• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCH. OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Robert Long
    • ALL POSTS
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2022
    • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans 2022
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work
  • Safety Culture
    • Safety Culture Silences
You are here: Home / Social Psychology of Risk / Is Choice The First Casualty in the Worker’s Compensation War?

Is Choice The First Casualty in the Worker’s Compensation War?

August 16, 2014 by James Ellis 9 Comments

Introducing our latest awesome Author: James Ellis from The Framework Group

Is Choice The First Casualty in the Worker’s Compensation War?

Healthy choiceEvery day we make decisions based on insufficient information, informed by our biases and shortcuts, which ironically, we’re also ignorant to. Even in the google and wikipedia enhanced era of information technology, oversimplification constantly tempts us. I spend most of my time guiding people through the workers compensation maze, and I’ve noticed that oversimplification is pervasive in this domain.

It is not uncommon in my work to meet people who feel disempowered. Both workers and employers. Workers who have lost their sense of self identity, their self esteem and, ultimately, their motivation. I also meet employers who feel like they have no control in an unwieldy system. Their premium is unpredictable and a poor indicator of their commitment to their team. This was certainly the case with Brian who I met last month. He’s a manager of a shop in a chain of stores and was adamant that he wouldn’t lodge a claim despite clearly injuring his shoulder at work. He used to work for another organisation and told me that “he knows how compo works and wants none of it….I’ll get depressed and lose my job and the company will get hit by higher premiums…no one wins”. Brian also thought he needed a week off, but was worried about how his staff would perceive his taking “time off on compo”.

Brian’s case is typical, but his insight is unique. He expressed concerns for himself and his employer. That’s unusual. His experience has been that it doesn’t take long in the workers compensation system to lose your humanity and your employer’s money. What was motivating Brian’s decision making? It’s always tempting to draw a simple conclusion but the fact is, I had just met Brian and although we had rapport, we didn’t yet have a relationship. Guessing at his motivations was tempting, I love a simple solution as much as the next bloke, but do I really know Brian at this point?

“For every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s usually wrong”

H.L. Mencken

I’m a parent, a business owner, a client, a student, a teacher, a physiotherapist, a counsellor, a husband and a son. All of these roles involve efforts to persuade and to motivate. I find myself trying to motivate others to learn, to recover, to re-engage, to change entrenched beliefs, to manage pain and to better relate to each other. Inferring and analysing the motivation behind others’ decisions is an ongoing and daily exercise.

Edward Deci is a director of the human motivation program at the University of Rochester and co-author of WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO with Richard Flaste. They open their book by stating that;

Control is an easy answer. It assumes the promise of reward or the threat of a punishment will make the offenders comply. And it sounds tough, so it feels reassuring to people who believe things have gone awry but have neither the time not the energy to think about the problems, let alone do something about them.

There’s a lot of “tough talk” in the workers compensation world. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve heard that have been about how to ‘motivate’ someone by exerting control. Compliance is the goal of control and the motivation is provided in the form of legislative threats, financial sanctions or even ‘a good talking to’.

Deci points out that motivation is commonly viewed as being applied externally. That there is a misconception that skilful coaches or teachers motivate others with carefully chosen words. In the workers compensation domain these words are usually conveyed by documentation imbued with legal jargon, or verbally by an overworked supervisor or insurance claims manager who has no time for a relationship with the workers they are tasked with “managing”.

Deci argues that the price of control and compliance is “steep”. He acknowledges that some people are oriented towards complying with the rules but also suggests that compliance and defiance often co-exist, often subtly or even passively. Reduced discretionary effort can be hard to notice. He argues that self-motivation, rather than external motivation, is at the heart of responsibility, ownership, healthy behaviour and, durable or lasting change.

Higgins’ extensive book on motivation, Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, teaches us that motivation and simple are not words that sit well together. Higgins suggests wariness with respect to “the hedonic principle”. This is the principle that says motivation is just about applying pleasure and pain to achieve a desired result. Higgins warns us that although pleasure seeking or pain avoidance are generally accepted principles in life, there is more to motivation than the promise of reward or the threat of punishment (aka carrot and stick).

Higgins believes that;

… the best answer to the question of what it is that people want is that they want to be effective. People want to be effective at having desired outcomes (value), but they also want to be effective at establishing what’s real (truth) and at managing what happens (control).

… which is compatible with Deci’s idea that motivation is optimised by creating autonomy-supportive environments.

Once a workers compensation claim is made and the process takes hold, it seems to me that control, effectiveness and truth (in the sense if understanding the process and all of its rules) are easily compromised.

Consideration of Deci and Higgins has made me aware of the importance of choice in the development of ownership, care, acceptance and personal ‘drive’. People, they state, are more motivated when they have some control of what is happening and the best way to feel in control is to feel free to choose. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have any rules or take away all external pressure but burying people in too many externally applied rules and restricting any choice is surely the way to suck people dry of motivation or any will to effort.

So is our workers compensation system autonomy supportive?

To borrow from the popular idiom that the first casualty of war is the truth, I’ve found myself wondering if the first casualty of workers compensation is choice?

