Healthy Workers, Prosperous Companies

We continue with our news related to the 2020-2022 campaign belonging to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) entitled Healthy Work: let's relax the burdens. In this case, we briefly explain here a guide that we loved, for its simplicity and clarity whose name is already attractive: "Healthy workers, prosperous companies - Practical guide for well-being at work."

The guide is designed for business owners but it would also be useful for all workers to read it, fundamentally it tries to help small and medium-sized companies create a healthy environment through a five-step method that can help them tackle psychosocial risks and musculoskeletal disorders, both related to each other, so that by addressing one we can improve the other.

The guide proposes 5 steps to create a good work environment:

1. Preparation: decide who will lead the project, what resources we have, when and how we will inform workers, and when the planned actions will take place.
2. Risk assessment: we will identify psychosocial and TME risks, we prioritize.
3. We make an action plan: we will determine what actions we are going to carry out to eliminate the detected risks.
4. We carry out the plan: we carry out the planned actions and monitor them to see their progress.
5. We review: we see if we have achieved the planned objectives, we review the entire cycle to fine-tune and start again.

We must be clear about the following principles, very much in line with Vision Zero:

As we see, these basic principles can be used for TME, psychosocial or for life in general. We cannot do generic risk assessments, we need to carry out risk assessments that reflect what happens particularly in our company, with all our particularities, those that make us unique, otherwise we will have a risk assessment that we can use to hold a door but for nothing useful. Let's avoid this useless documentary-itis. The next principle is that we must involve the workers, they are the ones who know the most about the risks of their job, we must not be afraid to ask them, in this way, they will feel an important part of the company, we will put people at the center, as a strategic value. And last but not least, without the help and involvement of managers and managers, we will not reach a successful conclusion. They are the driving force, who must lead and not give up so that the cycle is completed and the risks eliminated, in this way we will achieve a healthy workplace and, most importantly, a prosperous company.

The guide gives us practical tools to evaluate MSDs while involving workers, one of them is to make a Map of MSDs, a tool that we already explained in a infographic and in a news, another of them is called photographic safari. This safari involves all workers taking a photo of something that they perceive as a risk that can cause MSDs or of some element whose manipulation they think will cause MSDs. They are given a short time, 2 weeks, to take the photos. After this time, the project leader organizes the photos by type and they are posted on a wall. That is when we begin the dialogue in groups of 10 people maximum, trying to find out what risks each photo represents and how we can solve them. 

Once the risks have been evaluated and the measures have been implemented, it is time to evaluate whether we have achieved the proposed objectives.In the guide we also find examples of the questions we need to ask ourselves as leaders to know if we should redefine the objectives and implement new measures, some of them are the following:

• What can you do differently in each step of the process to make it work better?
• What has gone well and what can we improve?
• As the person responsible for the company, have you led the process in the best possible way?
• How can we make the positive effects last?

These are questions that we should always ask ourselves, not only to tackle TME, but that we can extrapolate to effective process management in general.

At Fraternidad-Muprespa, we are always willing to provide tools that our associated companies can use, such as this guide that we present in this news, or our wonderful good practice guides, prepared in collaboration with Prevencontrol, all of them essential material if we want to have a prosperous and healthy company.