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Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Psychological Health and Safety: Protecting Industrial Workers Beyond Physical Hazards
Safety+Health: Ensuring the psychological health and safety of industrial workers is as crucial as safeguarding their physical well-being. The demanding nature of industrial work – characterized by long shifts, exposure to hazardous environments and high productivity pressures – can significantly impact workers’ mental health.
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3 comments:
When reading about these guidelines and assessing the effectiveness of their implementation and how to practically achieve these guidelines, I become increasingly concerned about how these guidelines can lose sight quickly when they are not only attempting to change procedure, but also the culture of a particular organization. As such, when considering these guidelines, it is highly important how this is also framed to the rest of the company to ensure that those who these guidelines are supposed to help are actually accepted by them instead of rejected, thus causing even more strain between management and those that are carrying out the industrial work itself. This is not to say that there is an inherent pushback to psychological health and safety, it is moreso that as a result of the persistent pushes away from these practices in the past, the industrial culture has formed itself more around achievement than safety in particular circumstances, potentially leading to further tension.
These safety precautions are SO important. As both someone who has done work that requires heavy manual labor, and an EMT who has to respond to such injuries, any precautions that can be taken to help prevent not only workplace accidents, but also employee burnout and the detrimental strain of manual labor, is absolutely worthwhile. Speaking from experience, I am much more likely to perform well in an environment where I feel both physically and mentally supported, in contrast to one where I am experiencing constant pressure and stress. In addition, positive working environments foster a system where employees are more likely to report safety concerns, whether it's defective equipment or a colleague who requires more training, and that colleague is more likely to get adequate training without additional emotional strain. The School of Drama, at least when it comes to work calls and run crew, has a pretty good system for fostering a healthy work environment, and I hope that the theatrical industry as a whole can adopt a similar system.
When workplaces discuss prioritizing mental health for their employees I often scoff since a lot of the time mental strain happens in those work places however this article does list off some good plans that I think would be beneficial though they could go a bit farther this is a good first step and I do hope they revisit this in the future. Although I can see why a person would be surprised a plan such as this is being enacted for factories, I think it’s important to remember that factory jobs are some of the most dangerous out there for a number of physical and mental reasons so I think that places like factories need guidelines like these the most in order to ensure their safety and mental well being, if they’re not a 100%dangerous mistakes could happen which could endanger not only their lives but the lives of those around them at work too.
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