Managing the challenges of health and safety in a multigenerational workforce

Managing the challenges of health and safety in a multigenerational workforce by Dr Simone Ryan

Hey everyone. It's that time again, time for you to enjoy another special presentation from a Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. This morning, it's all about managing the challenges of health and safety in a multi-generational workforce with Dr. Simone Ryan. I'm Chris Bomblas from the office of industrial relations, and I'm your M.C. for today. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. I'd like to extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples watching today. Safe Work Month is held every October and is all about raising awareness of work, health and safety. This year Safe Work Month looks a little different but through these virtual events we're able to deliver safety and return to work information straight to your screens. This morning's presentation will be delivered by Dr. Simone Ryan, a medical specialist and occupational medicine pioneer. Simone is the founder and CEO of Totium and Australian Medical and Health Services Company as well as a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. She consults to and for large multinational organizations on all types of occupational health and safety risk matters. We are so lucky today as Simone will share her extensive expertise about managing the health and safety risks of a multi-generational workforce. She will provide guidance on how to maintain productivity in the workplace while protecting employees from the risk of injury or aggravation of age related conditions. Simone will also deep dive into the challenge of implementing healthy initiatives relevant to a multi-generational workforce and touch on the implications COVID-19 has had on the workforce and those now considered vulnerable workers as a result. Today's event will be broken into two parts. In the first session, Simone will explore the subject of aging and in the second, she will share how to design an age friendly work site as well as talk about ways to ensure multi-generational teams are all on the same page when it comes to safety. After each session, there will be an opportunity for you to ask Simone questions or simply provide a comment. To do this, just use the chat box on your screen at any time, and we'll get to as many of those questions and comments as possible. And I know that we've already got a number of questions lined up. Let's head to a soggy Sydney and welcome in Dr. Simone Ryan.

