Creating a Safe and Healthy Workplace: Strategies for Employers and Employees

This paper provides an insight into different ways by which an organization can create safe workplace and the main areas of focus are job design and culture of well-being. It also discusses the role of employers and employees in maintaining profitability in the workplace.

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1HEALTH CARE
Introduction:
Employees in workplace may be exposed to many hazards such as environmental hazards
and work related hazards that may hamper their productivity and intention to stay in the job.
According to the human resource management (HRM) process and practice, creating a safe and
health work environment is critical for success of the organization and maintaining a strong
bottom line. The importance of maintaining a safe and health workplace is also realized because
of its advantage in increasing staff moral, work engagement and productivity. Hence, it can be
said that safe working condition is linked to employee satisfaction and better work performance.
This paper provides an insight into different ways by which an organization can create safe
workplace and the main areas of focus are job design and culture of well-being.
Healthy workplace:
Development of a healthy workplace is dependent on the joint action of both employers
and employee. To achieve the vision of a safe and productive, the main duty for the employers
will be to develop appropriate work designs, implement guidelines for compliance to workplace
safety, develop employees and create a culture of well-being for them. Instead of dominating
employees, employers need to employ strategies that make employees feel more valued and
confident. By embracing relationship building strategies like sharing information and engaging
employees in decision making and seeking different point of views from audience, the workplace
can be made more productive. Setting legal framework for actions to be taken in response to
workplace discrimination and incidence of injury is also important (Jonathan & Mbogo, 2016).
For example certain laws like Human Rights Act and Labor Standards Act provides legal
directions to respond to incidence of harassment and injuries in workplace. In contrast, an

2HEALTH CARE
employee has the duty to be committed to fulfill the vision of the organization. They should be
encouraged to actively take a stand when they find the workplace vulnerable or when they want
to report about any risk to work engagement. Having a positive attitude is important to maintain
employee morale and achieve career goals.
There are several examples too that gives a vision of safety and productive workplace for
employers and employee. A study investigating about employer’s perspective on the promotion
of workplace health and well-being has revealed that employers believed avoidance of accidents
and injuries are important to reduce unnecessary stress and maintain work-life balance. They
believed in keeping healthy workers at workplace as this would contribute to greater level of
safety, increased productivity and positive attitude towards work (Pescud et al., 2015). Hence,
any workplace health and well-being initiative can be successful when target employers have
positive perception about the importance of safety workplace. In addition, from the perspective
of employees, it has been found that employees welcome workplace health and well-being
initiatives and report that such initiatives lead to positive work outcome for them such as
resilience, engagement, organizational commitment and employee engagement (Nichol, 2015).
The bottom Line:
Organizations can ensure profitability while maintain healthy workplace by modifying
organization culture and creating a culture of well-being. This is likely to produce many positive
work related outcomes because it leads to collective sharing of vision and responsibilities and
higher level of performance and commitment. By implementing strategies like embracing
employee’s opinion, increasing career development opportunities, providing resource and
flexible work schedules, leaders can enhance employee engagement and raise productivity.

3HEALTH CARE
Evidence also suggest that when an organization focus on celebration of progress and taking
regular feedback from employee, such employees are committed and engaged in workplace.
Hence, this would directly translate to high productivity and new achievements too (Zhong,
Wayne & Liden, 2016). Other tactics that are needed by an organization to ensure profitability is
taking steps to minimize additional cost incurred due to workplace injury. Regular workplace
inspection and hazard assessment can be done to modify infrastructure and eliminate factors that
may contribute to health and safety risk for employees (Schulte et al., 2015).
Despite the positive impact of health workplace on profitability, the issue is that many
organization strategies to increase profitability do not go hand in hand. For example, while
making effort to reduce workplace injuries, an organization might have to invest huge amount of
money and implement practice changes. This form of changes may also lead to protest from
employee’s and rejection of new proposal for change (Wong, Gray & Sadiqi, 2015). Hence,
unless these uncertainties are managed properly, often effort to improve profitability cannot
guarantee development of a healthy and safe workplace. Therefore, careful consideration of all
importance factors that may facilitate productivity as well as employee well-being is needed.
Conclusion:
The paper summarized about the importance of creating and safe and productive
workplace and gave idea about the role of employers and employees in maintain profitability in
workplace. The presentation of different arguments suggest that strong HRM strategies and
process is needed to make workplace aligned to the needs of employee and foster those factors
that lead to employee engagement and productivity. However, certain barriers in the process
need to be systematically identified and addressed.

4HEALTH CARE
References:
Jonathan, G. K., & Mbogo, R. W. (2016). Maintaining Health and Safety at Workplace:
Employee and Employer's Role in Ensuring a Safe Working Environment. Journal of
Education and Practice, 7(29), 1-7.
Nichol, A. P. (2015). Examining employees perceptions of workplace health & well-being
promotion initiatives. Retrieved from: https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/10592
Pescud, M., Teal, R., Shilton, T., Slevin, T., Ledger, M., Waterworth, P., & Rosenberg, M.
(2015). Employers’ views on the promotion of workplace health and wellbeing: a
qualitative study. BMC public health, 15(1), 642.
Schulte, P. A., Guerin, R. J., Schill, A. L., Bhattacharya, A., Cunningham, T. R., Pandalai, S.
P., ... & Stephenson, C. M. (2015). Considerations for incorporating “well-being” in
public policy for workers and workplaces. American journal of public health, 105(8),
e31-e44.
Wong, J. Y. Y., Gray, J., & Sadiqi, Z. (2015). Barriers to Good Occupational Health & Safety
(OHS) Practices by Small Construction Firms. Journal of Construction
Management, 30(I), 55-66.
Zhong, L., Wayne, S. J., & Liden, R. C. (2016). Job engagement, perceived organizational
support, high‐performance human resource practices, and cultural value orientations: A
cross‐level investigation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(6), 823-844.

5HEALTH CARE