Importance of Health and Safety

In the construction industry, health and safety is extremely important. The goal of every company is to have workers leave work at the end of the day in the same condition as they were in the morning when they arrived. This is stressed mostly through the evaluation of physical hazards. Mitigating risks like fall hazards, struck-by hazards, caught by hazards, and shock or electrocution hazards. But what about physiological hazards. Stress can be a big problem for employees and can silently wear down employees. In my experience, stress is something that is talked about in the workplace but never actually addressed. And what I mean by “never addressed” is we don’t see the same level of training as we do for physical hazards. There is no OSHA 10 or OAHA 30 for dealing with stress. I do not think I have even been in a meeting where stress is formally talked about. However, I do remember in one of my many life skills chats with my manager over the summer he mentioned stress. He said that if I did not have a way to relieve stress already that I need to figure one out. He said that our jobs and industry are naturally stressful and if you can’t deal with it then stress will eat you up. He said that he uses fishing to relieve stress. I am still working on what my stress reliever is going to be and I think about this often. Especially when I get worked up about something small. The day-to-day decisions I go through and the risk I take as a college student are not even in the same ballpark as the decisions I’ll make once I start my job. Some things that I could suggest to my employer to help develop a stress program are developing a wellness program, clearly defining roles and responsibilities, a protocol for dealing with mistakes and failures, and reassessing how jobs are designed to see if anyone’s role is carrying too much weight. After taking the surveys in this weeks learning materials the only thing that stood out to me was my coping and stress malmanagement score was 84 and called problem-focused coping. It said in my summary that my biggest stresses are going to be when problems are out of my control. And my Type A personality test score was 57 and from what I gathered from the summary is that is kind of an inbetweener score. It said that I can switch back and forth between type A and B. Which means I can use all the useful skills from both personalities but I also get all the negative skills from both.