Brave new workplace - Health and Safety at Work magazine | HSW

Brave new workplace

14 October 2008
Becky Allen

How will the world of health and safety have changed in 10 years' time? Becky Allen looks at two attempts by researchers to model the shape of things to come.

It's 2017. Protesters are on the streets of London again, this time not demonstrating against war or climate change but fighting "personal augmentation" and "human performance enhancement". West Nile Virus has broken out in the UK, the US has signed the Kyoto Protocol, and the HSE has won a major contract to develop a safety executive for China - a country in political meltdown.

It may sound like science fiction, but it's not. Called the "digital rose garden", this is one of four future scenarios the HSE is using to explore what health and safety challenges might face practitioners in 10 years' time, and how to plan policy accordingly.

The HSE developed the scenarios with the help of futures researcher Dr Wendy Schultz of Infinite Futures and SAMI Consulting. They built the visions using two sources of information: "hot topics" identified by the HSE's own horizon-scanning team and issues highlighted in a series of interviews with 28 health and safety experts. From these, two themes emerged - public attitudes to risk, or the so-called "blame culture", and the UK's
competitiveness in the global economy - which, because of their importance and uncertainty, were tipped to play a major role in shaping health and safety 10 years hence.

Coming up roses

In the "digital rose garden" scenario, the UK is a strong player in the global economy and public attitudes to risk are more relaxed. According to the report, "People are channeling their inner Edmund Hillary... It's the age of cool explorers and new adventures; risks are acknowledged, weighed, and managed in cooperative public-private partnerships that enable a continuous stream of responsible innovation."

As a result, the UK is gripped by a "renewed, cohesive spirit of innovation [that] looks likely to create the 'Roaring Twenties' of the 21st century". Offshoring is declining, the UK is experiencing a brain gain, people are more politically engaged and there is open debate about the impact of new technology on health and safety at work. Health and safety is built in at the design phase and there is more automated health and safety monitoring and control.

According to this scenario, the lines between the workplace and everywhere else have become blurred and regulatory structures simplified. "Streamlining the health and safety regulatory structure opened space for more flexible responses to health and safety issues," the report says.

At the other end of the spectrum, things are far from rosy. In the "tough choices" scenario, life in the UK is nasty, brutish and getting shorter. Major events marking the 10 years to 2017 include a major economic downturn and a massive TB outbreak that brings the NHS to its knees. At work, the public is shocked to discover that the workers killed in a huge accident in Liverpool, dubbed "the industrial Morecambe Bay", had been injected with subcutaneous radio-frequency identification (RFID) inventory tags by their gangmasters.

Faced with a declining economy, the best and the brightest young people flee abroad. Innovation slows, unemployment soars, low-end jobs are filled by migrant workers. Only social division, alienation and gang membership are on the up. "News from urban neighbourhoods looks like coverage of civil war... Analysts worry that the UK is on the brink of complete societal breakdown; new data suggests increased malnutrition and declining life expectancy," says the report.

In this darkest of the four scenarios, the police is the only expanding branch of government. Health and safety regulations are stripped bare and the media are reporting an epidemic of workplace accidents in the UK. According to the report: "Old machinery, worn flooring, jerry-rigged wiring and over-taxed ventilation and exhaust systems combine to create health hazards and the potential for accidents... Underreporting of health and safety failures in the workplace is rife - and the system in any case lacks the resources for anything more than low-level interventions and the investigation of serious incidents."

Back to the future

The scenarios may make entertaining reading (see end of article for the remaining two) but they could help the HSE think about how it might respond to future health and safety issues.

"These scenarios are not predictions, or even forecasts; they are stories and descriptions that explore possible future outcomes and thus inform strategic conversations ... they help us explore the boundaries of uncertainty defined by specified drivers of change," explains the report.

However, as business guru Peter Drucker says, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. "Scenario thinking assists that strategy by sparking discussion and dialogue about potential futures, exploring bands of possibility that may then be monitored for emerging probability - and evaluated for preferability," the report adds.

The use of scenario building together with more traditional horizon-scanning and Delphi questionnaires is increasingly common in government. In 2006, for example, the UK government published a series of 246 horizon scans covering everything from the impact of financial shocks in international currency markets to the implications of a greying workforce. Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser at the time, said: "Government has to identify opportunities and risks at least five to 10 years ahead when making policy. It can then make decisions that might move us from an unfavourable to favourable scenario."

And these methods are also used by strategists in other businesses. "Corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Swiss Re and Unilever have all used scenario planning," notes the HSE report.

The second major exercise to envision future work and workplaces - and their impact on health and safety - was conducted by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Published in 2005, it involved 60 experts from 14 European countries and concentrated on emerging physical risks related to occupational health and safety.

Emerging risks

Through a three-round Delphi questionnaire, the experts came up with a list of the most important physical risks likely to face workers in coming years. To be included in the list, the risks had to be both new - that is, previously non-existent - and increasing.

