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Safety Champion Software Launches Employee Assistance Program
Safety Champion Software now offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), a tool companies can provide their workforce to support their broader mental health, resilience, and wellbeing programs. Unlike traditional EAP pricing structures that have a pay as you use model, the Safety Champion EAP has a flat cost per employee regardless of uptake, making it far more accessible to small businesses.
“Our mission is to make safety easier and accessible to all businesses. EAP Programs are widely adopted in larger organisations, to support workers navigate both work and non-work-related issues. However, due to variability in the investment, small businesses are most often priced out of this service. Via a headcount pricing-model this strategic partnership with Action OHS and Safety Champion, provides small businesses with a clear and visible pricing structure, allowing them to leverage the benefits of this employee benefit, which include increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, and improved employee engagement and empowerment to name a few. The adoption of an EAP service is one piece of the puzzle businesses can use to navigate mental health hazards in their workplace” says Safety Champion CEO Craig Salter.
The workforce is seeing rising stress levels, ranging from work related stressors to personal problems. Not only is an EAP a vital resource employees can turn to in times of need but it also plays a big role in safety. In 2021 alone, there were 120,355 serious work-related injury claims, resulting in over 100,000 days of lost productivity. Those injuries are caused by a variety of things, such as repetitive stress or accidents. Although you can’t prevent every accident from happening, an EAP can help ensure your employees are taking care of their physical and mental health, putting them in the best position to be safe and careful at work.
With an EAP, employees can access assistance from a psychologist in both a face-to-face setting or over the phone and skype. Counselling is available via appointments at a location and a time that is convenient for the individual. Employees can access free, professional and confidential support for a range of scenarios including but not limited to:
- Anxiety and Depression
- Family and relationship problems
- Loss and grief
- Conflict at work or home
- Substance abuse issues
- Career transition
- Trauma
Confidentiality and privacy are always guaranteed and counselling services are 100% confidential for users, except in the rare case that significant risk is identified. Demographic data is gathered on service users for analysis of trends and usage rates to assist your organisation to adapt to the welfare needs of their employees. All information is aggregated in such a manner as no individual service user can be identified.
The EAP can be integrated into Safety Champion, allowing employees to access information and guidance material via our Noticeboard Module. Not using Safety Champion Software? No problems, we can still provide you access to this service.
With EAP starting at less than $2.50/day for businesses with less than 10 workers, if you would like to find out more, please Contact Us and a member of our team will be in touch with you in less than one business day.
If you want to find out more about the EAP, fill out your details below.
Managing risk when working from home
It’s no surprise that moving between an office, site, and home working location has its benefits for employees. Flexibility and increased autonomy can improve mental wellbeing, which helps to increase staff productivity and retention.
This type of hybrid work model started to become popular in recent years, with some employers embracing this new way of working, whilst others were more cautious. But once the pandemic hit, employers who had not supported the model, and those who simply rejected it, were forced to be more flexible.
A new way of working
Now, post pandemic, many employers are considering long term hybrid work models due to their benefits. To preserve the full benefits of the hybrid model, it’s important for organisations and individuals to make sure that the work from a home environment is as safe as working from the office or worksite.
When working on a site, in an office or in a public space, safety inspections and audits are part of the way we work. While sometimes they can be tedious, they always have a purpose. Few would disagree that it’s better to discover a safety risk as part of an inspection, rather than after an employee is injured.
So, does an employee’s private residence count as a workplace if they are conducting work there? The answer is yes! And if an employee is injured in their home whilst conducting work, it’s considered a workplace injury.
Because of this, organisations need to ensure they have systems in place to identify and assess hazards in a home work environment. They then need to implement risk controls and review them, the same as for any other hazard. To do this, organisations need to ensure their employees complete regular safety checks in their own home environment, just as they would complete a regular safety check in a traditional workplace.
Resources for employers
Business Victoria has created a helpful template to help you get started on the type of hazards that need to be considered and made safe: Working from home safety and wellbeing checklist | Business Victoria
It’s also important to set aside regular check in time with employees who are working from home. Managers or supervisors may not have regular face to face contact with these individuals which can make it much more difficult to know when something isn’t quite right and when to provide further support. So make it a date!
Lastly, if a home work environment is unsafe for operational or personal reasons, it’s important to provide another work location. No matter the source of the risk, if it effects the employee during their work hours, it is a workplace hazard.
Here are a few more resources to help you navigate the risks safely, so that everyone can have the flexibility that works for them post pandemic.
