At some of our events last year, it became clear that health, occupational health and safety, occupational safety and environmental protection are not isolated and require more than one functional area in the company. That’s why we designed this cross-divisional workshop and the idea fell on fertile ground.
Around 20 safety officers, production managers and HR managers, sustainability officers and NIRO members with associated areas of responsibility came together to find a common approach to the topic.
Right at the beginning, speaker Prof. Dr. Jochen Overbeck-Gurt, business psychologist at the South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences in Meschede, asked participants to take a picture of their mood and write down their own assessment on a flipchart: Are you healthy? How important is health to you and what do you do about it? How healthy are your employees and how do you contribute to this? And everyone was immediately on the subject.
Three keynote speeches on health, appreciation and psychological risk assessment
After a brief round of introductions, three keynote speeches dealt with the broad topic of HSSE in more detail.
Prof. Dr. Jochen Overbeck-Gurt provided the first important definitions of the concept of health with “Health – one term, lots of confusion” and classified health as a subjective competence, namely the ability to balance physical, mental and social factors. Health is not simply the absence of illness or infirmity, as we are led to believe when we visit the doctor, but a question of subjective well-being, which gives rise to numerous salutogenic starting points for health management in the company.
In his presentation, Matthias Hose, Safety Manager at OBO Bettermann Holding GmbH & Co. KG in Menden, demonstrated how important and worthy of support appreciation in the workplace is. He thoroughly debunked well-known old adages such as “Not reprimanded is praised enough” and used a number of statistics to clearly demonstrate how closely appreciation, health and the climate in the company are linked. Authentic, genuine appreciation forms an indispensable basis for good cooperation at work and managers have a major influence on this.
Prof. Dr. Jochen Overbeck-Gurt contributed the third content-related impulse and discussed “Mental health risk assessment – one tool, many myths and fears”. He gave tips and recommendations on how a psychological risk assessment can be implemented in six individual steps and which tools are already available and tried and tested.
World Café delves deeper into issues
After a short coffee break, the World Café method was used. It is well suited to addressing less comprehensive topics in a short space of time, obtaining initial assessments and engaging in discussion with several participants.
The following questions were discussed at five themed tables: Why is appreciation not received? What are the connections between error culture and appreciation? What does it take (in the company) to be able to implement a psychological risk assessment profitably? What good practice examples do you know? How can we anchor the cross-sectional task of health and safety in the company?
The participants were able to discuss this at various tables in three rounds.
Our workshop ended with a results and closing round.
The group agreed that it would like to continue working on HSSE topics. In the coming weeks, we will be looking for and selecting suitable focal points. As always, we will send out invitations to the next events promptly via NIRO Knowledge.
NIRO would like to take this opportunity to thank the two speakers, who conveyed the great importance of appreciation and health for our day-to-day work in a lively and convincing manner and shared their knowledge and experience with us.
