Introduction
We are living in a transformative phase in human history. Since the last century, science and technology have been aiding humanity to transform work. Heavy manual work is overtaken by machinery. With the current trends, AI, automation, and robotics will soon take away most other manual, routine work. Individuals are forced into more brainy work with technological invasion. Manual labour seems to be alive only in developing nations and third-world countries. For the modern white-collar workforce, physical labour like heavy lifting and carrying weights seems to be associated only with gyms.
However, this is far from the truth. Even in the industrial age, millions of workers earn their living by working in physically arduous labour. And most of these jobs come with the risk of life, limbs, and health. Currently, around 2.78 million workers lose their lives in the workplace every year due to accidents or diseases. This constitutes one death every fifteen seconds! Along with these staggering but sad figures, there are an additional 378 million non-fatal accidents that result in injuries, cuts, and surgeries. These result in a financial burden for the workers' families. This takes valuable productivity away from businesses, resulting in a 4% loss in global gross domestic product each year (Source: Wikipedia).
In this article, let us discuss the future of the workforce and its health and safety management.
The types of workplace threats
Workplace: Professionals spend one-third of their waking hours in the workplace (Source: Gettysburg). With the advent of remote working, the definition of the workplace has been expanded. Today's occupational health and safety manager should be concerned with such home offices as well as the traditional workforce that is under physical, emotional, or social threats in offices.
Source: Naseem Buras Unsplash
1. Physical: Physical hazards are the most common type of risk for workers that concerns occupational health and safety managers. Mining, logging, and construction workers, agriculture workers, machine operators, extraction, healthcare, and transportation workers incur most of the physical injuries at the workplace (Source: UDel). Falls are the common reason for mortality and other bodily harm. This is followed by burns, cuts, shears, stabs, and machine induced wounds or strikes. Also, muscle strains, dislocations, or injuries are some of the common risks.
If manual workers have such dangerous threats in the workplace, the relatively safer office workers are no less threatened. Unlike physical workers, office workers are at the risk of a different set of physical and mental health complexities. Chief among them is obesity. Programmers, data entry operators, and writers have a higher risk of developing eye strain, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), and lower back pains (Source: Pacific Prime).
2. Mental: Apart from the physical injuries or mortalities, the psycho-emotional well-being of workers also needs proper understanding and care. Overwork, job insecurity, inflexible working hours, workplace bullying, and night shift working - can all have significant mental health impacts on employees. Midlife identity crises and an unhealthy work-life balance will all drive professionals into mental health crises. Employee burnout is becoming a frequent nightmare for employees and companies (Source: Deloitte). Even suicide rates have been steadily increasing among workers, especially in the agricultural industry (Source: Armando Meyer, tandfonline).
According to the World Health Organization, mental health issues are causing 1 trillion USD in losses every year due to productivity losses. Currently, the epidemic of depression and anxiety, and alarming suicide rates are overwhelming economies. The modern Occupational Health and Safety Manager must not only be concerned about physical safety. They also need to take care of their mental well-being. Recent pandemics, wars, and tense geopolitics have only added more concern to the occupational health and safety Manager's plate.
3. Biological: Healthcare workers are at the most risk in terms of biological hazards. The recent COVID-19 has shown the risks associated with treating patients with highly contagious diseases. As of May 2021, approximately 115,500 healthcare workers succumbed to the pandemic globally (Source: WHO). This sheds light on the need for an established safety system to safeguard healthcare workers.
However, healthcare workers are not the only ones that need such systems against biological hazards. Recent studies have shown us that our mobile phones contain the highest number of bacteria, fungus, and other pathogens. This is followed by a keyboard and then a display. This is only the case for office workers. If you consider those that are working in harsh environmental conditions, and the risk for biological hazards will go over the limits.
4. Chemical: Chemical hazards affect industry workers like workers in chemical factories, oil and gas extraction workers, miners, and agricultural workers. Even radioactive exposure can lead healthcare workers to develop cancers. For example, X-rays and elemental mercury exposure can cause serious health risks for lab technicians and dentists, respectively (Sources: PubMed PubMed).
Based on the above observations, we can conclude that every profession needs a proper analysis of health risks. With that, occupational health and safety managers need to establish countermeasures to facilitate safe working standards for professionals. Hence, the role of the occupational health and safety manager will be invaluable in the future. However, certain industry conditions, like the takeover of AI, can affect the scope of occupational health and safety management.
The future of Occupational Health and Safety Management
Laws and regulations
It is no surprise that even today, large portions of the work are being done through unethical means. Even with international concern, child labour is still rampant across the globe. Due to outsourcing and the global reach of multinational corporations, many dangerous jobs are being undertaken by children, minors, and exploited women in poor countries. Without the notice of such large corporations, or with a blind eye towards the issue, millions of jobs, potentially harmful to the exploited workers, are outsourced to third world or poor countries (Source: World Affairs).
However, this is steadily changing with the rise and fall of governments, democracies, and monarchies. Organizations like the International Labour Organization and initiatives like the Convention on the Rights of the Child have put together new laws that prohibit child labour. These are ratified by most countries in the world (Source: Web Archive, United Nations). Trade unions and labour movements are forcing governments to seriously consider the workplace health and safety of workers along with minimum wages and other benefits.
For occupational health and safety managers, identifying this exploitation might become a challenge in the future. Complying with international laws to safeguard the rights and safety of the last worker will become an important concern. Human rights movements and awareness among the workers might bring about this change sooner. However, occupational health and safety managers can do their part without such pressure in identifying the source of work in such situations.
