What is the future of work? British Safety Council hosts roundtable to find out

A much greater focus on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace – particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic – together with more flexible working practices and the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) brings a new set of challenges for employers that legislators in the 1970s could not have dreamt of. With that, however, comes a wealth of opportunities to improve people’s lives and make workplaces even safer – both physically and psychologically – across the next 50 years.

Photograph: iStock/CentralITAlliance

British Safety Council’s Future of Work Roundtable, chaired by Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) chief executive Nathan Baker, brought together a panel of six workplace health and safety experts from across the training, legal, technology, auditing and trade union spectrum for a lively and informative conversation about the impacts of the Health and Safety at Work Act and what the world of work could look like in the years to come.

The participants agreed that the 1974 Act had provided a strong framework from which to build and was instrumental in bringing down the number of work-related fatalities and non-fatal injuries, but that there is much more work to do to keep people safe and well, as workplaces continue to adapt to a changing world.

“The global challenges we face are massive, but back in 1974 we faced a challenge which the Health and Safety at Work Act was trying to address,” said IOM’s Baker, pointing out that the number of fatalities in the workplace dropped by 85 per cent between 1974 and 2015, while non-fatal figures fell by 77 per cent. “We still lose 35 million days a year in the workplace due to ill health and injury. So, I think the Health and Safety at Work Act was a good starting point, but there is much to do.”

Health and wellbeing challenges

British Safety Council chairman, Peter McGettrick, agreed that there is still a considerable amount of work to do, particularly on the health and wellbeing front.

“I still see, from a British Safety Council perspective in the work that we do internationally and domestically, the challenges that people face in the workplace – both short-term and long-term – and I think it’s a great opportunity to reflect on the progress that we’ve made in the past 50 years since the Health and Safety at Work Act,” said McGettrick. “But also, there is much work to do to improve some of those areas that perhaps don’t have the same focus or coverage as fatalities and workplace incidents.”

British Safety Council hosted its Future of Work Roundtable in central London on 8 July.

Dee Arp, chief operating officer at NEBOSH, who also participated in the roundtable, said the Health and Safety at Work Act had provided a “great framework” but there is a great deal still to be done.

“I always think whenever we mention statistics that for every one of those numbers, there’s a person, there’s a family and there are friends,” noted Arp. “In addition to that, there are all the mental health issues that we know are not significantly reported. So, we’ve made great progress but there is much to do.”

Also emphasising the importance of addressing mental and other health issues, Janet Newsham, chair of the Hazards Campaign at the Greater Manchester Hazards Centre, said: “From our perspective, the Health and Safety at Work Act is fantastic and it’s done some really good things, but there are still more than 50,000 people dying each year because of work-related exposures to hazardous and toxic substances, and the ever-increasing mental health crisis that we’ve got.

“We don’t know the true numbers of people who die from work-related suicide but, as an estimate, we say it’s probably 10 per cent of suicides in the country. It’s never reported – it’s not reportable – and it’s not investigated, so there’s a long way to go to keep people safe.”

Moving into the 21st century, there has been a “realignment of health and safety topics away from what we historically had, which was very much focused on safety, safety, safety, and we started to see pre-pandemic a move in towards health”, observed British Safety Council’s head of audit and consultancy, Phil Pinnington.

He added: “I think that’s continuing with wellbeing, mental health, stress management and things like that, and I think things are moving in multiple directions, in a way that those who wrote the 1974 Act would never have thought about when they wrote it.”

Pictured (L-R) Nathan Baker, Sean Elson, David Sharp, Janet Newsham, Phil Pinnington, Dee Arp, Peter McGettrick. Photograph: British Safety Council

Indeed, from a legal perspective, Sean Elson, a partner at Pinsent Masons, said that there has been a significant rise in recent years in the amount of work the law firm has taken on in relation to mental and occupational health issues.

“Something we’re now doing regularly that 10 years ago was unthinkable is we’ve been instructed by a number of academic institutions and inquests in relation to student deaths by suicide, and that’s a very hot topic in that particular sector. At the same time, people are then asking questions from an employment point of view [such as] ‘you’re placing a lot of emphasis on the students; what about the staff?’” said Elson. “That’s a topic that we would never have been involved in and asked about – and the same with occupational health.

“I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and up until very recently, we were never asked anything about occupational health.”

Elson believes there is work to be done to change employers’ mindsets when it comes to treating mental health issues in the workplace.

“One of the hobbyhorses I have is if a company has an incident where someone falls off something and breaks their neck, everybody recognises that for what it is and all the infrastructure internally swings into action,” observed Elson. “I say to clients, if you have three members of the same team going off with stress-related conditions, do you do the same thing? Would you start with an investigation as if someone had a broken leg? And the answer, of course, is no. It’s treated much more as an HR or personnel issue.

