DO NOT JUST TRAIN YOUR EMPLOYEES, TRAIN THEIR FAMILIES ALONG!

Workplace health and safety processes, patterns and scope will continue to evolve along with the new workplace realities.

Trends have made us to realize the need to adopt employee/employee's family-centered approach as a decent workplace management system. When we employ a man or a woman, by extension, we have employed their families and this should be given due consideration in our management systems.

Employees' productivity, mental health and wellbeing are not an exclusive issue that have to do with the workplace, the home and family account for a huge deposit of the outcomes whether positive or negative. I am able to work and deliver comfortably because my home front is ok, the moment this changes, my work suffers.

Notably seen in most organizations, employees annual health assessment programs only cover the principal (employee) and never extended to his or her spouse and even in some systems where these are extended, only skeletal part of the programs gets approved. The truth is, when an employees spouse or any of his or her children suffers ill health, that employee suffers along side and the employer by extension also suffers.

Let me share an example.

A certain organization saw it necessary to train every employee on fire safety and response and at the end of the training, they bought extinguishers for all their employees to take home. This, i would have thought was fair enough but employees families were left out of these trainings. You only trained the principal to be available to respond to fire should it happen in the office but the most important critical element for his own safety were left out - the employees family.

Remember, the employees are hardly at home, they spent a higher number of their wake hours at work.

This fateful day, there was a fire outbreak in the residence of one of the employees, there were fire extinguishers but no one in the house knew how to operate them, the spouse took the children and ran to safety while they watched in tears everything that they had labored for went down in flames. Though fire fighters finally came to the rescue but not so much could be salvaged. It would have been a different story if the employees family were also trained on fire prevention and response.

Can we make workplace management systems more flexible & perhaps consider employees' families as extension of us also? We need more innovative approaches to workplace management system.

My name is Ehi Iden, i am an Occupational Health & Safety Management Consultant in Africa, i advocate for EMPLOYEE/EMPLOYEE'S FAMILY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.