time is threats against workers’ emotional health and safety. It’s time for a new, broader mindset around what constitutes “worker safety” as well as innovative solutions for providing that to our workers.
The first step to change and transformation is awareness. And the second step, as leaders, is accepting responsibility.
These Are Our People
Forgive me for taking on so much accountability, but it’s hard to do otherwise. When people come and work for us, they’re drinking our Kool-Aid?— the Kool-Aid that we have on offer to them. They could have chosen to work elsewhere, but they didn’t; they chose us. Rank and file employees join our organizations to fight our battles, to go after our wins. Every day. Fighting the hard fight. For us. Our vision. Our goals.
The hard part? Most of the people we hire aren’t like us. They can’t be. We must hire people for their distinctive skills and the unique assets they bring to the organization and to the fight. And if we’re interested in driving any innovation at all, well, they’d better be a hell of a lot different from us or we’ll sit fat and happily in a sea of sameness for years, never doing anything worthwhile, much less remarkable.
This means that not only are many of your people NOT LIKE YOU; many of your people—if you knew them personally—YOU MAY NOT EVEN LIKE! Yeah, that’s right. And that makes taking care of their interests all that much harder. But we must. That’s our job. That’s your job.
A New Solution Ahead
Let me reiterate that I’m not calling for legislation. I’m calling for us to step up and take responsibility for our people. Your employees are your people. It’s your responsibility to provide a safe physical and social workplace environment.
SIDENOTE TO WORKERS: Don’t get all victim-y on me. You’re an actor in your employer’s social environment/ecosystem too, and not always a charming one. One thing you can do is become more discerning about what constitutes “harm” to you. I have a time-tested acid test for evaluating perceived awfulness in others, and it is this:
Kristen’s Acid Test for Evil
I ask: Is there malice behind what they are doing or saying? Are they trying to marginalize me? To harm me? Are they abusing their power to make me feel inferior? Are they trying to “keep me in my place” etc. Or are they just plain clueless because they have never and will never know what it’s like to walk in my shoes? There is evil in this world. And evil people too. But, mostly over five decades, I’ve found that people are good—sure, stupid, and clueless at times—but inherently good.
The average number of employees in a Fortune 500 company is 69,000. There are 188 cognitive biases – i.e., systematic errors in thinking that occur when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them.
You do the math—that’s a LOT of errors made each day by thousands of workers, human resources professionals, managers and leaders who are trying to interpret the behaviors and, more important, the intentions (good or bad) behind others’ behaviors in the workplace.
There’s an easier way to evaluate workplace physical environments and social environments—to isolate the stress drivers, to evaluate when they’re rising, their impact on the overall organization, and what interventions are necessary. The solution involves data and technology. At EWING, we call it SYMI Science, the code name for our patented workplace stress solution.
Interested in doing a quick-and-dirty diagnostic on your workplace environment? Say hello, [email protected]