“So, I think there is still a great deal to be done regarding people’s mindsets on how they treat this issue alongside safety.”

McGettrick pointed to the work British Safety Council has done in the past to improve workplace health and safety, and its strong focus today on wellbeing.

“I think it’s worth reflecting on the 60-odd years that British Safety Council has been agitating for change as a force for good. Our founder, James Tye, was instrumental in agitating the government of the time to set up a royal commission, which ultimately led to the Robens Report that led to the Health and Safety at Work Act,” he said. “If you fast-forward 50 years, in recent years we’ve been agitating for wellbeing to be at the heart of health and safety.

“Recently, we’ve called on Sir Keir Starmer in his new Government to put a Minister for Wellbeing in the cabinet. Sadly, that didn’t happen but we’re going to continue to agitate for the need to put wellbeing at the heart of health and safety.”

The impact of AI

David Sharp, the founder and chief executive of digital learning provider International Workplace – who holds a Masters degree in AI Ethics and Society from the University of Cambridge and who wrote recently for Safety Management about AI and its impact on worker wellbeing – said during the roundtable discussion that the focus on health and wellbeing has been “one of the more positive shifts” in recent times.

He also said the changed working practices that came about during the pandemic, along with the introduction of AI and its impact on work, could never have been envisaged when the Health and Safety at Work Act was written.

“The risks now are different from the risks 20, 30 or 50 years ago,” said Sharp. “From my point of view, there’s a lack of awareness of the implications of where we are. We’re in the middle of a moment. I personally think everything is very over-hyped around AI and I think we’ll probably look back in 10 years’ time on this moment and think that we all went a little bit crazy, and that we were all trying to do too much, and we lost focus on the people at the expense of the technological solution.”

YouGov survey reflects uncertainty about the role technology might play in shaping workplaces of the future. Photograph: iStock/shylendrahoode

A survey on technology and the future of work, conducted in May by YouGov on behalf of British Safety Council, found that both employers and employees are generally optimistic about the impact new technologies, such as AI, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), could have on their workforces and workplaces. The survey found that 63 per cent of 2,006 employers and 41 per cent of 2,012 employees felt optimistic.

More than a quarter (26 per cent) of employers and employees alike reported a belief that AI would make the workplace less safe over the next decade, while 26 per cent of employers and 13 per cent of employees said they believed that AI could make workplaces safer. These conclusions, said the survey report, “reflect uncertainty about what the future may hold and what role technology might play in shaping the safe workplaces of the future”.

The roundtable’s chair, Nathan Baker, agreed that “there’s a lot of confusion and we are at the start of our understanding of AI”, while Sharp observed: “If you replace the word AI with statistics it really takes the sexiness out of it, and that’s not a bad thing to do.”

He added: “When I view AI, my first question is always, why do we need it and what’s the benefit here? Who are the people who are negatively impacted by it? That’s the question that so often does not get asked.”

NEBOSH’s Arp agreed that “in this fast-moving space, it goes right back to the people”. She asked: “How is [AI] helping people and what do we need to give people to help them embrace these huge, unprecedented changes?” While everybody can remember a teacher who made a difference to them, noted Arp, “in 10 years’ time, is somebody going to say, ‘I remember a chatbot or a piece of AI or tech that helped me on the way’? AI hasn’t got that empathy, and it hasn’t got a conscience”.

Flexible working

Technology aside, the future of work has some “interesting twists and turns”, particularly when it comes to flexible working and the changed relationship between employers and employees since the pandemic, according to McGettrick.

Regarding flexible working practices, Elson sounded a note of caution over the danger of creating two classes of workforce – one that has the “luxury of working from their bedrooms and one that doesn’t”. There is also a “trade-off” for people who do work remotely, he added, in the form of the “isolation and mental health issues of spending five days a week in your own bedroom, never seeing another human being”.

An important point to recognise when thinking about the future of work, said Sharp, is that “we’re in control of the narrative and it’s not being done to us”.

If we can indeed control the narrative, in an active engagement sense, added Baker, “we can create a workplace that is fit for the future”. He concluded: “I believe that in 10, 15, 20 years’ time, the workforce will be more agile, more able, more capable, but only if we’ve enabled them to have the conversation, included them in that conversation and given them that equal voice.” 

To watch a short video on British Safety Council’s Future of Work Roundtable, visit:

tinyurl.com/4vv8new5

To read a summary of the YouGov survey findings, visit:

tinyurl.com/3nwwm74u