Thanks Chris and good morning everybody. That was a lovely introduction and yes, here in Sydney it's pretty cold this morning for a late October week. So it's nice to be indoors and in fact I'm so excited to be able to share this presentation with a wide audience while sitting at my desk in Sydney. So Chris has given a kind introduction about me. You'll hear a little bit more about me as the presentations continue. And today really I'm calling this topic aging at work. Aging was a word we used a few years ago and it was a bit of a buzzword back then. But what it probably means is multi-generational people or our workforce that spans a number of decades of age. So today I'm here on behalf of Totium, a company that I founded 10 years ago you can read all about my story and why this business started through the internet. And at the end of the presentation, I will be asking people if they would like to hear more about myself or Totium and things we're doing through an opt-in SMS and we'll get to more of that later. How did this all start? Gosh, I am madly passionate about keeping people at work well, it comes from a personal story relating to my family. And then just over time, I was exposed to more and more environments whereby I wondered what was wrong with someone that I might be to work site visits such as one I'm about to show you and wondering how these people were surviving with age related conditions. And so if I may, I will show the first video. This is a video where I was invited to a work site to sort of start thinking about manual handling and how to support an aging workforce. So video one will start now. As you can see from that, my job was to look at this type of manual handling practice. This particular company worked in gangs that was the name of the group of all men. And on this occasion, there were 10 men per gang and they were undertaking fairly heavy ergonomically challenging tasks as part of their daily work. The average age of these men was 55 and most of them had been with this company or a similar company since they left school at 18. So they had 30 or more years. When I went to the work site, I was fascinated that this type of work was still being carried out by people and particularly by people that were getting older in life. However, there was a very clear problem on that day, which was not the reason that I was invited to this work site. I'll show you the second video and if you watch this man here with the broom, like I did on that day, I remember saying to the person next to me, what's happened to this fellow. So let's start and have a look at that. Hello . If you watch carefully, the gentleman with the broom doesn't do very much. He stands around, he holds the broom. And as part of the work site visit, he was incredibly anxious and nervous. He was wondering why I was there. Rapport was instantly gained, as you can probably tell from the conversation between the leader of the gang and myself, he was wearing a straw hat under his safety hard hat. But if we go back to the original video I want you to please have a look again at the man with the broom and how he is carrying the broom. It became pretty clear to me that his left arm wasn't working, his left leg wasn't working. And I expect on this occasion here, he's not the man with the broom, sorry, the man with the shovel. He is giving it his very best to continue to perform as part of that work site assessment but it became pretty clear to me that if I wasn't standing there and wasn't standing there with the head of safety for this company that he probably didn't do much at all. And in fact, as it turns out that man had had a stroke, he'd had a stroke a number of years before, he was protected by his friends in the gang. They'd worked together for 30 years and he was on a defined benefit superannuation scheme where he was waiting to hit the age of 60 for his superannuation benefits to kick in. And he was very, very nervous. He was 58 years of age as to what might happen to him if he had told his company that he had had a stroke. And so for me, that became the real topic of the day and started to spark my interest in how I can help companies like this, keep their people at work well. And so it all began with this particular work site assessment but the real story was this gentleman who was holding the broom who clearly had had a left-sided stroke. So a little bit about me. I really care about these people. My own parents and my own personal circumstances led to various changes in career due to changes in work demand and health issues resulting of that. People obviously on this call are pretty passionate about safety. I can't believe that Safe Work Month is nearly over. There must have been thousands of presenters like me and what a privilege it is to be able to share information like this with an engaged population. Clearly throughout the college of physicians where I've formerly been a director and a fellow of the college of physicians through occupational environmental medicine. We talk about the healthy benefits of good work. We know that the working population is healthier than the non-working population. So people like me are madly passionate about keeping work as well. We care because we have gentlemen like this who love their job, haven't thought about what leaving their job would look like and certainly not in circumstances related to poor health. And then of course there's a business side. So as an occupational position but also in my CEO role with Totium, we give that advice to large corporates and small to medium size enterprises thinking about how the business can profit from keeping people at work well. And an interesting fact is to replace someone that you might lose through your business through ill health or other means probably costs about 1.5 times that person's annual salary. So if someone's earning a hundred thousand dollars a year and suddenly injured at work and can't come back, the timeframe between that person being injured, not coming back, replacing them and retraining the next person back up to a performance level that is suitable is probably one and a half times the salary of the person who went off injured and one would argue it's probably easier to keep them well and safe at work. Chris has given a kind introduction to me most of which he's touched on. I have a sideline business where I do independent medical examinations and provide fitness for work assessments for all sorts of people as an occupational physician. I'm very keen to provide the referral with information about how to keep someone safe and well at work if they have a medical condition. I am privileged to represent the federal health minister, the Commonwealth health minister on a government based health data board which the Australian Institute of health and welfare, I believe we can use health data and welfare data better than we haven't done for some time. And we're certainly doing that now to keep people at work well, and I'm six foot one. I've been six foot one since I was 11 years of age. And suddenly I got picked up to play basketball and went on to represent the country. So today we're talking about aging, if you like, physiological aging. So what happens to our body, mental, physical, and emotional components of that, and then how this affects work. What happens to people's cognition, their memory their thinking, their planning, their learning, do they lose that as they get towards retirement age? And what does this mean to them at work? This first part of the presentation, I should tell you, does have 40 slides. We're about 10 slides in. I always remember at university I'd think, gosh, how many more slides to go? So we're about a quarter of the way through the presentation. I have designed it as a resource pack, so I will talk quite quickly through it. It's part of a larger program that I run for corporates in aging, which is a half day or a full day workshop. So part two, after our first set of questions and answers, we'll be talking about designing an age-friendly work site. And I'm sharing with you my own worksheet that I use. I'm a girl from the bush, I'm from Canada. And I just have an April page when I go out to workplaces and I scribbled in a matrix to get me to start thinking about how to design an age-friendly work site so I'll share that sheet with you. It's not very technologically savvy. So the physiology of aging, really why we were thinking about physiology and medicine is to determine what's kind of normal or the physiological change, geriatric population dare I say. So a geriatric definition is someone over the age of 55, sorry Chris, I know that you've just had a beautifully significant birthday recently. And then the pathological relationships, so the disease relationship that happens as we get older. And to try and appreciate what is normal age related degeneration versus disease, and then the management of the same. So, as I said earlier, we'll talk about biology, physiology and psychology. I see Chris coming back into the screen here I'm hoping he hasn't got comment about his age. And so there are a number of theories, I won't bore you with them, but as I said, this is part of a resource pack. So do aging events occur randomly and just accumulate in time and then suddenly someone turns out with a condition that is sort of random, unexpected, but probably related to a number of various factors, or is it that aging is inevitable. So it is part of the general process of wear and tear, if you like. So for the first stochastic theory that aging events occur randomly and just accumulate in time because of the number of years that we live. So again, it could be like repeated damage to DNA or wear and tear. So someone might have seemingly work-related injury to their knee at the age of 58, but having played external sport for all of their life in Dunlop volleys they might've been playing tennis and their knees