Relevance: All States and Territories
Industries: All Industries; all Businesses
Keywords: Maintenance; stress; psychosocial hazards; shift work; workin alone
This material will shortly be found as a Fact Sheet on Workplace Safety Australia’s website
This material was sourced from EASHW
This story – examining the issue of psychosocial hazards in relation to maintenance work. As we pointed out last week, maintenance occurs in most industries and businesses and encompasses a huge range of different tasks in different work environments.
Most of this information is based upon a recent important study released by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, but is relevant to maintenance work in Australia also. We note that there are numerous Fact Sheets on Workplace Safety Australia’s website relating to the issues we cover in these stories, and we have reported on a huge number of stories in relation to these issues over the past decade. Where relevant we will point readers to the relevant Fact sheets that will provide further specific information on the OHS hazards discussed.
During maintenance work, the productivity of an organisation is cut back and there is an urgency to restart activities as soon as possible. This can put considerable pressure on maintenance workers to complete their tasks. Time pressure and poor work organisation may lead to excessive stress. Moreover, working with contractors can sometimes lead to communication problems.
According to European studies, the following psychosocial issues may impose a problem for maintenance workers:
• Complex problems have to be solved under time pressure. During maintenance work, the productivity of an organisation is cut back. There is an urgency to restart activities as soon as possible because production has to go on and people are waiting to resume their work. This can put a lot of pressure on maintenance workers, causing stress and increasing the probability of making mistakes and accidents. In additionally, unfavourable working conditions such as, for example, excessive heat may increase the level of stress;
• Shift work, weekend work, night work, on-call work and irregular working hours can lead to stress, or mental health problems sleeping problems, fatigue, lack of work-life balance, obesity, etc.;
• Workers have to deal with complex problems in non-routine situations. Nowadays technologies are very complex and require specific knowledge by the workers who manipulate and repair them. Maintenance workers also often work on dangerous machines that do not have an adapted human-machine interface (e.g. information from displays is not clear, unreadable scales, controls not known or not in reach);
· Working with workers from contractors can lead to communication difficulties;
• Lone work/isolated work can lead to uncertainty and fear, lack of coaching and social support. When an accident happens, maintenance workers have to rely on their ability to help themselves. In case of serious accidents, it may take time until a colleague discovers the worker. When working alone, no-one knows where the worker is located exactly in the machine or installation. So if the nature, planning and location of the work are not well communicated to the operators, the chance of an accident is high;
• Exposure to unexpected/unknown safety and health risks;
• Maintenance activities can often be found at the bottom of the hierarchy in terms of respect, influence and authority. Furthermore, maintenance work is often considered as mostly manual labour, which requires little or no mental work. This may give maintenance workers the impression that their work is not acknowledged enough, affecting job satisfaction and work-related stress.