workplace safety raining

Violence in the workplace is quickly becoming the buzz word of the time. Most governments are now actually considering legislation that'll force companies to manage these issues in order to improve workplace safety. Take Bill 168, in the province of Ontario Canada, that's planning to take effect on June 15, 2010.

The Bill, underneath the Health and Safety Act, requires an employer to assess the danger of workplace violence that'll arise from the character of the workplace, and the type of work or the conditions of work. The assessment must take into account common risks at other similar workplaces and risks specific to the employer's workspace. A copy of the danger assessment and its results must certanly be provided to the joint health and safety committee or health and safety representative. When there is no committee or representative, employees must certanly be advised on the best way to obtain copies of the assessment and its results and it must certanly be provided to workers on request.

An excellent strategy to remain before any legislation should include the next:
- A synopsis and comprehension of the legislation and or pending legislation that emphasize key components and legal duties of your organization.
- Recognized and approved best security practices for conducting workplace violence risk assessments.
- Putting Re-establishment violence in perspective with other security issues in your organization.
- The types of workplace violence and how each one of these requires different mitigation actions.
- Steps to creating a court defensible workplace violence program.
- Workplace Violence Risk Assessment - more than checklists.
- Written and implementation plan of effective policies and procedures that work.
- Training programs - what works and what doesn't - getting buy-in from the beginning.
- Incident management - the multidisciplinary team approach.
- Mitigating the impact of incidents to minimize the impact on your operations.
- Case management - how proper recording and analyzing incident reports can enable one to take proactive preventive steps to prevent future incidents.
- Supporting the victims of workplace violence to minimize the effect on the workplace.

There is little doubt that given the current stresses we are all confronted with, employers need to make a safer workplace because of its employees, and if it requires government intervention to take action, then count me in as a supporter.

The other day there was a news event about some child in high school that took his own life after reportedly being the victim of ongoing bullying. The school board and high profile community members setup a task force to examine what can be achieved about any of it ongoing issue in schools today. All this, just on the heels with this new Bill 168 Workplace Violence and Harassment legislation that's to take effect June 15, 2010.

Rather than gather more adults and so-called experts to see what can be put set up to manage these issues, the task force should be comprised of mostly students and the principal focus should be on HOW do we empower students to eliminate these sorts of conflicts themselves. As the old saying goes "Give the person (student) a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him/her how to fish you feed them for life ".The truth that Bill 168 and similar legislation has been needed, is evidence that students and adults were never taught how to fish for themselves.

As a society that's more and more reliant on technology and less reliant on working together with one another, schools should adopt mandatory effective communications skills. Books like Dale Carnegie's "Just how to Win Friends and Influence People" or Dr. George Thompson's "Verbal Judo" need to become area of the curriculum.

You see, since the overall game boy generation, our youngsters have already been taught that in order to win at "the overall game" you've no time for you to think; you only need to react as quickly that you can and faster than the game. That has created a generation of society that undergoes life reacting before thinking of what the results might be. We give our youngsters violence simulator and take away lots of the social programs from our school curriculum and then act all shocked when they develop violent or aggressive behaviour.