FLEETDRIVE
“ It ’ s still a very competitive market and for those people who are in a management or senior executive role , the risks of maintaining a business , trying to grow or stabilise it , and trying to ensure that your people strategy is complementary is causing a degree of anxiety .
“ And I think that for all of them , while there was a beneficial focus on the conversation around mental health in the first year of Covid , that community conversation has dissipated but there ’ s an anxiety that they don ’ t understand what they can do to identify and manage psychological hazards in the workplace .
“ This concept of a psychological hazard in transport is far less tangible than ‘ I can see that you are limping ’, ‘ I can see that you ’ ve hurt your back ’, ‘ I can see that your arm is in plaster ’. Physical injuries are very visual , you can talk to someone and they ’ ll be able to tell you about the way they ’ re feeling .
“ But when you talk to someone about their mental health , especially in Transport and Logistics , many of the drivers , many of the people are ‘ yeah , I ’ ll be right ’, ‘ no it ’ s just what happens . I don ’ t want to talk to you about it at work ’, ‘ I ’ ve got my own way of dealing with it , which is I go on the boat ’. So you end up with the coping mechanisms of the individuals involved , which is very isolating .
“ If you ’ re not seeking to find trusted people to vent to , then it builds up and if you continue to find isolating or exclusionary activities – that might be as simple as sleeping or I ’ m just going to stay in my house and watch movies all day – and you ’ re not doing anything to maintain a degree of social engagement with the world around you , then the academic evidence does tell us that can help increase deterioration .
“ The past two years were the anomaly and while this year is coming back to normal there are still supply chain disruptions that will impact us into 2023 . However , we still have the opportunity to reflect on our job roles , our job design , our job processes . Asking ourselves , ‘ Do we like the way we operate ?’ ‘ Do our people like the way we operate ?’ ‘ Are we asking our people what can we do to improve ?’ Listening to their suggestions should be part of any good businesses approach .
“ You don ’ t have to hire an external consultant or bring in a new software system . It ’ s about looking at the systems you have as a performance review ; because if you can target the 10 per cent of issues that cause you 80 per cent of your lost time , then suddenly everything becomes a lot easier .”
ISSUE 38 DECEMBER 2022 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU 7