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about James
James Ellis

James Ellis

Managing Director at The Framework Group
James Ellis

Latest posts by James Ellis (see all)

  • Psychological Core Stability for Wellbeing in Workers Comp - February 24, 2022
  • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery - July 29, 2020
  • What and how should we measure to support recovery from injury? - May 24, 2017
  • Humanising Workers Compensation: the missed opportunity - April 24, 2017
  • I work in workers compensation - September 22, 2015
James Ellis
B.App.Sc (Physio) After finishing High School I experimented with a range of vocations including 12 months as a midshipman in the Royal Australian Navy, a false start studying Engineering at UNSW and a very enjoyable 5 years as a gym instructor at a variety of gyms in Sydney. I graduated as a Physiotherapist from the University of Sydney in 1991. After 12 months as an intern in the public hospital system in NSW I travelled to Michigan, USA, where I obtained experience in an outpatient facility servicing the local community and the adjacent private hospital. I then returned to Australia and obtained a full time position at the Hills Street Sports Medicine Centre in Gosford, NSW, treating sports injuries. In 1995 I founded Hills Street Occupational Rehabilitation Service which later became Hills Street Group and, more recently, Framework Group. Over the past 19 years we have grown to have several franchised teams throughout NSW. I really enjoy the daily challenge of problem solving in the complex arena of workplace injury management. At Framework, we focus on humanising injury management. We've developed a unique model of injury management that allows our employer clients to maintain and enhance their relationships with their workers which, in turn, has very positive commercial implications. We believe that injury management provides employers with a portal through which they can demonstrate how much they care about their team. We believe that mistakes and injuries are inevitable, because people are fallible, but this same fallibility provides opportunities for learning and enrichment of relationships.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Social Psychology of Risk, Workers Compensation Tagged With: choice, deci, higgins, safety is a choice, Workers Compensation

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,434 other subscribers

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Mike on WHAT IS SAFETY, REALLY?
  • Rob Long on Ritual Performance and Risk
  • Brent Charlton on Ritual Performance and Risk
  • Rob Long on Culture Silences in Safety – Socialitie
  • Joe Zinobile on Culture Silences in Safety – Socialitie
  • HASSAN MOHAMMED on Free Online Safety Training Courses
  • Rob Long on Safety Climate / Safety Leadership Survey
  • Ann on Safety Climate / Safety Leadership Survey
  • Rob on Near Miss or Near Hit
  • Robert Long on The Convenience of Complacency

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Recent Posts

  • CLLR Quarterly Newsletter–June 2022
  • Spot the Hazards – What is Wrong With These Safety Photos?
  • Culture Silences in Safety – Memes
  • Are you a Safety Crusader or a Safety Leader?
  • Ritual Performance and Risk
  • Asking Better Questions in Risk
  • The Toxic Language of ‘Performance’ and Risk
  • OHS Compliance Puts Lives in Danger
  • Talking About Teams
  • The Art of Active Listening in Risk

What is Psychological Safety at Work?

Footer

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • After the goldrush
    • The Internationale
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • Risk assessment tips
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • Psychological Core Stability for Wellbeing in Workers Comp
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • In it for The Long Haul – Making the most of the FIFO Lifestyle
    • Who is Responsible for This?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • Safety Culture–Hudson’s Model
    • Culture – Edgar Schein
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
  • Admin
    • CLLR Quarterly Newsletter–June 2022
    • OHS Compliance Puts Lives in Danger
  • Dr Rob Long
    • Culture Silences in Safety – Memes
    • Ritual Performance and Risk
  • Rob Sams
    • Are you a Safety Crusader or a Safety Leader?
    • The Learning (and unlearning) that Revealed my Vocation
  • Barry Spud
    • Spot the Hazards – What is Wrong With These Safety Photos?
    • Things To Consider When Developing And Designing Your Company SWMS
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Simon Cassin
    • Safety values, ideas, behaviours and clothes
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

Most commented on

Forecasting Safety

The Banned Objects Index – A New Development in Safety Culture

Dumbs for Safety

The Real Barriers to Safety

Safety as Faith Healing

Who Said We Don’t Need Systems?

Why Safety Controls Don’t Always Work

How to use signs, symbols and text effectively in communicating about risk

Safety Should NOT Be About Safety

How Do We Know?

FEATURED POSTS

Blind Faith in Safety

Visualising Risk

Free Online Introduction to the Social Psychology of Risk

Due Diligence Workshop Sydney 20,21 February 2019

‘False Consciousness’ and Perception in Risk and Safety

Safety Aphorisms and Platitudes

Consciously Safe, Unconsciously Unsafe or Head in the Sand Safety

Anchoring Safety to Objects

Safety Career Highlight

non-Leadership in Risk

We can Value Safety but Safety is not a Value

I Wasn’t Thinking Mr Spock

Banning Head Protection is Safer

Brain-Centredness and Occular-Centredness in Risk

Binary Opposites and Safety Goal Strategy

Seven Essential Safety Reminders

Balance in Risk and Safety

Tape Down Those Leads

Speak Up, Reporting and Trust in Safety

What’s Your Resilience Profile?

More Posts from this Category

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,434 other subscribers

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Top Posts & Pages

  • BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2022
  • Free Safety Moments Examples, Tips and Resources
  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • Road Safety Slogans 2022
  • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity
  • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
  • Free Risk Assessment Template in Excel Format
  • WHAT IS SAFETY, REALLY?
  • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES

 

How To Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer

 

 

How to Make your own Covid-19 Face Mask

 

Covid-19 Returning To Work Safety, Transitioning, Start Up And Re Entry Plans

 

How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?

imageOne of the benefits of the Covid-19 epidemic is a total rethink about how we live and work (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-28/coronavirus-could-reshape-how-australians-work-forever/12097124 ).

Expertise by Regurgitation and Re-Badging

One of the fascinating things about the Coronavirus pandemic is watching Safety morph into epidemiology expertise. I would like a dollar for every flyer, presentation, podcast, powerpoint, checklist template, toolbox talk and poster set that had jumped into my inbox… Read the rest

The Stress of Stasis

One of the challenging things about the Coronavirus crisis is stasis. For those without work and confined to home, for those in self-isolation, it’s like life is frozen in time. ‘Stay at home’ is the mantra. The trouble is, in… Read the rest