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

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
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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.