SAFETY SATURDAY: THE WORK ENVIRONMENT

And it's go boys, go

They'll time your every breath

And every day you're in this place

You're two days nearer death

But you go

- The Chemical Worker's Song, Great Big Sea

The average Australian worker travels for about thirty minutes one way to get to work each day (Both et. al., 2022). This is because for the majority of people who work, their workplace is separate to their home. For workers who do not work at home, their jobs are done in different places - offices for banking, services, and firms, in cafes, restaurants and venues where the work involves kitchen and plant used for food preparation, and on construction sites, mines, and farms where the people must be brought to the physical location of the work. Even when work is done at home, the home office, the kitchen, and the lounge are working spaces, because any space in which work is done can be a working space. The work doesn’t even need to be paid, either - housekeeping, cleaning, and the care of children and the elderly all involve physical, mental, and emotional labour. All work is done in a space, because everything needs a space to be done. Work environments are the arenas in which work is done during the working day. The median hours worked by Australian workers is 38 hours per week (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). Australian workers also report doing an average of 3.6 hours of unpaid work per week overall (The Australia Institute Center for Future Work, 2024). These are hours spent working in a place, commuting to and from a place, establishing and navigating relationships, efforts, and labours within a place, and making that place a regular part of a worker’s psycho-emotional milieu. Right now, I’m writing this article at my desk at my practice, which is a single combination treatment and consultation room. The space is light, clean, and open - there’s the faint sound of jazz music coming in from the waiting room, I’m enjoying the smell of coffee, and I am surrounded by little artistic and aesthetic objects that lend richness to my environment. This is the space in which I do my work, so I’ve made my work environment as accommodating as it can be. I have that privilege because I am my own employer, I work my own business, and I own the space in which I do my business. 

Not everyone is so lucky. 

Workplaces in Australia and globally are physical spaces where work is done. Even when work is done remotely, the worker needs to interact with tools, technology, an interface, or some other substrate to facilitate the actual doing. Work is broadly understood to be cyclical, effortful work that is directed to a purpose which may produce some economic gain for business, (Kasl, 1973). This physical space is the physical location where a worker does their job, so that space will naturally have the tools for the worker to do their work, and be arranged in such a way as to allow that worker to do that job in as frictionless a manner as possible. The physical environment is not just an office - where workers need specific machinery, they must go to this machinery and do their work. You can’t run a lathe in an office cubicle. You can’t run a commercial kitchen in a loungeroom. You can’t run a tax firm in a quarry. Businesses manage the physical work environment - controlling things like light (Borisuit et. al., 2015), temperature, humidity (Akimoto, 2010), noise (Toftum et. al., 2012) and the arrangement of the space to maximise the worker’s productivity while providing for their comfort. In this way, locating work in a building or warehouse isolates the working environment from the external environment, keeping distractions, discomfort, and danger outside and keeping the worker and their work inside, as well as hazardous by-products of work like noise and dust, which are in line with business operators’ obligations (Safe Work Australia, 2024). Physically separating environments makes sure that there are physical boundaries between work and the outside world. However, having boxed the worker in, it’s important to remember that the worker is still a person with human needs (Citation needed). The working environment is where the work that must be done meets the people who must do the work, who are given the tools they need to enable them to do the work in a comfortable way. This might seem self-explanatory, but often, the way work is designed just sort of happens or evolves over time (WorkSafe Queensland, 2021). The key word in that statement is design - because to design something is to make a series of decisions, consciously and unconsciously, about something with the intention of achieving an end, and then to act on them. The sum effect of those decisions is experienced by the worker, and can impact their motivations, satisfaction, and their performance (Newman, 1977). 

The theory of the Perceived Work Environment suggests that a person’s behaviour is a function of that person and their environment. The work environment isn’t just physical in terms of the space being navigated or the temperature or the noise. The work environment is psychological and psychosocial (Nieuwenhuijsen et. al., 2010), and if the worker perceives that the psychological environment is unsafe, they may experience fatigue and burnout (Aronsson et. al., 2017). The work environment is organisational in terms of hierarchy, occupational with respect to the work being done, relational with regards to a person’s team, and a person’s perceptions of their work environment can change depending on their position within an organisation (Zigarmi et. al., 2019). The work environment includes the information, training, instruction and support that are provided to a worker (Bluff, 2019) and their ability to make decisions about those resources and how to do their jobs (Theorell et. al., 2015). All of these drivers: the physical environment, the organisation of work, the composition of teams and the resources provided, are the result of decisions that were made consciously, unconsciously, all at once or little by little, whose cumulative effect gives rise to the worker’s environment. Where the work environment provides resources, support, and protects the worker’s health, the working environment can be used as a performance and health enabler (Donald et. al., 2005). Where the work environment imposes demands on the worker that they cannot meet, where the work environment is physically unsafe or operationally disorganised or unclear, the workers’ performance, health, and wellbeing all suffer (Massoudi & Hamdi, 2017). Overwork, role stressors, working nights and overtime, poor quality leadership, aggression and bullying, and low job control are all identified as work environment products that increase the risk of mental health illnesses (Kelloway & Day, 2005). If jobs are designed with with few rest break opportunities, high work pace, excess manual material handling, are highly monotonous, or have other similar biomechanical risks, then work-related musculoskeletal disorders are likely to occur (Punnett & Wegman, 2004). The worker may be separated from the outside world, but they are still within the work environment, which can be as threatening or as health-degrading as standing in the middle of a field during a thunderstorm. 

