Social Cohesion - Part 1
14 April 2025
Social cohesion. The glue that holds us together as a community, as a nation.
Since reading the Helen Clark Foundation's Social Cohesion report for 2024, I've been thinking about how this relates to organisational health, safety and wellbeing outcomes. I've landed on two niggling thoughts that we need to talk more about. I'll just cover one today - because holy hecker it's a big topic.
Overall, we are going backwards. 1 in 4 of us are regularly going without a meal, because our budgets just don't stretch that far. 1 in 5 of us have experienced discrimination. Outside of the report, we have ongoing divisive politics locally and internationally and an economic situation that appears to be imitating a game of squash between two drunk friends. For a lot of us, that's not all. We still have to navigate bereavement, disease, financial insecurity, relationship breakdowns and redundancy, just to name a few. Then we've got NZ's mental health crisis - where we have moved to 1 in 3 adults experiencing anxiety or depression, up from 1 in 4 in 2018.
When we put this in the context of health and safety, it becomes abundantly clear that we have a burning platform. We need to move. Incident Analytics published a white paper recently in which they stated that "64% of serious incidents occurred despite safety controls, relying on workers behaviour, such as avoiding danger zones." In 2025, we are still managing critical risk with an inexcusable number of administrative controls. Our people can't keep doing it. We can take it as read that a significant proportion of NZ's workforce are carrying some bloody heavy mental loads. At a guess, I think a fair amount of that group will also belong to the group who work at the sharp end of organisational health and safety risks. Our brains aren't wired to function effectively with that sort of sustained cognitive load, never mind the cognitive limitations we have when it comes to identifying hazards.
Now is the time to be having radically candid conversations about what we are doing when it comes to the layers of control within our systems of work AND how we foster a psychologically safe environment - not just to allow for Work as Done conversations and being able to protect the integrity of those conversations, but also because people need it now more than ever.
Social Cohesion in New Zealand - The Helen Clark Foundation