The company that awaits us…

We are witnessing the most intense metamorphosis that companies have ever undergone throughout their existence. The change had made a loud entrance (industry 4.0, digitalization, Big Data, BI, 5G) and the tsunami of a new normal we are immersed in, have mixed and generated such a cocktail of working conditions, and a need for quite different products and services that when looking at a company of 2019, its remembrance evokes in us a reflection of similarities and mixed emotions, which leads us to think of the 19th-century organizations.

Changes in the labor foundation

As a metaphor, we could say that the entire foundation on which the labor system rested is being changed. It is as if we had realized about the terrible impact on our society coming from a displacement of tectonic plates, and suddenly, our territory had become seismic, forcing us to urgently rethink all our buildings and infrastructures, taking into account this new reality.

Our process of national reconstruction or reactivation would lead us to address this new situation through three strategies: to build based on this new geological normality; to fix the foundations of those buildings and infrastructures if possible, and of course; to promptly assume responsibility for any loss resulting from those structures (organizations) failing to adapt to this new reality.

Fortunately, the corporate world is more malleable than tectonic plates, and such a practice is not new to the entrepreneur. Perhaps the most puzzling and pressing aspect for organizations is the speed in responding and the handling of the high level of uncertainty with which they must respond to this new normal. Never has the decision time been so short or too much pressure has ever been exerted on companies.

For current organizations, the triad to analyze, composed of the individual, multifunctional work scenarios and company, must be examined considering the genuine changes raised by the pandemic, and that has already become a post-Covid culture.

When analyzing the impact of this new culture we can think, for instance, of:

•     New work habitsas a result of the current working time valuation.
•     The resilienceof the workers.
•     A Self-careapproach that we have internalized… and in its connection and transposing to the activity area of this unique learning.
•     Try to generate new designsto be inserted in the current work scenarios taking into consideration, in many cases, the “home” as just another workplace.

And to all this, we have to add the current and future requirements of services and products that society demands, and that must be provided by companies to maintain their business continuity.

Labor relationships generated by the pandemic

The current situation within the domain of labor relationships being generated by the pandemic leads to new extremely versatile jobs to crystallize with unusual speed; which will be followed by specific and surprising niches of the activity in which people will have to rethink their skills and guide their talent towards growing economies such as those generated by NGOs, green economy, orange economy, and economy supported by the data …

These new jobs and changes in the existing ones provide unusual working conditions. From a prevention approach, we must be prepared and assimilate this reality quickly, both to preserve people’s health and safety, and to avoid the economic collapse of some sectors.

Striving to design and implement scenarios compatible with people skills, and their possibilities of action within their activity areas, and the search for efficiency in the production system has always been the objective of prevention. Companies, by obligation, must respond to the extension of the labor reality range efficiently.

Opportunity for PRL (Occupational Risk Prevention)

For occupational prevention this new normal is simultaneously a temptation, a risk, and an opportunity:

•     A temptation, to address the situation as if it were a temporary parenthesis and try to minimize the problem and the actions, and waiting for the storm to pass.
•     A risk, to try to change everything (adapting laws) so that nothing changes, allowing oneself the illusion that a reality reflecting the previous one will return.
•     And,finally, and hopefully, it is also a great opportunity: to respond intelligently to the new challenges, and take advantage of this formal recognition of the preventive discipline made by all organizations, to which they have given a second look and has been granted a higher rank and significance in such a way that has promoted it to the decision-making centers.

Perhaps, now, with this formal recognition of the significance and talent that prevention brings, we can root the health and safety values within the company culture. Supported by the new normal, we will be able to transmit the knowledge and ways of acting on health and safety and move from being considered the spending preventive approaches, and ways of acting to an investment.

For companies, all these actions accelerated by the pandemic and escalation due to the digital organization of work are not, far from it, new since the digital revolution was being experienced without strain. It was planned as a medium-long term path, assuming there would be time to adapt.

But circumstances rule and all these massive changes have come to settle accounts and create an insurmountable chasm between the companies that will disappear, and those using their organizational intelligence to the maximum –as a result of the rational use of resources, and the interaction of all of them- will have the ability to adapt to the situation, and will consolidate and grow as organizations with a future. As they are, above all, healthy organizations taking care of their workers which, and in the same way, will allow them to attract talent.

The workers that await us…

The dramatic changes that are taking place in the organization of work as a result of the extensive use of technology, reach all the company areas and impact on the distribution of people’s working time. These changes bring as a result “moonlighter tech workers” that, whatever their professional or activity level, they will have technology as a faithful companion throughout all their daily tasks. The most urgent reflection for pandemic-preventionists will have to do with their obsession to analyze and control the traceability of all risks, to protect these “nomadic workers”.