Workers’ relationships to their work environments are grounded in their perceptions about their work, their workplaces, their teams, and themselves (Cox & Ferguson, 1994). Perception is an individual prerogative, and cannot be controlled by an external actor, only influenced. Work processes and environments do not arise in a vacuum - they are the end result of decisions, time, and operations. Hazards within the work environment can arise from the design or management of work, plant, workplace interactions or behaviours, as well as occupational load. Where work processes exist as a result of design decisions, protecting the worker by modifying their work environment becomes a matter of good work design (Safe Work Australia, 2015a). Safe Work Australia’s Work Health and Safety Strategy 2023-2033 (2023) encourages persons conducting business undertakings (which includes managers, workers, contractors, and stakeholders associated with the job and work tasks) to consider the needs of workers to in designing safe systems of work, where they specifically state that “good work design involves incorporating Work Health and Safety considerations into workplaces and organisations from the ground up.” If the work environment is the encompassing basis for workers’ performance, then design is the basis of a good working environment. Safe Work Australia uses this discussion as an opportunity to state that Good Work is where the work design optimises human performance, satisfaction, and productivity by not only protecting workers from harm to health but improving worker health and wellbeing, and therefore improving business success through improved worker satisfaction, encouraging business operators to start incorporating good work considerations into the conceptual and planning phases of the work to design out hazards (Safe Work Australia, 2015b). However, workplaces and work tasks are dynamic - they change with time, with the constitution of work, and with the people doing the work even if the basic work process stays the same. Where a business or organisation can, they should consult with workers or stakeholders in the basic design of premises and working spaces. Assessing the physical features of the work environment such as entry and exit, lighting, temperature, and noise from work-related or outside processes gives duty holders the opportunity to eliminate hazards definitively instead of reactively (Vischer, 2007a). Failure to do so may result in environmental demands being met by employees using their own resources, time, and energy, which would more ideally be directed toward doing their work. Where a worker needs to continuously leverage their own resources to meet environmental or occupational demands, a worker’s health may be degraded (Hafeez et. al., 2019). Proactively designing a protective working environment for a worker decreases the worker’s exposure to hazards and accumulated stress, and by improving their satisfaction can also have indirect benefits toward worker performance through the perceived management of worker needs (Budie et. al., 2019), which itself is an antecedent of perceived organisational support (Eisenberger et. al., 1986). Managing the work environment through good work design gives the business an opportunity to improve their workplace performance by optimising worker productivity, workgroup cohesion, and output (Vischer, 2007b). In short, a good working environment is one which weights the balance of contention in favour of the worker, providing them with tools, time, and a team that is willing to work alongside and with them to achieve their goals. 

The notion of what constitutes a safe and supportive working environment will differ between workplace parties, industries, and with different occupational background (Borys et. al., 2012). The question might be asked as to how a construction site can be turned into a healthy working environment. Every occupational environment, whether at home, in the office, or on a job site, whether a worker works alone or in a team, whether the worker needs to lift or sit, and whether the work is paid or unpaid, carries an inherent risk. This is further complicated by the fact that a worker’s relationship to their work environment is largely based on perception. Therefore, a worker’s relationship to the risks they experience is based on their perception as well (Leiter, 2005). A worker may not perceive something as a hazard, so may not believe that there is a risk, and consequently not take reasonable steps to address what may or may not arise from that exposure. Safe Work Australia recommends consultation with workers to give those workers the opportunity to contribute to decisionmaking about health and safety matters as well as weigh in on work design (Safe Work Australia, 2022). If work processes and practices arise from work design, and work design is the decision set that has been undertaken before a task is done, then adding workers’ contributions and considerations to this informational ecosystem best positions the business and its workers to assess, manage, and minimise risk, whether that risk is physical, psychosocial, or operational. The same document, The Model Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work (2022), notes that job demands, tasks and systems as well as the layout of environmental conditions are the product of work design, and workers themselves may have contributions that can be useful in minimising harm. Consulting with workers and engaging with their concerns can improve their enthusiasm for work (Addison et. al., 2000), their solution creativity (Amabile et. al., 1996), job satisfaction (Røssberg, et. al., 2004), and their safety (Simao et. al., 2021). Work processes may develop organically or within boundaries defined by organisational and operational goals, but by engaging with the worker who is doing the work, future work may be informed by and engage with the capacity of the worker as much as the demands of the work.

Working people bring themselves to work. In doing so, they leverage their physical and cognitive capabilities, their training, their experience, and their individual creativity when they complete their duties of work. In doing so, they contend with physical, mental, organisational, and psychological strain for the durations of their working times, which are multiplied out over their days, weeks, and the years of their working lives. These stressors are the product of a system of work that is designed either implicitly or explicitly, and so which may have understood or unknown effects on the workers’ health. Work systems are, most often, organically developed as the function of a business’ growth and increased complexity. By planning and designing work using conscious decisionmaking that accounts for the workers’ capabilities, limitations and needs, work systems and workplaces have an opportunity to develop healthy and protective work environments. Every system that exists is a system that was designed by people, and the features of that system were decided upon either deliberately or inadvertently. Office work, carpentry, hospitality, education, the labour market, and international trade function the way that they do as the consequence of design decisions that have led to their present state. By engaging with proactively protective practices with respect to working and living environments, people have an opportunity to challenge the inherent assumptions within the systems in which they operate. A good working environment isn’t just about a good workplace - good working environments are homes, streets, suburbs, transportation systems and communities. To uphold the good of the individual is to engage with the good of the community, in a measured, mindful, and meaningful way. 

None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription. 

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