were gonna wear out at some point anyway. So the fact that there's injury happened at work may not be that work caused the injury, but it was gonna happen even if the person was out in the street. And then the inevitable theory is that certain organ systems such as parts of our brain, parts of our immune system and our hormone systems have pacemakers that just kind of keep going. The old theory that our heart is a pump and it only has so many beats before it chooses to stop. And this also gives rise to that genetic basis that you have, you're born with a set of genes, and then you have a familial predisposition to things just getting worse as you get older related to your genetics. And on top of all of that, within my area of expertise is thinking about the diseases and how these happen and then how they might impact the general aging process. So, which is it? It's probably his parts of all of this that looks like all of this is probably correct. There's no one single theory that explains things and chronological age, it's very important to know. So the number of years that you have been living is not actually a good reflection of the state of aging. And I will get into some of those systems in a moment. So while I'm going through the next bit, it's very dry, I'll tell you, I'll make it as interesting as I can but think about the jackhammer guys, that big piece of equipment that that man was using the well man was using is called a wacker. It can weigh up woods of 200 kilograms under force, and you will note that it sort of jumps around, it takes considerable amount of upper limb force and all over body stability to keep that thing on track, to whack down the tar in what was previously a little tunnel. So let's think about that job, those men. So there were 3,000 of those men in that company, average age of 55, there was no one young coming through that wanted to do that job. And so we needed to keep all of those men well. Let's keep that in mind when I go through the next stuff. So just general themes. Now, this is my medical lecture. People get shorter as they age, the discs and their lovely shock absorbers throughout the spine lose a bit of water and get a bit smaller and there's a number of those throughout the spine. And we all get a bit shorter probably doesn't matter for people like me who've been this height since I was 11. We can reduce that weight and appetite goes down actually. So you'll see people that are much older not having a great appetite, having a small sandwich for lunch they get thinner and lighter as they get older. We reduced our total body water, I've touched on that. And then really we have an increased ratio of fat to lean body mass. I'm sure people on the call know that as we get a bit older it's a bit harder to lose the fat around the middle and really what we're doing is losing some skeletal muscle mass as we get older. So the ratio just kind of shifts. So when you're thinking about your workforce, think about these really general things and how that might affect your people. Our skin, we get a receding hairline. Our hair goes gray. We have sweat glands that atrophy, so atrophy is a medical term, which means kind of shrinks and shrivels away and becomes underused and our skin strength and thickness is diminished. And so you think about people that you might see in the streets that have a lot of skin cancers over their head. There is backs of their hands. Their skin is very thin. And then suddenly we had some skin cancers coming out which one would argue is not only related to the amount of years that you have been exposed to the sun, but also your skin strength changes and becomes more vulnerable. So you've got to think about people that are in the outdoors, like my beautiful men at the work site, where I was visiting outdoors all day to the point that the leader of the gang wore a straw hat under his safety hard hat, which I think probably changed after I left. Posture control is very important for people in our manual job. Older people can get increased body sway and less able to kind of keep themselves back on track if they're thrown off balance. So if you have a workforce that is picking and packing in the logistics industry, grocery pickers and packers, if something happens and suddenly they pick something up and it's a bit heavier than they thought, and they can't kind of themselves, they might fall over. That doesn't mean we get rid of them from our workforce but we need to think, hang on a minute, like we did it the company that I demonstrated earlier, be really proactive and think I've got a workforce here that is a little older than they were five years ago. They're providing good work. Let's invest in them with some manual handling techniques or some exercise physiology classes or some online classes to keep them strong and stable in their posture and their core. With our eyes, yes, we get bags under our eyes. Presbyopia is a condition whereby the distance that you need to hold something away from your eyes to be able to read it properly increases. You'll often see people that are getting older and in denial about needing reading glasses, sort of having a long arm, particularly they're in dim lighting in a cafe or a restaurant that the lights aren't as bright as the sun. They sort of hold the menu out for themselves before they might order their coffee. Slower to adapt to darkness. Some disease processes come in like macular degeneration which is definitely an age related condition of the eyes that does have a genetic predisposition and degeneration of the tear glands. And so tears of course, or the moisture of our eyes keep our eyes healthy. And most of us will know, if you're in a cold air conditioned office environment, by the end of the day, you might have sort of sore or gritty eyes. And particularly as we get older, that becomes a real thing for people. And so all of these things are things to think about when you're thinking about your workforce and how you would design it, an age friendly workforce. With our ears, so we have a decrease if we do an audiogram of people we see this drop off at higher frequency which is really just age related hearing change like the presbyopia for the eyes it's called Presbycusis. It's just that your ears and your hearing is not able to keep up with the higher frequency sounds like it would have when you were younger. And sometimes sounds from speech is distorted because the amplification changes as we get older. So if you think about an industry whereby let's say a man or a woman is on a forklift, and they can't turn their neck for one reason or another, and they rely on someone behind calling out to them, they probably wouldn't be safe at work, but let's say these things happen in real life. And I've seen it too many times to think about, and they're relying on someone calling out, Hey, Bob, or, Hey, Jane, stop, stop, stop. But if they're not able to hear the speech clearly, then the real issue that could be screened for early through some onsite health screening or health surveillance or part of a preemployment or regular employment medical. And then we can engineer solutions. Most people here probably know about the hierarchy of controls in safety. And so in this particular scenario, you can't eliminate or substitute the risk they still need Bob or Jane to be on the forklift but it might be that the warehouse has a light that flashes over the whole warehouse. If there looks to be a safety issue booming or a safety issue pending rather than relying on someone calling out. So these things are just really clever ways to think about keeping your workforce well. Cardiovascular system, I have a big background in cardiovascular training as part of my physician and surgical training. And we know that our output of our cardiovascular output what we might think about our stamina or our ability to keep going folds with age. And if 80, our cardiovascular output is about 30%, that of a 30 year old. And so people wear out, they get tired, they don't have as much blood pumping around their body. Their heart rates might increase to try and keep the blood pumping around but the pump is not as strong as it was previously. And so what happens is the blood pressure rises and the arteries all around the body harden with cholesterol if there's been smoking, they might be some genetics which we're gonna make them hard and up a bit anyway. And so ultimately you have a pipe that's trying to get more and more blood through it. The pipe's hard, so it's not flexible. It's filling with cholesterol. The pressure in the pump rises. The pump tries to work harder to get the blood out, and all of these things can impact someone at work. If you think about my men at the work site that's pretty hippy physical job working on that whacker. It's actually heavy physical jobs standing outside in the sun for eight hours a day, five days a week for 30 years. So we've got to start to think as a business as that business did, let's keep these people well let's get them regular health checks, annual health checks and if there were any blips on the radar, we would invest in reducing that risk rather than reducing the number of people at work. Our respiratory system is similar about the air coming in and out of our lungs and our ability for that air to oxygenate the blood that's pumping around our body as triggered by our heart. And then the other thing in the respiratory system, really specific and important for the COVID-19 scenario that we are currently in the midst of, is that the cilia or the small hairs lining the respiratory system starting at the nose, going down through the pipes and in various other parts of our body they become less in numbers and less effective. And so if you have an infection or you're breathing in some smoke, or you're breathing in some dust at work or something else tries to enter your windpipe system if you like, normally we would