Managing risks | Safe Work Australia
Minimising the spread of COVID-19: Working from home – WorkSafe
Health and safety for working from home | WorkSafe.qld.gov.au
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Workplace stress can be next to invisible… watch these videos
This health and safety month has placed a massive focus on building greater awareness of mental health in the workplace and developing more effective strategies to mitigate and manage these risks.
And to follow suit, many businesses – large and small – are now far more aware of what they need to look out for to protect their workers from unnecessary mental health concerns including stress, anxiety and depression. We think this is great!
A big part of this shift in thinking is the emergence of initiatives like beyondblue’s Heads Up which aims to assist Australian businesses with working towards becoming mentally happier and healthier places to be.
And recently Heads Up released a few really powerful short videos that help to shed light on the ‘invisible’ nature of workplace stress. It is, after all, something that isn’t overtly obvious to others in the workplace and at home, requiring us all to take the time to think about it and look out for it.
So if you are a bit of a fan of watching short, powerful and beautifully produced videos, check these out;
Mental health is well and truly within the realm of what we are talking about when we encourage all businesses to protect the health and safety of their workers.
So, why not share these videos today with your staff, access great tools and more on the Heads Up website, or read more from us about how to prevent stress from escalating in the workplace.
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Why use the 70:20:10 model…
Differences in learning styles, attention spans and the way that we generally consume information these days, means that the way we train must evolve to keep it relevant and suit changing needs.That’s why when we stumbled across the old 70:20:10 learning model in our research, we thought it was worth a blog.
Whilst this model has been around for a little while, we feel that it is still incredibly valid! Especially for those people responsible for training staff in health and safety. Understanding the 70:20:10 model might actually help you ensure that your training and onboarding is relevant, whilst also assisting your managers and supervisors to build better rapport with their team members. And all of this leads to your people actually engaging with your health and safety training, rather than your health and safety training just serving as a ‘tick the box’ exercise.
The idea is this;
70% of everything you learn comes from your own personal on-the-job or general life experiences
20% of everything you learn comes from your interaction with others – feedback or observations
10% of everything you learn comes from formal training and courses
As you can see, this model indicates that while formal training sessions and course work is certainly a part of our learning, it is only a very small part of the larger piece. As health and safety professionals, this is particularly interesting – because we see businesses still placing considerable emphasis on getting their people into a room and training them in operational activities – so those boxes are ticked – rather than buddying them up with more experienced operators, or identifying innovative ways that they can build capability of their people in the field.
Don’t get us wrong, we believe formal health and safety training sessions are hugely important. However, we shouldn’t be stopping there when it comes to making sure our workers are fully briefed, ready to properly handle hazards and mitigate risks to ensure that they keep themselves and others safe in the workplace.
So, to get your workers to more thoroughly understand and adopt relevant health and safety skills and knowledge, try facilitating better on-the-job learning opportunities for ‘peer learning’. A couple of ideas could be;
- Hold quick daily or weekly meetings to reflect on recent work to find any risks or hazards so you can learn from them.
- Encourage older staff to take an active role in training the younger ones, even if they don’t think it’s their job.
- Remind the younger and new staff to constantly seek advice and guidance from the others before proceeding with anything.
- Encourage older and more experienced staff to share relevant health and safety stories and experiences they’ve had in yours and other workplaces.
- See if you can build on the social aspects in your workplace. Allow workers to implicitly learn through informal and unstructured conversations.
Clearly there are many things you can do – but it’s all about communication, observation and experience. So, try encouraging or facilitating more opportunities for people to learn in a variety of ways, and you’ll see vast improvements in the uptake of your health and safety practices and procedures!
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Some pointers for those without formally documented OHS Procedures
For many small businesses, especially those with regular and ongoing communication across all levels of the business, undocumented Health and Safety Procedures may be sufficient to fulfil the legislative duty. Read more about this here. But to ensure that you are managing your health and safety legislative duty, here are some basic ‘no brainer’ procedures that you should consider establishing as a minimum:
- Hazard and Risk Management. You workplace has a duty to provide a safe work environment. What steps have you undertaken to identify, control and review health and safety risks in your workplace?
- Training and Competency. Your workplace has the duty to provide information to workers; in addition, there are some statutory obligations regarding training. How does your workplace manage this?
- Consultation and Communication. The health and safety legislation is not prescriptive – its basis is the risk management approach. How do you know what all of the health and safety issues are without asking your entire workforce? What steps has your workplace established to ensure information is shared across the business?
- Incident Management. Your workplace has statutory obligations to manage workplace injuries and, under certain circumstances, report incidents to the regulator. What workflows have you established?
If you are reading this and thinking it is still a little too hard, please contact us. We have functional, legislation-compliant solutions that can work for your business, whether it’s small or large.
