What are the main factors (social, environmental, organizational, economic, etc.) affecting the occupational safety and health sustainability at work?
Gender equality as a social factor and routine health checkups facilitates occupational safety and health sustainability at workplace
I fully agree with your opinion but apart from these factors we should also consider the occupational risk assessment and ongoing safety and health training of all workers/employees.
A HSE Consultant once ’kicked. off’ a presentation by saying the three main causes of work place accidents were ’men, women and children’ before getting serious and changing the pitch to pressure, stress and fatigue. While ’sustainability’ is seen as an ’add on’ which reduces productivity and increses costs it is unlikely to be a welcome concept. So it reduces to the ultimate engineering challange of ’do more with less’
As economist I consider economic factors to be as important as environmental ones. Investments in new machinery, processes and management techniques are vital to all outputs in enterprises whatever they produce. One of these output is the occupational safety itself.
It can be tricky to answer, as organizational factors, for example, groups many other factors you mention.
Basically, the organization of a company defines the main guidelines of the EHS policy. Then the reality on the work field (in the case you think about companies which are more than offices) depends on numerous other factors, mainly cultural / social / environmental.
Regarding the economic / investment aspects, they depend directly of the organization, because budget is decided there. If the company does not makes a point dealing with safety (policy, again), then you can have no training, signalling, maintenance or new tools / equipment. This also increases the risk of accident.
Finally (as main factor, but there are many others), stress, tension and tiredness relates directly to absenteism (indicator of motivation then mental health) and if there is absenteism, the work must be done with fewer people, which increases the risks. Or with new untrained workers, which is worse.
You need to take into account that, basically:
- an accident in never caused by only one factor, so focusing only on the main factors is not of great help
- despite the habit of seeking technical reasons for an accident, the method of the 5 whys allows to understand further the problem, which is at a large majority of the cases an organizational problem.
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