cough that up the cilia beat to try and remove the foreign object from our body and out through one of the holes of orifices. But you think about, if you're getting older your respiratory system is reduced, your stamina is reduced. The cilia aren't working as well, and you're at work and suddenly something happens. Your respiratory system is finding it difficult to recover. So with COVID-19 of course, and I'll talk about COVID-19 right throughout the presentation, but it's a virus attended to affect the respiratory system of some people, particularly vulnerable people. So, the government regulations and recommendations were for aging workers to stay home because we weren't sure how they would respond if they're at work and became unwell and other vulnerable people which I'll talk about in a moment. Our immune system becomes weaker as we get older. And so if you pick up community-based diseases or you're in an environment that is dusty or smoky, and you get sick, you might get pneumonia, your immune system, as you're getting older, isn't able to fight back as hard as it would have when you were younger. And so we needed to think very carefully about who was vulnerable even if you were well at work, but you were 60. Did that mean you were vulnerable and the government regulations were recommending? Yes, it did mean you're vulnerable. And there was a recommendation you would stay home. Of course, for businesses, this created chaos, particularly businesses that had people in their late 50s that did have wide community contact or contact with their workers and weren't able to kind of isolate themselves the recommended 1.5 meters away from their colleagues. So it created absolute chaos. I don't think I have been ever as busy as I was for the first eight to 10 weeks that COVID-19 had hit the Australian shores. Renal system has really kidneys, same kind of thing. This all sounds very grim, I assure you. This doesn't happen to all of us all the time, but it's just either that this is the medical sort of lecture if you like to think about it, when you're starting to think about an age-friendly at workplace. So kidneys, less blood goes through our kidneys. Our kidneys are used to clean out toxins and excrete things from our body through our Woolley. And so kidneys are pretty forgiving by the way, you can live on about half of one kidney. So this isn't as catastrophic as let's say the cardiovascular system or the respiratory system which you might think about doing some screening for in your workplace. In your gut. Similarly, decrease salivation, our mouths get a bit drier as we get a bit older. The interestingly, the motility or the movement of the intestines remains unchanged. But again, there's less blood flow around the body, the enzyme activity changes, less sensitive to smell and taste. So if you're in an environment that requires you to taste things or be mindful of particular smells, let's say you're working in a chemical laboratory and some of you would know that there are very particular smells that can be pungent but probably safe. And there are other chemicals that have either no smell at all or a very faint smell, which can be toxic. So if that was your job and you're getting older, you'd wanna make sure that your smell and taste is checked regularly to keep yourself safe at work. The musculoskeletal stuff is big. I've spoken earlier about the loss of lean muscle mass. So therefore of course, just in as principle terms, if you haven't got as much muscle mass in a muscle, that's trying to work then the strength of that muscle diminishes. And we know that people have decreased bone density. In our Totium clinics, we do screen workers over particular ages for female and males, because bone density, isn't something you feel but it's something you can do something about if it's detected early. And the last thing we want is someone who is 60, enjoying their working life, ready to think about retirement going out with a party rather than a letter and falling off balance, can't rightly sway and falls over and breaks their hip. The recovery from that is horrific, particularly as we get older. And in fact, in little old women who are about 80 years and older, if they do fall and have a hip fracture often they have some kind of life ending condition within the next couple of years. So it's important. I think about my 94 year old grandmother who has now passed but she was determined that every day she would be able to get up when she was 80, when she was 90 out of her own chair, that was her one of her last missions was to be able to stand up independently out of their chair when she was in an aged care home, and God bless her. She was able to do that but it does take some motivation on behalf of the person and in workplace, there's probably some screening and some thinking about this, particularly if you have a manual labor workforce. The nervous system. So the nervous systems is not only nerves but it starts with the brain. All of the hormones in the brain, how we respond quickly to things or not, how our memory behaves, how we sleep and all of those things are written here as part of a nervous system kind of resource. We do have defects in the synthesis of some of the hormones that we need to keep us happy and keep us calm and allow us to sleep and keep our hands steady. So as these things change, not necessarily related to age but sometimes disease kicks in and sometimes people at work can't be kept as safe as they would otherwise if they had a strong nervous system, good sleep, good memory, and the like. Metabolic changes. So, as I said earlier, we have a decreased total energy requirements or we don't need to eat as much. If we're thinking about our body as a bank, we put money in, food in, and we expend energy or spend our money. And we like to keep that quiet level. If, of course, if we eat too much or put too much money in and don't spend enough, we get fat, which is probably included to make balanced, but not if it's your body. The other thing that happens just as a part of living through years is that we become glucose intolerance. So diabetes should be hitting our radar and there's other liver related changes. But really the two main ones are the decreased total energy requirement and the sugar problems. Immunology is a big one, particularly around COVID. So T-cells are one of the cells that make up our immune system. And as we get older, our immune system does find it more difficult to fight back. If you think in just practical terms, you might have a 35 year old person at work who gets a dose of the flu or a terrible head cold or something viral like that. And then you might have someone who's in their late 50s or 60s, otherwise, excuse me, appears to be quite fit and well gets the same fluid or the same head cold. The person over here might take one or two days off, and should probably take one or two days off to rest. Firstly, look after themselves, but also not to spread things around the office or the workplace, but this person over here might take a week or even two weeks off. I know lots of their fitness for work assessments that I get referred even through tele health video conferencing or face to face does say, can you explain Dr. Ryan, why this person is full time away from work? And if they are a person who is in their 50s and 60s, while age as a number it doesn't describe how old that person is. It's that we've spoken about earlier. We know that their immune system is weaker and they're not gonna bounce back as quickly. So I think in workplaces where you have got an older population and the sick leave does go up for genuine reasons and it's probably quite forgiving and supportive of the employer to understand why that might be the case. That's all the physical stuff and now we'll click into the psychology. We're probably just on time or even possibly ahead of time. So psychology is a very complex area. I don't profess to be a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, but I'm well learned in aging and I'm well learned in workplaces. And so really when we think about psychology, we think about cognition. So how we get getting information and process it, store it and use it. We think about memory, laying down memory how we can start getting information in and then storing it away, but being able to pull it back as we need it, that's essential for future planning. And then we think about learning. So changes in behavior due to experience and how people will alter their behavior according to learning and I know there has been already an early question Centene about should we be trying to encourage older people to use new technologies and those sorts of things. And we'll touch on that later. And learning of course does rely on your memory. So if you are trying to teach someone who's in their late 50s a brand new wiz-bang technology system for case management or recording of details or logistics you're gonna have to give that person some time because we know that as we get older, our memory possibly isn't as good as it was when we were younger. And we're so used to ways that we were doing things. It does take time to encourage that person to learn new behaviors. So the good bits. Some aspects of intelligence decline with age but we think it's probably not until after 60s. So they're much later in life. And so, just because someone's had a 60th birthday or a 65th birthday, that's no reason to think about them any differently with respect to their intelligence and particularly people that have been in an environment or one workplace or industry for most of their working life, their corporate knowledge far far outweighs any loss of intelligence. So some aspects are increased with age. The boring story for everybody is all of this can be fixed if you like and nurtured and nourished through activity and nutrition and good health. So if you think about what you put into your body it