Employers Beware: COVID-19 and Remote Working Obligations
The Safety Health and Welfare at Work legislation boils down to the fact that Employers are obliged to provide a safe place to work.
There are significant sanctions for employers who breach the legislation including fines up to €3 million and imprisonment for up to 2 years for a serious breach. In 2019 in HSA v Walker the defendant was prosecuted for a breach of s11(1)(c)(ii) of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 and sentenced to 6 months with only 2 month suspended.
In these COVID 19 times a workplace can mean working from home for many employees. Employers have a duty therefore to check that their employees have the appropriate facilities and equipment to work safely. The big difference now is that people working from home are doing so for their full working day or at least a large part of their working hours. Appropriate desk, chair and work station ergonomics need to be considered. How do you keep in touch with your staff to check on their well-being? Is there inappropriate online activity? How is everyone’s mental health holding up? These are just a few of the considerations that you need to consider and find ways of dealing with issues that were previously dealt with in the office environment.
“Having a designated COVID-19 Compliance Officer within the workplace
is looking like becoming the new norm.”
Having a designated COVID-19 Compliance Officer within the workplace is looking like becoming the new norm. This person or persons will be tasked with ensuring businesses meet any instructions or rules issued by the Government in order to allow them to continue trading. Online training, health and safety awareness and carrying out up to date risk assessments can be implemented easily and at low cost. A simple example is asking your employees to send a photo of their workstation. This can then be reviewed by an appropriate qualified person to assess its suitability. Creating appropriate checklists and procedures can help employers and employees assess what needs to be done in everyone’s best interests.
Myelearnsafety.com provides a range of courses and our experts are on hand to give advice and courses to suit your business helping you create a better safer workplace in a changed pandemic world and helping you meet your legal requirements to provide a safe place of work.
5 Ways Mindfulness Practice Positively Changes Your Brain
In recent years mindfulness has become a buzzword in neuroscience, and mental health fields. Over thirty years of research has found that mindfulness practice, mindfulness meditation and mindfulness based stress reduction shares a symmetry with mental, physical and emotional health. Some of the benefits of mindfulness practice include the following:
- Great control over your attention
- Better social relationships
- Lowered risk of physical illness
- Better immune system
- Better sleep quality
There are essentially five ways in which mindfulness practice positively changes your brain.
Frontal Cortex
Mindful states achieve through meditation, meditation training, mindfulness based stress reduction training and mindfulness practice boost frontal brain activity. Over time this increased cortical strengthening bolsters our capacity for rational thought and intentional planning which promotes great emotional awareness and control and executive functioning.
Amygdala
Mindfulness practice and mindfulness training helps reduce grey matter and activity in the amygdala (a roughly almond-shaped mass of grey matter inside each cerebral hemisphere, involved with the experiencing of emotions). This helps reduce feelings of fear and anxiety and promotes physiological well-being and calmness.
Social Neural Circuitry
There’s a strong correlation between relationship practice and mindfulness practice. Mindfulness has been found to play a vital role in establishing and maintaining emotionally nourishing relationships.
Mindfulness practice also impacts the hippocampus positively, helping us to better remember and lead to greater cognitive functioning.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex
Mindfulness practice increases one’s attention levels and enhances emotional control. With the online world constantly vying for our attention this can have a great benefit to us.
Insula
The insula controls the internal sense of the body, “gut” feelings and responses. This region is associated with how we perceive ourselves physically. The ability
In his article, Linder concludes that the ability of (mindfulness practice) to increase the thickness of your brain and protect against normal age-related brain thinning linked to dementia, in itself, is an especially compelling reason to practice (Linder, 2019).
Why not put this into practice yourself and experience the fantastic benefits of mindfulness practice at https://myelearnsafety.com/product/mindfulness-practice/