By Prof Hew Gill, Associate Provost, Sunway University
Over recent years, it has become increasingly common for businesses to link the three related areas of health and safety and well-being at work.
However, perhaps the most obvious difference between them is that responsibility for these areas is separated between different parts of the organization.
Most of us have come across Health and Safety Departments which are responsible for health and safety policies, procedures and standards, but how many companies have a Well-being Department?
When businesses are concerned about well-being it is almost certainly the Human Resources Department which produces any policies and line managers who are responsible for their implementation.
So even when health, safety and well-being appear in the same sentence, they are clearly treated as separate areas of activity, which prompts the obvious questions, just how and why are these areas different from each other?
Health and safety are well-established concepts, with safety at work having a history that stretches back more than 200 years to the passing of the first Factory Acts in Britain.
Concern for health at work is a more recent phenomenon that first came to prominence in 1948 when the World Health Organization defined health as the “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not only the absence of disease”.
In contrast, it was only in 1995 that the WHO produced a definition of well-being to include all the social, economic, psychological and spiritual dimensions that are required for “health, happiness, and prosperity”.
Safety at work is a legal responsibility of employers and in practical terms, safety is almost always concerned with the prevention of immediate harm by reducing potential risks.
This means safety tends to focus on external physical features of the workplace that are capable of causing injury, and on developing systems to ensure that employees don’t do things that could cause harm to themselves or their colleagues.
Identifying physical risks makes it relatively simple to assess the extent to which any particular working environment, process or procedure may be unsafe and to take the necessary corrective action to mitigate or eliminate any risks.
Occupational health is also heavily regulated and is also mostly about external factors which may cause harm, but usually, these are things that may cause illness or disability over the longer term.
Employers have a legal duty to ensure that their employees are not exposed to substances that may cause irritation or illness such as dangerous chemicals or airborne dust.
Identifying and eliminating potential health risks can often be relatively straightforward and this means there are obvious crossovers with traditional workplace safety measures.
However, occupational health may also include protecting employees from less obvious threats, such as badly designed furniture that may cause musculoskeletal problems causing pain in the joints or back.
It can also include protecting employees from bad work practices that may lead to Illness, so some would argue that occupational health should also promote positive behaviours like not sitting down for too long or taking the stairs instead of the lift.
This line of argument can quickly lead into areas that cover activities outside work and that are also matters of individual freedom. For example, within the workplace it is correct to ensure that non-smokers are not exposed to their co-workers’ tobacco smoke, but is it legitimate to prevent smokers from indulging in a legal activity? The boundaries of occupational health can sometimes be hard to define.
Although many health and safety laws require organisations to consider their employees’ well-being, rarely is well-being clearly defined and no specific legal duties are placed on employers.
This may be because unlike health and safety which are mostly about what is happening in the outer world, well-being is mostly about what happens in the inner world of subjective experience.
Well-being includes intangible things like social relationships and psychological health so the boundaries of what constitutes an employer’s responsibilities for well-being are even fuzzier than they are around occupational health.
Well-being is also about more than prevention, it is also about the promotion of “health, happiness, and prosperity”, so it is not only about eliminating risks it is about helping every employee to have a good and fulfilling life.
And perhaps this is the biggest difference of all between health and safety and well-being because there are many different opinions about what constitutes a good life.
For almost all of us, a good life will also include things outside work and this is why concepts like work-life balance are so important to our well-being – but, how many work emails during the weekend disrupt work-life balance? The answer is that it depends on who you ask.
The relative newness of the concept of well-being means that we are still working through these kinds of questions and trying to establish some general principles. As those principles begin to emerge it seems likely that legislation will follow and in the coming decades there may even be Well-Being Departments helping to ensure the employees of the future live safe, healthy, and happy lives.
Professor Hew Gill is the Associate Provost of Sunway University and joined the University after a successful multi-track career as an entrepreneur, UK politician and public servant, banker, senior business leader, and media pundit. He has served as a chair, governor, trustee and lay member of various educational, charitable and professional institutions and organisations in the UK, Singapore and Malaysia. He is an alumnus of several world-class universities including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, Leeds University Business School, and the Derek Bok Center, Harvard University. He is a frequent broadcaster and sought-after public speaker on a range of educational, business, and psychological subjects.
