“We’re seeing more clients taking that holistic approach to health in the workplace by implementing physical health programs, but also mental health programs and bringing those together”.
Tell us a bit about yourself
Name: Claire Ebstein
Role: Chief Commercial Officer
Favourite Sport to play: Tennis
What’s your background?: I trained as a physiotherapist and worked in a clinical setting for several years before deciding to move into the health and safety side of things, so I did a post-graduate qualification in health and safety management. I then worked in OHS and workers’ comp space, before moving into proactive injury prevention and that’s what led me to Bodycare 11 years ago.
What emerging trend do you see having the greatest impact on how organisations protect and support their workforces in the coming years?
Trend 1: The shift to integrated physical and mental health in the workplace
The first trend is Mental health in the workplace and specifically how organisations are looking at tackling mental health issues in the workplace. There’s obviously been a huge emphasis on psychosocial hazard management, which is really critical and really important.
We’re seeing more clients taking that holistic approach to health in the workplace by implementing physical health programs, but also mental health programs and bringing those together.
We know that psychological and physical health are inextricably linked. You really can’t pull them apart. But so many programs have got them as completely separate entities.
More and more we’re seeing clients bring those two together and we’re seeing that with our onsite injury prevention and our onsite mental health services; the gold standard is to provide employees with support and early intervention services.
Trend 2: The move towards connected, lifecycle-driven workforce health strategies
One of the things that we’re seeing the most from clients at the moment is they’re wanting to consolidate suppliers and really look at as many services as possible from single suppliers.
Not just from a procurement point of view, but also from the knowledge and the insights and the expertise that you glean from different stages in that employee lifecycle and how you can provide that back to the employer.
So whether it’s starting at a pre-employment assessment and using the data that we gain there to feed into an onsite injury prevention program, we’re asking, ‘does that give us any information about likelihood and predisposition to injury? What are the sorts of injury trends that we’re seeing?’
If we’re also running health and wellbeing services, ‘do any of those insights around the health and general health trends of a workforce link into those injury trends as well?’, ‘what are the mental health trends that we’re seeing?’
So all of those services across that employee lifecycle, we’re seeing them become more linked, and using data to identify opportunities for improvement and understanding workforce trends and health risk factors is really one of the key areas that we’re certainly looking at and will be continuing to enhance for our clients moving forward.
Trend 3: The rise of AI-enabled workforce insights and service delivery
I think we’re seeing how we can incorporate AI into the services that we deliver for our clients. So whether that’s through capturing tasks using AI and then being able to compare how is a task done in Brisbane different to a task done in Melbourne. The use of AI is an incredibly powerful tool to assist in that.
I think AI is kind of an emerging trend in everything at the moment. So sometimes it’s a bit gimmicky, sometimes it’s really meaningful in how it can enhance or change a task.
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