Experts talk about importance of tools, data, culture to keep workers safe
While workplace health and safety programs are staples, many workers continue to get hurt or get sick in the workplace.
In Canada, there were 348,747 workplace injuries or diseases sustained in 2022, according to the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada’s (AWCBC) 2024 data.
Why? It’s largely due to a lack of due diligence, says Shayne Ottman, lead health and safety consultant at Citation Canada, in talking with HRD Canada.
“Due diligence and communication, to me, are the two core things… Without those things, any health and safety program isn't going to succeed.”
And workplace injuries and sickness continue to be costly for employers: the average estimated cost associated with each of these claims is $40,000-$50,000 (AWCBC).
“As you can imagine, for a small business, this can be a debilitating amount of money, sometimes insolvency threatening” says Terra Aartsen, chief product officer, Citation Canada, in the same interview.
Earlier this year, the Labor Commissioner’s Office of California ordered Amazon to pay almost $6 million in fines due to its violation of the Warehouse Quotas law, which was enacted in 2021, involving two of its distribution warehouses in Moreno Valley and Redlands.
With due diligence, data is key in preventing workplace injuries and diseases.
“Data is crucially important. There's no way to know what changes need to be made without data on any injuries, on incidents, [and] even if nothing has happened,” says Ottman.
“If you're doing risk assessments at the frequency that we would recommend, the point of doing that is taking a proactive approach, so you're not waiting to have data based on injuries. You're doing a risk assessment to get out in front of that potential injury and make sure that it doesn't affect the workplace. And if the risk assessment points to there being issues in the workplace that can't be immediately resolved, that data can then be used to create a hierarchy of issues that need to be addressed in time or on a specific schedule.”
There are also a lot of workplace safety tools available to employers, he says.
“Being able to use those tools in a way that's meaningful to the workplace and then communicating the outcomes of using those tools to everybody in the workplace, that's really, really important.”
It’s also highly important that employers create a strong workplace health and safety culture. And that starts with having strong policies in place, says Ottman.
“You can push a culture that you want, but the real side of culture is what your employees are buying into. So, if you don't have that foundation of policies [or] if that's not clearly communicated through that policy manual, then the whole program is not going to be built on the foundation that it needs to be built on. And there's going to be a lot of fracture, and there's going to be a lot of miscommunication.”
Occupational injuries due to excessive heat reached 22.8 million in 2020, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
Involving employees in safety initiatives and making sure they're well-informed, as well as regular employee training on compliant practice, are also key, says Aartsen.
“Good health and safety practices help organizations meet their legal obligations,” says Aartsen. “They help them mitigate any organizational costs that might come along with a safety violation, but, more importantly, they safeguard employee lives and employee wellbeing.”
In July, WorkSafeNB launched a campaign to raise workplace safety awareness among foreign workers in New Brunswick.
Ottman cites a platform offered by Citation Canada.
“I think a lot of people's perception of health and safety is that it's onerous, it's difficult to implement, whereas as soon as anyone gets on our platform, they'll see that the integration of all of the tools, the way that information is communicated, it's all very simple, but it's very comprehensive and it's very intuitive.”