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Learned workforce
Younger generations are increasingly pursuing higher education. With digital alternatives to traditional education, even those that have missed their formal education are considered to be returning to the digiversities. The younger population is increasingly becoming aware of the possible stiff competition in manual job roles from artificial intelligence and robots. Hence, young entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers are moving away from these possible robot-friendly industries.
Some heavily improvisable jobs, like carpentry and management jobs, are seeing a surge in popularity and opportunities. Trade schools are offering international standard teaching for manual labourers. Even with advanced AI driving systems, the logistics and Supply Chain industry cannot ignore the benefits of human drivers. Difficult terrain, vehicle repairs, and human judgement are still invaluable to driving.
With education, creative, analytical, or physical roles, mastery of the job increases. This results in higher productivity and job satisfaction for both the company and the employees. In a world increasingly seeking prestige, meaning, and job satisfaction, employees are unlikely to share their work scope and pride with a robot or software.
Technological alternatives
Whether the workforce recognises it or not, technology is getting more sophisticated every day to do human jobs more efficiently. AI is driving cars on highways, landing rockets in their orbits, predicting weather around the globe, and writing job descriptions on behalf of HR managers, to name a few. Robots are working in bomb squads, mining, surgeries, and underground rescue operations. All these advancements have greatly reduced the risk factors associated with these jobs. Robots are saving lives and limbs in many of these operations.
However, technology still has no possible restrictions on how far it can go in replacing jobs. There are many technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality that are popular competition for the human workforce. However, other seemingly unimportant, but highly transformative technological advancements like 5G and IoT can also transform the industry and workforce. The COVID-19 lockdown has been a catalyst in popularising remote jobs, freelancing, and outsourcing. According to a survey, a staggering 97% of workers preferred remote or hybrid jobs after the pandemic (Source: Flexjobs)!
Workforce trends like the need for meaning in work, the need for sunlight, and flexible work hours have all been indications of changing winds in work structures. The future of work relies on all these factors, and an occupational health and safety manager can rest assured that these trends, technologies, and problems can create new challenges in the workforce. Occupational health and safety managers will be faced with a new set of problems arising from hybrid working environments. This may also end up in labour strikes, economic boycotts, and employee mental health issues.
Productivity loss
According to the WHO, one Trillion USD is lost every year because of mental health issues in the workplace. Mental health issues were a taboo topic until recent psychological breakthroughs and their newfound relevance. Study after study has found out that mental health issues are not as uncommon as previous generations thought. There is hardly anyone anywhere that is not affected by depression, anxiety, or insomnia at some point in their lives. Substance abuse, addictions, and the like are all symptoms of underlying psychological conditions.
With the invasion of technology into manual labour, the future of occupational health and safety management might be more about the emotional and social well-being of the employees than about physical hazards.
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Climate change, natural calamities, and geopolitics
Occupational Health and Safety Management will be more important in the future with the worsening of climate change and natural disasters. It is no surprise that climate change will have adverse effects on human working environments. Heatwaves, heavy rain and snow falls, thunderstorms, rising sea levels, and low temperatures during winter are all already pointing toward the oncoming dangers of climate change. The workforce will be adversely affected during these extreme weather conditions. Travelling to and from the office might become a safety concern for office workers. Logistics and Supply Chain employees will face the adverse effects of climate change. Heatwaves will result in harsh working environments for machinery workers. Extreme weather, as well as extreme laws, will pose serious challenges for occupational health and safety managers.
COVID-19 has shown the devastating effects of a highly contagious pathogen. With thousands of such bioweapons stored in military bunkers and labs, we cannot underestimate the probability of another global biological war (Source: NCBI). Including climate change in the equation, we can be rest assured that new viral mutations can also become a new threat to working environments.
Geopolitics and global wars can also create additional challenges for occupational health and safety managers. Bioweapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons are all critical tipping points that, if uncontrolled, can spread across the globe. Nuclear winter is a popular example of this.
Globalisation and e-commerce
Along with all the above, the effects of globalisation can also create some challenges for occupational health and safety management. Globalisation has inadvertently paved the way for multinational corporations and e-commerce giants. One sub-branch of the e-commerce industry is the gig workers' platforms. As highly regarded as they are, though, for their creation of millions of jobs, they also have a darker side. Often, gig workers are overworked, underpaid, and insecure in their jobs. In many cases, taxi drivers, food delivery servicemen, and freelancers like graphic designers, writers, and programmers are being paid less than the global minimum wage (Source: Times of India).
This subsector of the e-commerce industry is largely neglected by governments. With a 350 billion dollar global gig economy, laws are expected to soon roll out (Source: Brodmin). When these workers are recognized and appreciated for their work, occupational health and safety management will soon be expanded with a sub-branch for gig workers who deserve a better working environment.
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Conclusion
The future of occupational health and safety management can be predicted with current workforce trends and technological advancements. The chaotic world will have an impact on these possibilities. While there are new challenges in providing a safe working environment are surfacing, occupational health and safety managers need to keep an extra pair of eyes on these. New government laws and climate change are going to be a major concern in the future of occupational health and safety management. As the employees are becoming educated, the patterns of the work are expected to change. Also, the gig economy is a promising industry with a new set of challenges for occupational and safety managers.
All these can challenge the well-being of the workforce in many ways. Managers in this sector can reap the benefits of its promising future. For added advantage, they can pursue a prestigious UK qualifications from SNATIKA. With dual qualifications, the shortest duration of 12 months, and ISO 9001:2015 certified admission and academic delivery processes; SNATIKA is the global leader in online UK Masters Degree programs. With just two years of managerial experience, you can apply for our advanced program and build your career faster and smarter. Check out the program right now!
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