comes down into your gut, the good stuff comes out into your blood, the blood pumps around to your brain and your nervous system and your heart and your respiratory system and your muscles. If that's full of good nutrition, all of those things are probably gonna be in a better state than if you're not feeding it with good nutrition. There are multiple ways that intelligence can be expressed through creativity, practicality, wisdom, corporate knowledge and how we emotionally evolve as people and that intellectual expertise and wisdom can be developed with age. So the traditional views of intelligence which have changed is that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. This is my puppy dog, Rocky and Rocky turned 10 months next week. He's 50 kilograms and he is just a little puppy. So when I take him out to the dog park, I still have to keep him on a lead. Other dogs think he's this big adult dog. They don't understand why he wants to jump on them and play on them because he's so big and it might hurt them. And it's an absolute nightmare. I came to a dog park to be quite honest but the reality is you can teach an old dog new tricks. And the other traditional view was that intellectual decline was inevitable. As we got older, we just became a bit more stupid and that's not quite the case. The contemporary views is that you're not getting older, you're getting better. And that life span, as we know in lots of aspects of our life is it consists of a dual process of gain and loss and gain and loss. And as I say to my team here at Totium, if the gains are more than the losses on any one day then our trend will always be towards good health. We don't have to change, eat cardboard and run marathons every day to be quite well but just to be mindful that we have to be kind to ourselves and everything in moderation, including moderation. So the contemporary views of intelligence are you can get better as you get older, you can teach old dogs new tricks. So factors that reduce the risk of that intellectual decline. So the absence of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. So I've spoke earlier about exercise and nutrition, nourishing your body with good nutrition and making your heart, the muscles of your heart are similar to the muscles of your legs. They need exercise to be strong and healthy. So if we can reduce cardiovascular disease and other diseases in our body then our intellectual decline risk decreases, a high socioeconomic status produces a favorable environment. So people that have a higher socioeconomic demographic or way that they live tend to have opportunity and funds to go on and nurture their intellectual desires as they get older. Flexible personality styles is very important. As people are getting older at work, they need to be thinking about ways that they can adapt themselves and inflexible personality style probably doesn't serve someone as they're getting through much older working life because things particularly these days and particularly with COVID, things have changed so rapidly. And unless your personality is going to allow you to be flexible and accommodating of some of these necessary changes it's probably not gonna serve you well. And then people can become less, they can experience intellectual decline but they also can start to experience a mental health conditions. A high cognitive status of the spouse. So going home from work and having a sensible conversation with someone at home, doesn't have to be a direct partner. You might be living in a shared house environment but having an opportunity to sit and talk to the same person regularly with a sensible conversation. And also the other thing that can help reduce the risk of intellectual decline is maintaining high levels of processing. Other dimensions of intelligence I have touched on just keep looking at my watch. You'll have to forgive me, I like to be on time and we will be. So expertise. I can't tell you how many times when I give advice to companies about how to design an age-friendly workforce through a workshop or a round table chat over a day or two. The corporate knowledge and the expertise of people that have been there a long time is just invaluable. And then other things we can think about, we have people can express intelligence through their creativity. So young people coming in, I have a team here, I'm looking out my window of their team here and everyone is under 30. That's sitting here now open plan office today only half of them are here. They're very creative. They come at new technologies and we have a health technology business. They're very creative in their ways of thinking about how we can care for patients which if I had an inflexible personality as I'm getting old, I'm hitting my mid to late 40s. I might think, gosh, no, I'm not doing it that way. I'm a medical practitioner. I know how to do this. But in fact this is a way that they're expressing their intelligence to me and of course, wisdom. I've put some older adults and their accomplishments here to keep us all inspired. So George Burns won an Academy award at 80. Gandhi was involved in the Indian independence movement, starting at age 72. Nelson Mandela won a Nobel peace prize at 75. And the rest you can read. I also had someone told me recently, as part of a workshop I was running that the gentleman who started, I think it might have been KFC or one of the fast food chains was probably mid to late 50s when this came out as a concept. And so if you've got the drive and motivation no matter what your age, you can go on and accomplish things of which are usually passionate about. The final little topic is looking at young versus old. So this is just numbers of age. And we know that people who are younger in your workforce and people who are older will have differences in their lifestyle. The young guys might go and take every last cent out of their wallet and go and buy their lunch every day. And the people that have been there a long time might pack their lunch, their apple or drink, and just prefer to sit at their desks. So it's a very different lifestyle. Familiarity in tasks during testing. People that are older who are familiar with tasks might appear to be slower in their processing, but usually perform extremely well. Self-belief is a big part of young people coming through. Are usually fairly confident and really willing to go with the changes of businesses and work versus old people might start to think I don't know how to do this. I don't think I can turn on a computer. I'm not sure how to send an email. I hope someone at work, doesn't ask me to do that. And they start to lose confidence which then affects their memory, and their learning and their performance and their exit strategy from the business. And then as I've said repeatedly, corporate knowledge outweighs the loss of any physical function that we see in people that are getting older. We do know that processing speed is slower, but language skills and the ability to learn other same. So, as I said earlier, I was involved in a large federal government project where a brand new IT platform was to be introduced. The old IT platform had been grandfathered for about 20 years and everyone was really familiar with it. Everyone, even the people who were older could work as fast as the people who were younger because they'd been doing it all of their life. The new platform came in unfortunately, where our technology troubles it was clunky, not everything ran smoothly. People became frustrated. The people who were older were sent for so many fitness for works because the business couldn't understand why the people that were older, weren't picking things up as quickly as the people that were younger. And I kept saying to them, it's just going to take time, communicate appropriately. They're not stupid. They're just getting a bit slower. Once they get it and get that the business is moving that way and they're trained in it, they might need repeated training. They might need double the time to implement this program. Once they get it, they will be back performing as per usual. We do know there are differences in attention in young people versus old people. So older adults are more likely to be distracted and again, it affects their memory and language, which affects their learning. So in summary, the young versus old story is that it's multifactorial. It's not impossible to keep these people at work. I showed you right at the very start, the videos of a work site, where there were 3,000 men in one large city who've been with the company for 30 years and the average age was 55. They had a very heavy manual labor job and we kept them all well at work we designed a re-transition to retirement program. Of course, that for them, from a business viewpoint for people thinking, Oh my God, imagine if that was my business, we then had to have rewards and recognition system for young people coming through. And for those that will ask, and usually hundreds of people ask what happened to the man with the broom? We decided that he wasn't fit to do that job at that point in time, we understood his financial requirement that he was hoping to get to 60. And we used his corporate knowledge. His memory wasn't affected by the stroke, his language or his intelligence. He really had a physical defect. And we used him for the next two years to help us design a transition to retirement program and his friends who were all of his workmates in his gang, but also to use his corporate knowledge and start to train younger people coming through the business. So in summary, some aspects of intelligence decline with age, some are maintained or can be increased. There are multiple ways to keep people well and safe at work. And as we get older, intellectual expertise and wisdom can be developed. And that Mr. Chris, is the end of my very long 40 minute presentation, which is a resource about aging.