According to the experts, top emerging risks to workers will be physical inactivity, the impact of increasingly complex new technologies, and growing vulnerability of those in low-status jobs, for example to thermal risks.

Thermal risks, the experts decided, are likely to become increasingly important for several reasons. "The exponential increase of cold and freezing work environments, especially in the food and transportation sectors, is not being followed by an equal increase in our knowledge of the possible long-term health effects of working in these environments," the experts say. "One issue of concern is risks during pregnancy. A further issue is inaccurate reporting procedures: when a worker in a food preparation cold store cuts his hand, this is recorded as manual handling injury and not as a cold-induced injury."

Multifactoral risks

The report also points to a new underlying trend: the increasing influence of factors acting together to create health and safety problems - so called "multifactoral risks".

Looking at musculoskeletal disorders, for example, though many of the risks (such as static postures, repetitive movements and awkward postures) are neither new nor emerging, the experts say they deserve a place on the list because they are likely to be magnified by other things.

According to the report, "Human, social and organizational factors... such as 'job insecurity' and 'fear of the future' resulting from the unstable labour market, accentuate the effect of physical risk factors such as poor ergonomic design, thus contributing to an increase in the incidence of MSDs. 'Longer working hours', 'increased work-pace' and 'older working age' were also singled out as emerging risks that lead to MSDs."

Similarly, noise exposure needs to be considered in tandem with chemicals that can damage hearing - so-called ototoxins.

Exposure to low-level noise should also be reassessed, the experts say, despite the introduction of the new lower thresholds set in the 2003 EU Directive (which was translated into UK law as the Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005). "The exposure to noise levels below the limit value is also perceived as an emerging risk leading to fatigue and inefficiency, which may increase the occurrence of occupational accidents," says the report. "Low-level noise in open-plan offices generated by equipment such as photocopiers, computers or ventilation systems, or by the ringing of a telephone, impairs concentration and communication and increases the workers' mental and emotional strain."

The report has implications for both health and safety policy and practice. According to the agency's director, Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, "Multifactoral and combined risks are a growing concern. The resulting message for policymakers and health and safety experts is that we can no longer treat individual risks separately. What we need is a holistic approach to risk prevention."

And this is perhaps the key message of both the European Agency's and the HSE's crystal-ball gazing. The issue is not believing that we can predict the future through these exercises, but that in the increasingly complex and fast-changing world of work, we need ways of thinking about possible futures and whether we have the type of health and safety systems necessary to cope with them.

The research report with the HSE's more and less apocalyptic visions for the near future is HSE Futures Scenario Building: The Future of Health and Safety in 2017 (RR600), available at www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr600.pdf The European Agency's Expert Forecast on Emerging Physical Risks Related to Occupational Safety and Health is at www.osha.europa.eu/en/publications/reports/6805478

Alternative futures

Scenario 3: Boom and blame
Forget sustainability - in this scenario the UK in 2017 is a dog-eat-dog place. Safety and environmental regulation has loosened - along with anything else that gets in the way of competition.

At work, the tightest cyber-security systems are the preserve of human resources departments. Companies routinely genetically profile prospective employees and implant workers with RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags to "help" people stay healthy and productive. In 2017, more than 1200 become ill because of infected RFID tags.

To boost productivity, as well as food and drink, the works canteen offers a range of performance-enhancing drugs and life has lost out to work in the work-life balance equation. Stress tops the health agenda, along with respiratory infections triggered by worsening air quality.

Scenario 4: A virtue of necessity
Britain now resembles one huge seaside town - and not in a good way. Young workers have emigrated leaving an even more aged population. Forced to reject consumerism and become more self-sufficient, people are once again having to "dig for victory". Community responsibility has replaced the anti-social behaviour order.

Following race riots and civil disobedience during the 2011 general election, in the run-up to London 2012, the International Olympic Committee decided that it would hold the first human-performance-enhanced Olympics.

"What bodes well for a future revitalisation of UK competitiveness is a national mood of adventure," says the report. "Britons are responding to the current challenges with resilience and creativity, working together to innovate and create new businesses and renew their communities."

Small, local and home-based businesses have replaced large corporations but many businesses have cut and run, offshoring R&D and production. In health and safety, immersive monitoring systems track people's health and stress levels throughout the day. "The bell curve of workplace health and safety has widened and flattened; we see more exemplary practices, but also more reports of businesses attempting to fly under the regulatory radar to save costs," says the report.," says the report.

Crystal-ball gazing for dummies

Horizon scanning is a way of uncovering emerging issues of change. Dr Wendy Schultz describes it as "a useful radar for identifying areas of approaching uncertainty."
Scenario building - also called scenario planning or scenario thinking - is used in corporate and policy settings to help manage uncertainty.
The Delphi method, named after Greece's most famous oracle, was developed by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s as a way of forecasting the impact of technology on warfare during the cold war. It is a systematic, interactive forecasting method involving a panel of experts. Individuals do not meet, but respond to a series of questionnaires. Feedback is provided between each round to help the group reach consensus.