Address by Mr. Tom Kitt, T.D., Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairsat the Employee Well-Being - Responsibility and Opportunity Seminaron Wednesday 8th November, 2000, at 9.30am, in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

I am very pleased to be here to open this Seminar on Employee Well-Being. Looking at the Seminar programme I can see that Liberty Risk Services has put together an expansive, and indeed intensive, programme covering a wide range of topics. The primary purpose of the Seminar is to raise awareness of psychological well-being issues and to provide you all with the information and knowledge on how to promote employee well-being within your own organisation.

However, the benefits of being here today will bring you beyond this primary purpose alone. Employee well-being is intrinsically linked to business well-being, and what you will be doing is essentially exploring how best to improve the success and competitiveness of your business.

This seminar will address many employee well-being issues from a business case perspective as well as giving you direction and guidance from lawyers and consultants. An impressive and wide variety of speakers has been selected to share their experiences with you, including organisations such as Bank of Ireland, Aer Lingus and Organon who will outline how they have gone about their own initiatives and the successes and hurdles encountered along the way.

The title of the Seminar has a very interesting three-part dimension to it. The catchphrase of "Well-Being, Responsibility and Opportunity" very adequately captures the direction which businesses should be taking in relation to protecting their employees. By well-being we should mean, quite literally, the physical and psychological well-being of all employees, by responsibility we should mean, in the first instance, the statutory responsibility imposed by the comprehensive legal framework in operation and secondly the moral responsibility on all of us not to put the health or safety of either ourselves or others at risk. By opportunity we should mean all business practitioners identifying, and grasping, the opportunity to improve their overall business well-being by protecting one of the most vital assets within their businesses, that is, the work force.

While some would say that the greatest reason to protect the well-being of your employees should derive from the moral obligation, let us acknowledge the reality that very often the greatest incentive is the financial incentive. Cutting workplace fatalities, accidents and ill-health will directly cut costs and providing high workplace standards will have long-term financial benefits by helping to both attract and retain valuable staff and contribute positively to productivity.

To compete today, organisations are faced with only one constant and that is change. Competitive advantage is becoming harder to sustain and organisations must formulate their own unique way to provide unsurpassed customer value. While customer-focus and the building of lasting customer relationships are considered the key business drivers of the future, these relationships are, in reality, built by the people within the organisation itself.

Change is evident also in the new processes and technologies which are being introduced all the time. In today’s terms a ‘generation’ is not what it was in terms of length of time. Products and systems become obsolete in very short time periods. Despite an obvious need to move forward, diffusion of new practices is slow and many organisations continue to struggle to maintain old customs and practices in a context where they become daily more inappropriate. Often this struggle stems from a lack of information on how to change rather than a lack of willingness to change. Liberty Risk Services has brought together a team of expert speakers today who can provide you with challenging ideas and practical strategies, all of which have the dual aim of ensuring employee well-being and competitiveness at an organisational level.

On a national level, the consensus on economic and social policy which we now have in Ireland could not have been achieved without the existence of basic social standards. That consensus of social partnership, involves employers, employees and Government and has been backed up by a well balanced array of employment rights and labour legislation. This legal framework should not be seen as a negative imposition, but rather as the statutory foundation by which all working relationships can be managed and built upon.

The primary objective of employment rights legislation is both to protect employees and to foster labour market stability by promoting personnel policies, which minimise conflict and maximise fairness. It is widely accepted that good economic benefits accrue from strong co-operative labour relations in the workplace. Employees who enjoy good working conditions are more likely to be productive and willing to embrace change than those without such progressive conditions of employment.

I know that you will be examining many aspects of employment law in greater detail today, but I would like to take this opportunity to mention briefly some upcoming pieces of legislation currently being developed within my own area of responsibility. These include the Protection of Employees (Part-Time) Work Bill, 2000, the Carer’s Leave Bill, 2000, Whistleblowers Protection Bill, 1999 and the EU Directive on Fixed-Term Work.