Look, you said it was gonna be dry, I thought it was very interesting. And we do have lots of questions, Simone, and some comments, a couple of quick comments before we start the questions Sandy and Sarah wanted to give you a couple of other examples of all these doing good in the latter years. How about the Queen and David Attenborough? Who's only just discovered social media. He's a good one. Talk about moving with the times.

Very good.

You were talking about the junk food or the fast food man that was Colonel Sanders, KFC. He discovered KFC in his late 50s, I think it was. And look, a quick comment too from Mark, and I have to agree with Mark because you suddenly called me a geriatric early on and he says, Mark says, my God aging looks and sounds awful. Just the physical side of things. You haven't painted a pretty picture. Although I must admit, I'm on displaying a lot of those symptoms. Nothing? You got nothing for me, Doc?

Oh, sorry. No, as I said, it does sound grim. My job was to tell you what can happen cause if you're Mr. HR or Mrs safety, you might be thinking, gosh I actually don't know what to do with all of my people and I need to look after them. At the end of the day, I'm still a physician. I went into medicine to care for people. And we just need to recognize that these things happen so we can care for people better and if we care for people better, they usually safe at work.

Don't forget everybody who's watching us this is just the end of part one. Doc will be back with part two very, very shortly. We're just gonna have a few questions. Debra asks, we currently have a young worker aged around 29 who's had a stroke and we're working with him to keep him engaged and looking how we can get him back into the workplace although the workplace is demanding. Any tips that would help us with this would be greatly appreciated from Debra.

Oh, what a great question. Stroke in young people is devastating. It's not only devastating for the person and their family, but the care packages available for young people that have had strokes, particularly strokes that affected physical or cognitive development or physical output because depending how that person continues to function it sounds like he or she is continuing to try and be at work. The best thing you could do, Debra, is probably have a chat, at the very end of my second preso, I've got an option to send me an SMS so we can keep your details. Just reach out to me separately, got off go and just off the saying that there's a thousand people on the call, but reach out to me and I'm very happy to help you think about ways to move forward. What you probably need to do is like a fitness for work assessment. The person may or may not be fit for work, but you might ask the occupational physician or the neurologist that you're referring that person to, modifications or reasonable accommodations, the business could implement to help that person. The other thing to know about stroke I was a stroke pre-registrar here at Madden Hospital for six, as part of my physician training is that usually that person has reached maximum medical improvement at two years. So they probably made an 80 to 90% recovery from the stroke at 18 months. People with high intellect and people who are young probably can go on and have a bit more recovery but at about two years, the way that person behaves and is able to express themselves physically and cognitively is probably as good as they're gonna get. So that's an important number to think about.

Don't forget everybody. Part two of Dr. Simone Ryan's presentation is all about work design and communication is coming up shortly. But back to the questions, Jack asks, what are some different workplace wellness strategies that could be implemented to improve work, health and safety outcomes in a multi-generational workforce?

