Digital Occupational Safety - Today’s challenge for all work organizations
| Time to read:4 minutes
11.10.2021
Most of us are quite well aware of the risks in the digital and social media environment, especially when it comes to children and adolescents. As a father of a teenage daughter I have many times been worried about her life in the digital world - mostly without any particular reason. Our youngsters have been born directly in the digital era, they are genuinely diginatives. Even though their first steps with mobile phones and computers might sometimes look a little uncertain or unstable, after learning the basics these diginatives are much more capable in social media communication and more aware of the digital risks than us older generation representatives. What about us adults? As the bad behaviour among adults in social media is alarmingly growing, should we start worrying more about our work organizations and how the older generations manage in social media?
Taking care of digital competitiveness
How are our work teams and colleagues doing with their social media and digital communication and are we aware of the risks and how to avoid risky behaviour? Since the majority of the communication in work organizations is moved to digital platforms - partly thanks to Corona - have we managed to adopt needed new habits and behaviour in order to control the risks? We have become heavily dependent on digital communication tools such as Teams, Slack, Zoom, Facebook, Instagram and Yammer, and the change is here to stay.
What new practices, habits and tools do we need in order to ensure that we can safely and effectively make the most of our digital interactions? As good corporate citizens, we need to at least learn new skills and update our rules for good and safe behaviour in online environments. Otherwise, there is a significant risk that we will be unable to use the potential of corporate social media. We may become chary to perform impactful professional dialogue or to publish even good results in digital platforms and thus we will lose part of our competitiveness.
How I see it is that our ability to handle digital occupational safety issues affects not only a single organization’s competitiveness, but also the whole economy. For instance, if we think about an expert organization, that has the task of highlighting and discussing important issues and phenomena in its field. If it does not dare to do so for fear of online harassment, it is unknowingly acting inefficiently and limiting its own influence. If this kind of overcautiousness is becoming a more widespread habit, it can harm the whole economy or branch.
Boldly moving forward to develop new work-life skills
Being overly adventurous can not always be recommended, but good risk management is usually a wise thing to apply. In order to remain competitive, we need to have such tools, skills and processes which are bringing confidence and a sense of security to us. A feeling of safety is the key for staying efficient, and good risk management processes for unwanted incidents will secure the performance level if something unexpected happens. While looking after the youngest, we must also look after our own safety and that of our colleagues.If you don't have the needed skills and tools in place, it's worth asking for help sooner rather than later.
Let’s keep your businesses competitive and in good shape, and ensure it doesn’t fall behind the current developments. Digital occupational safety deserves some good attention from all of us.
If you got interested - and I recommend that you should - our team at Someturva is more than willing to discuss more with you.
Jaakko Antikainen,
Director of Safety and Partnerships
info@someturva.fi