Læsetid 2 min
And yes – The Health and Safety Assessment is ‘the child’ in this scenario. Because it is your safest and best way to good well-being and a good working environment in the company. Precisely by giving you the necessary insight into the employees’ thoughts, experiences and measuring the temperature of their daily well-being, well-being and feeling of being an important part of the company. The main role in your workplace assessment is – and will always be – the questions chosen in the measurement itself. And a Workplace Assessment can be decidedly useless if you are not asked about exactly the right things in relation to exactly YOUR company and YOUR employees.
An industry-specific question framework?
So, the first step in The Health and Safety Assessment process is to map which question frames are relevant for your industry. It is clear that if it is a construction site, then there are different questions in The Health and Safety Assessment than if it is, for example, a company with only office work. After all, The Health and Safety Assessment must take into account both the physical and the psychological working environment. In relation to the physical working environment, the various risks of heavy lifting, crooked working positions and working with dangerous chemicals are looked at. With the psychological work environment, the focus is on stress levels, profits, flexibility and work pressure, among other things. So, what industry is your business in?
- Are there premises for the performance of the work that involve risks for the employees?
- Do you work with dangerous chemicals?
- Are employees exposed to general health risks?
- Is it primarily office work?
Once you have mapped the industry and which premises are primarily applicable in relation to the working environment, you can start choosing the right question frame.
The questionnaire is only the beginning…
When the question frame is in place and the measurement has been completed, the ‘hard’ Workplace Assessment work begins. And here it is important that you follow the Danish Working Environment Authority’s 5 phases, which are crucial for your workplace assessment to comply with the legislation.
Phase 1
Identification and mapping of the company’s overall working environment
Phase 2
Description and assessment of the company’s work environment problems
Phase 3
Inclusion of the company’s sick leave
Phase 4
Prioritizing solutions to the company’s working environment problems and drawing up an action plan
Phase 5
Guidelines for follow-up on the action plan
This is how it looks. And it is precisely these phases that you must build your Workplace Assessment work around. It is a really good guideline for you along the way – so you ensure that everything is done correctly and thoroughly. The first phase is actually an expression of the entire measurement itself. Here, the entire working environment is mapped based on all employees’ responses and comments. From this follows a natural analysis of the collected results. Which problems have come to the surface – and how many employees are affected by them? How are they affected by them – and what is required of the following action plans, so that it is ensured that all problems and focus areas are met?
The response rate is crucial!
It is clear that when the results are to be representative, an acceptable response rate is necessary. How high the response rate should be depends on several factors. For a large company with more than 200 employees, it can of course be difficult to reach the high end of the 80-90%. Here it will be relevant to look at how high a response rate you want per department most of all, so that, for example, you not only have a nice response rate of 79% overall, but then you are left with individual departments where the response rate is completely down and kiss them around only 20%. If, on the other hand, it is a company with 20 employees, a high response rate would be preferable to ensure that the survey in question is representative of the entire company as a whole. At the same time, there will usually not be as many different departments either.
So how do you increase that response rate?
As I said, there are several different parameters you can look at, but if we take our platform, Woba.io, as a starting point, we have some different tools that make it easy to send out reminders to employees who have not yet answered the survey . But in addition, you can also always – with good effect – ensure that you are proactive in the answering process. Read more in-depth about how to prepare employees in the best possible way so that the response rate is as high as possible.
Now you both have complete control over your specific question framework and you have prepared your employees for all parameters. Then it’s just a matter of starting the actual well-being measurement. If you still have a lot of doubts about whether you are doing it all right, then you might want to invest in a working environment advisor (an add-on you get with Woba.io), who can guide you and help you safely reach your goal with the entire well-being work. Read more about your associated working environment advisor and the advice itself.
And then all that’s left is to wish you ‘good luck’ with the project – a project that will return so much value when you get to the other side…