Oh, great question Jack. And I will indicate a professional interest not a conflict, but clearly at Totium, we provide wellness programs for corporate company. What we have thought about in the last couple of years, and thankfully has a couple of patents pending on it is a way that you can kind of screen your workforce in a well-being manner but use the data at the end of the day, I'm a data head. I want data to tell me how our workforce is behaving what their health is like, so I can then advise the company on where they can spend their wellness dollars. So the best thing you can do is have a low cost but large scale program where everyone is equal. Traditionally, and we have one at Totium, there's an executive health program that is platinum, gold silver, bronze, et cetera. And depending where you are on the hierarchy of salaries, usually depends on which package you give. But Jack, I would give you advice to try and get some kind of low cost screening for all. Make sure two things. One, you get access to the de-identified data. So you can start to think about gosh, I've actually got a problem with 45 year old people in Brisbane who was smoking. My 60 year old people over here are quite well and have had ongoing medical care. The other thing to remember as part of wellbeing programs is you don't want to supply a provider to come in do a one-off screening, give someone their results and hope they'll take their results to a GP. We know that 75% of Australians don't have a designated or nominated GP, particularly people at work, they think Oh gosh, I've got this funny thing on my thumb, I better go and see someone at a medical center and they don't have a regular family doctor that they go to. So make sure if you do do some screening at work, that someone is gonna care for that person until the end of their treatment and not just screen them give them a report card and tell them to go away.

Thanks everyone for joining us. Jody asks, Doc, how can a positive safety culture influenced better double wages outcomes in a multi-generational workforce?

Oh gosh, safety. The second part of my next section is all about making safety. Cool, again. I've previously worked as a very senior leader at Qantas and also at IBM where we were safety crazy. I mean, I would happily get on a Qantas aircraft and feel completely confident that wherever I was going to or I was gonna get to, I can say that hand on heart because of the safety culture and that's what we spoke about we were proud to be part of the safety culture. So the second part of my next 30 minutes, we'll talk a little bit about that. And Chris, what was the first part of that question? Oh, how can a positive safety culture influence outcome. And so we know that people that feel safe and confident and comfortable at work, don't have to worry about external things. In the next part of my talk, I do use a flipped on the hierarchy of controls into a totally different hierarchy. It hasn't been done before. It's something I'm madly passionate about is looking after the person. And I say, if a person goes to work and knows their job is safe and they're being cared for at work, they're gonna focus on their work. And when you focus on your work, less accidents happen.

A question from Angie, and we've got one after this one, before we get into the second part of your presentation. How keen are employers companies willing to hire more mature aged workers in this day and age?

Yeah, great question. It depends on the task at hand, I think. I think lots of companies do preemployment medicals. Some would argue that it's a bit of a tick and flick thing. Particularly if they're low cost it's kind of a tick box that you've done it. But I think depending on what you're looking for, so I'll give a personal example. I'm looking for some business development people in my business at the moment our digital medical product has gone crazy. And I don't think people that we're talking to in the safety space are going to respond to someone who's fresh out of uni, done a bachelor of business, majoring in something. I need people that are learned and understand our industry and understand the safety lingo and have a respectful, calm conversation with someone. And so I'm actively looking for more mature people to join our Totium team. Similarly, in the past, I've had personal assistants, executive assistants, people that were just great at had been great at shooting off emails. But in fact, in more recent years, I've had someone who is like a sidekick. I call her my sidekick. She's much older than I am. She cares about me. She cares about our business very much and I can't imagine ever having someone different to that lady. So it's important for people to think about what job you're trying to fill. And is there someone that is a little older and has some more experience that would be more beneficial?

The two-part question from Shauna to wrap up this session, what are some tips for effectively managing an aging workforce that is set this way due to industry culture and then also in regards to flexible personality style, what about those people who are set in their ways, stuck in their ways?

Yeah, very difficult. So the first one was tips and tricks, and I'm gonna share that as part of the next part about preso if that's cool. But I've always said just remember that the H in HR stands for humans, we say HR, or I'm an HR director. I work in HR. I do this in HR and I think, Oh gosh I hope they remember that the H stands for human and that's the physician in me coming out. So humans come to work every day. And my second part of my presentation really gets into this. They come to work every day, probably enjoying their job not loving their job, needing the money, definitely. And lucky they've got a job. And so if we can think about that human and look after them at work and take away any of the other stresses that they might be thinking about while they're at work and related to work, then we're probably caring for that person and they will serve you well. And people don't go to work hoping to have an accident, usually, and hope to play some kind of claim. Chris, what was the second part? Oh, the inflexible personalities. Goodness gracious. Personalities are very difficult. Personality medicine is part of psychiatric medicine. So as I've said, I'm not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, have no training in either, but we know that inflexible personalities usually people are difficult to get along with. And in this fast pace or the fast changes we're seeing in workforces, these people don't survive. Their performance actually goes down and the way they exited from the business it's with a letter rather than a party. Always say to my team, I say to all of the companies that I give advice to, it's awesome if you can get someone to exit your business with a party, meaning a fair well or a lunch or a bunch of flowers versus here's your letter, there's the door. And so unfortunately, people with inflexible personalities take a lot more time and encouragement to get their mindset to change to come along the journey. We do have some older people in our business. And recently we've gone to, as I said to a digital thing and early days, the people were like, oh, it's not gonna work. People want face to face contact. They wanna go and see their doctor. I said, that's fine, but we're in the middle of a pandemic. They can't come and see their doctor. We have to think about ways. And so suddenly as these things started to work I would have meetings with the people that were older and say, can you see how it's working? Can you hear the positive feedback? And so it just takes some time to nurture those people and get them to come along for the ride rather than think, Oh God, they're never gonna get it. I don't know what to do with you.

