Hello! Welcome to my blog about all things workplace safety where I will be sharing research and personal insights
First of all, thank you for visiting my blog! Second, let me introduce myself and tell you a little bit out me! My name is Alyssa Grocutt and workplace safety is my passion.
The origin story of my workplace safety passion
When I was 11 years old, my dad was fatally injured in a workplace safety incident. Since then I have been driven to promote workplace safety in any way that I can. At the time of writing this, I am currently a PhD student in Organizational Behaviour and my research is focused on workplace safety.
What is the purpose of this workplace safety blog?
I have several reasons for starting this blog.
First, I think we would all benefit from talking about workplace safety more and the tragedies that occur. Workplace tragedies are somewhat of a taboo topic, something we tend to avoid talking about. It can certainly be an uncomfortable topic. I know from personal experience the feeling of telling people my dad died at work and having the room fall silent with everyone's expression suggesting they would rather be anywhere else at that moment. I believe that if we talk about the reality of workplace tragedies and the aftermath more we will all be able to handle the experience better and will be better able to help others experiencing this.
Second, there is a disconnect between academic research and the lived reality of workers. There are many useful insights from academic research that never reach employees nor employers. Similarly, there are many issues faced by employees and employers that remain unknown to researchers and therefore never investigated. I want to help bridge this gap by sharing key insights from workplace safety research. My hope is that this encourages a broader dialogue about workplace safety, what we know, what we do not know, and what we should be investigating.
Workplace safety research: What do we know?
Much of the workplace safety research examines the causes of workplace safety incidents in an effort to prevent such occurrences and promote safe work behaviours. This research is important to ensure we can be proactive in our approach to safety. In future blog posts I will be delving into this more and sharing key findings from various research studies with links to the original papers.
Workplace safety research: What remains unknown?
The focus on causes of workplace safety incidents leaves us with little knowledge on the consequences of workplace safety incidents, injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. For example, not only are injured workers affected, but their families, friends, colleagues, and managers are affected as well. We know this anecdotally yet there is a lack of empirical research on this.
There is research emerging on the children of injured workers. For my Master's thesis, I focused on the children of injured workers. I will be sharing more about this in a future blog post.
Other research that I am working on examines the impact work injuries have on family and friends. All of this is in an effort to understand the experiences of those indirectly affected by work injuries and how we can best support them and promote positive outcomes.
My PhD research will narrow in on leaders that have to deal with work injuries and fatalities. I want to know how they have been impacted and how best we can support them.
Stay tuned for all things workplace safety!
Thank you for visiting! Please come back to check out my future blog posts!
I hope to make one blog post every week or every two weeks, but that is still to be determined. Regardless, I encourage you to check out my general website, revisit my blog often, and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for more frequent (and short) updates.
On my home page you can find links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, and ORCiD.
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