Occupational health and safety is also part of my area of direct ministerial responsibility. In the three years since I took over responsibility for that area, I have seen the issue of workplace health and safety become far more prominent a business issue than ever before. At all levels - State, employer and worker - the awareness of workplace safety has increased enormously. The commitment by the State and the Social Partners to continue to seek to improve workplace health and safety standards is now underpinned in the national Programme itself, the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. This is, indeed, a strong acknowledgement of the importance and relevance of the issue as a contributory factor to a better living and working environment for all our citizens. Without a doubt health and safety is now part of the public pschye and one of the main challenges facing all of us is how to translate awareness into real action at the level of the workplace.

However, not only has there been a growing awareness of health and safety, but in many ways it is also the expansion of health and safety. Against the backdrop of a successful economy, a mobile, and increasingly educated and sophisticated workforce, the perception of what is health and safety has certainly expanded. The work environment today can no longer be defined in terms of the actual physical operation or the end product. It is also about the human interaction that takes place in the process of producing that end product and we must learn to think of health and well-being as a concept that incorporates, both mental and physical aspects. The workplace mirrors the wider living environment in that it involves the same range of emotions and human behaviours, both positive and negative. Ensuring the physical safety of people must be accompanied by ensuring their psychological safety - stress, violence and bullying within the workplace must be controlled and managed to the same extent as the more visible hazards.

Stress is a health and safety risk that should be dealt with in the same logical and systematic way as other health and safety issues. It should be dealt with as a identifiable hazard and specific procedures should be put in place to minimise the risk.

For its part, the Health and Safety Authority is currently working on a research project on stress in the workplace in conjunction with the Health Education Board of Scotland. The project will focus on a sample of approximately thirty workplaces from both countries and is expected to take twelve months to complete. The research will focus on smaller organisations with less than 150 employees in a number of sectors. This research will allow us to look at stress in an Irish workplace context, and will ultimately allow for a greater understanding of the issue by providing a checklist of work-related stressors which can be used by employers in carrying out a risk assessment.

Like stress, workplace bullying is another issue which is receiving much attention. I note from the Seminar programme that it a subject to be addressed this afternoon in general terms. As most of you will be aware I have set up a Task Force on the Prevention of Workplace Bullying which is being chaired by Dr. Eileen Doyle and which is operating under the auspices of the Health and Safety Authority.

The Task Force is examining workplace bullying in detail and is focusing on identifying the size of the problem and the employment sectors most at risk as well as developing proposals for practical programmes and strategies, both to prevent workplace bullying, and to provide a more appropriate co-ordinated response from the relevant State Agencies.

While it was originally envisaged that the Task Force would conclude its work earlier this year, it became clear that a six-month deadline was simply too short for the work in hand and to do full justice to the issue. Dr. Doyle requested an extension of time to facilitate a proper fulfilment of the Task Force’s remit, in particular the first remit which is to identify the size of the problem in Ireland and the sectors most at risk.

I am satisfied that the composition of the Task Force has involved the principal State agencies and bodies involved in promoting and supporting proper working conditions. This means that a wide range of expertise, and experiences has been brought to the Task Force. In particular, the involvement of IBEC and ICTU is testament to the importance of tackling this issue at enterprise level and on a partnership basis.

As the work of the Task Force is ongoing it would be premature for me to speculate on the outcome of the considerations, of the Task Force. But I am confident that the work of Dr.Doyle and the members of the Task Force will, in the long-term, make a positive contribution to employee well-being in Ireland. I look forward to receiving the report and the recommendations of the Task Force early in the new year, and to full and frank debate on it at that stage.

I referred earlier to the fact that the only constant in our lives is change. Underlying all of your deliberations here today is the fact that Ireland has undergone, and is undergoing, rapid change. We now have 1.7m people in employment. We have growing economic activity with accompanying labour market pressures and we have an increasingly mobile, highly-educated and sophisticated labour force operating against a variety of work patterns. We also have changing demographics and diverse cultural aspects affecting the composition of our labour force.

In fact this week is actually Anti-Racist Workplace Week. The designation of such a week is indicative that there is, indeed, a changing world of work in Ireland today to which we must adapt at both national and individual level. And perhaps even more importantly we must direct change and not simply be led by it.

Despite all of our technological advances, people will always continue to be the core component of any business and the phrase "employee well-being" probably best captures the essence of what we should be striving to achieve in order to protect and nurture this core component against a background of enormous change.

I am sure that this Seminar will make a distinctive contribution to the debate and I wish you every success in your deliberations.

Thank you for your attention.