We require an urgent characterization of the workplaces, and the activities to be carried out to mitigate, with our actions, as far as possible, the uncertainties and thus harmonize and make these new work realities compatible with the viability of the companies.

Just placing the prefix “techno” before the term agriculture forces us to analyze a completely different sector with tasks and working conditions that hardly resemble those of traditional agriculture. What to say when placing “business intelligent” before services, or robotics and 3D printers before construction, or 5G before the industrial sector? These new jobs that are shown or distinguished with these prefixes turn the classic production sectors, their professional profiles, and the occupational hazards, into something like the shadows of Plato’s cave.

Reformulate a priori

These very different production processes will require a reformulation a priori and promotion of innovative action needs for prevention. This will lead, in many cases, to disruptive actions, involving some risk. But, at the same time, should enable the growth, and consolidation of healthy companies, who set their goal to generate healthy, safe, sustainable, sensitive, and unique working conditions.

Imagining these new jobs raises, as you would expect, a swamp of questions to the preventionists, since it is an extremely complex task and with extreme levels of uncertainty.

We know work will continue to be the essential feature of societies to generate wealth. From a prevention perspective, we must join forces in such an innovative way and assume ipso facto those virtues that we already knew and to which the company was already oriented, knowing that without them there was no future.

Creative solutions applying business management tools

But now, we need one more effort, a creative look and to include, for example, workers in these business management tools.

•     Let’s think about how we could include SST variables during the CRM user experience, that consider the worker as a preferred client of the system.
• Let’s think about digitalization, and the use of 5G and their application in the working scenarios and their interaction with workers and work components.
• Let’s alsoinclude the cloud not only as a company data warehousebut by adding the data that comes from working conditions and allow us to take action and ensure that the health and safety parameters are under control.
• Let’s proposeBusiness intelligence(BI) and make use of it, to anticipate the possible occurrence of incidents and accidents, and manage it to correct potential sources of erroneous actions. Thus, we would ensure that negative predictions are not fulfilled, eliminating potential errors that could provoke incidents and accidents.

The impact of all these techniques and work methodologies, and those that will appear, plus the systematic use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the assessment of the working conditions will be tremendous. We must consider how to adapt these new realities to the requirements, and exposures, to which workers must respond, without losing health but rather to improve it.

Our activity as preventionists consists of harmonizing working conditions and creating a branch of healthy and productive alternatives that allow a quick transit and landing to these new work scenarios.

And finally, the hybrid prevention that awaits us

But how to achieve these healthy company objectives from the company’s strategic leverage of occupational health and safety? And, most importantly, what actions are expected of occupational health and safety gave this new normal for digital organizations?

This new work organization is marked by digitalization, creating new functions and work requirements. It drags us to foresee control and assurance measures for health and safety; these measures are not always easy to detect or obvious. We need, from prevention, to create new techniques and work analysis methods to address this melting pot of new work situations.

These current work situations generate what could be called “versatile jobs” since the new working conditions are a hodgepodge of scenarios: in the company, and / or at home and / or in any other places where the task must be performed. These force us to think and imagine the transition that people will go through wandering through these multi spaces of work, in which generic and specific restrictions will arise, and very different requirements for each of them.

A different perspective

This proliferation of new work situations forces us to analyze this complex reality, with a different perspective, the exposures, the dangers, the risks, and so on. They have to be handle in a matrix format to anticipate and generate preventive actions from the disciplines up to their use: psycho sociology, hygiene, ergonomics, safety, health, and with emphasis on preventive (digital) management.

We need to rethink, imagine, and even guess these digital work organizations by observing their impact on the analog and the pressure that workers will experience. During their working hours, they will switch between dysfunctional scenarios, entering into one and then into another, and performing in complex and even antagonistic and incompatible situations.

From a prevention perspective, we should start to move away from risk assessment analyzes of fixed locations and describe more and more a map of work locations in which people carry out their activities. These will be quite diverse and the operator will face constant changes when performing in physical and virtual spaces, with innovative, or classic tools, etc.

This should lead us to envisage the new occupational health, and safety professionals as people with a special talent, and with an extreme self-learning capability. The work as well as the situations to be analyzed, will require considering hyper-complex mental functions, extremely demanding physical functions, and all of them within a socially inclusive strand.

Major update on risk prevention

As an example, we can ask ourselves, how many sides should the exposure matrix that people will be subjected to in this real-virtual work have? We are convinced there are numerous, and, as a result, we will have to resort to extremely complex analysis. Our profession will have to make extensive use of all current work procedures, techniques, and tools, plus a tremendous amount that is yet to be determined, and include them all in our skill repertoire.

There is no doubt that if prevention professionals overcome the initial vertigo of this highly demanding reality, the talented teams won’t run out of jobs in this exciting profession that summons us to this 21st edition of ORP in Cartagena de Indias.

Pedro R. Mondelo

ORP Director