Don't forget if you've got a question or a comment for Simone and you haven't submitted it as yet. Please use the chat box on your screen and send it through. We've got another opportunity to ask Simone questions at the end of the second session. This senior citizen with his gray hair is gonna take a little rest now, Simone, 'cause you told me that was a very, very important while you take over and go to the second part of your presentation. Thanks very much, I'll just move off now. I'm going.

And I'll have a swig of my coffee to keep my adrenaline going. I could talk all day in case you didn't work hadn't worked out yet. So the next bit is half an hour, it's pretty fun. It's broken up into two 15 minute sections. The first has nine slides, the second has 20 but about 10 of them, we flicked through really quickly. And so designing an age friendly work site. Gosh, what I've done is got my four hour practical workshop and put it into 15 minutes. So forgive me again, it's a resource pack happy to this and tips and tricks later I do that anyway through newsletters and things, we run through Totium. So why do we want an age friendly work site for all the reasons we've stated earlier? It's so important to continue to care for people, no matter how many years they've been alive and secondarily, they bring so much value to our business. So module one, is get started. This is the hardest thing. When you go back to your desks after Safe Work Month and you think gosh, we don't have an age-friendly work site. We don't even have policy on aging. That's okay. That's actually okay. Just get started. Just grab a couple of people that are interested and I can't share the name under confidentiality, but a few years ago I was brought in by a department store where people that had worked for that department store had worked for them for all of the life of the department store. And some people in some of the departments were hitting 75 and 80 years of age. And that was a family run business. They said to me, we don't know what to do. And I said, let's just get started. Let's think about who we've got. Who do we care about? What's the demographic? Why did you get me to come in? And they said, we don't wanna get rid of these people, but it's time for them to go. And we just got started. We started with a little survey asking people why they were still at work at 75. And usually some of them were saying, well, it's part of who I am. It's part of my identity. It's what I've always done. And some say, well, I don't know if I've got enough money to retire. And so instantly, I was thinking let's get some financial people and see what their retirement package looks like, what their super looks like. And suddenly we lost half of the workforce because they realized they had enough money but then they were gonna lose their identity. And so we kept them on a couple of days a week for a year and then one day a week for a year and then transition them to retirement. So it doesn't have to be difficult. Just get started. Grab some mates, get a piece of paper and get started. You've just got to remember why we're doing this. We know that the workforce is aging. The retirement age is blowing out and we are going to have and probably want to have older workers on some of our projects. We know that as people get older, if they're injured at work, or if they become unwell, even in a non-work-related illness it does cost the business money. And that person takes longer to recover. The stakes are high. There's safety issues, quality issues, health care costs. And what I have said is some organizations will thrive even those that just pick up a piece of paper, which I'm gonna share with your mine in a moment and others mine too, really takes some leadership from some people. It doesn't always have to be the CEO or the senior management or head of safety, but some people will say, we really care about our workers here, no matter how old they are. And we're gonna start to look after them. How old is old? Gosh, we've spoken about aging for too long this morning, but as I've said age is a number. However, the higher that number is the more physiological things that can happen to us. There are people like the man in the top right corner and very similar to the work site that I showed at the start of my presentation, who that's all they've done. That's all he's done all of his life. He only knows manual work. He needs his job. He has a responsibility to his family and we have to try and look after him and keep him well at work. So these are goals that I throw around as part of my workshop that's a four to eight hour workshop. So we teach people about aging, which I've done a very quick version of this morning, not just older workers, but all of us. I'm aging, I'm in my mid, heading towards my late 40s. And so I think sometimes I think, gosh how long am I gonna do this for? Am I gonna be 65 or 60? I haven't even given it any thought but these are things to think about as part of a workplace aging policy conversations to have with people about what this means. Our workshop, we talk about an age friendly work place, which we're gonna do now. We can leave with an action plan. And then at the end of, the big workshop that I normally do I think about work-related claims and are these work-related aggravations of underlying degenerative disease. But at the end of the day, having an action plan that if there isn't a workplace claim, you've got an action plan, you've got a policy, the work safe investigator comes out this is what we do. This is how we've done it. And then it's less stressful for everybody. So there are six and a seventh, six things that are, I like to talk about. Get started, we've just done that. Think about the challenges, think about who your workforce is, what are their physical, what's their age, what's their demographics. So going back to the resource kit, I've just given you from this morning, what are the physical things that might be starting to be experienced by some of the people at work? What might be the mental changes? How long had some of them been there or have you got workers who are in their 50s, who've only been there a few years. So where's the corporate knowledge. Think about safety and health at work. Section three is the dimensions of an age friendly workplace. So you have an individual, that's a human that's part of human resources and you have a work environment. And so really the human wants to enjoy work as part of their life. Many years ago, we used to talk about work, life, balance but I think we would all agree technology and COVID-19 has shown us that in fact, work is part of life and really it's life balance. I've said to so many people as part of this COVID-19 scenario I've given loads of advice in seminars. Make sure your people are working from home and not living at work. Very, very important because mental health claims will go up about people that feel like they just can't escape from work because work might be on their kitchen table. They may not have a house where there's a spare office or a spare desk in a kid's play room. They might have to sit at the kitchen table push everything to the side, to cook dinner. Everyone sits around the dinner table the computers on the end of the table. It's not very friendly and that's not a friendly workplace at all. Let alone for someone who's getting older thinking, what am I doing? This isn't what I worked all my life to do. So the COVID-19 scenario is real and dimensions of an age friendly or a COVID friendly workplace are things that we need to be thinking about and how to get balanced for our people. Then the next three things, the work environment. So think about the hierarchies of control. Think about the risks you have. So let's think about your workforce as being older and aging and how you might be able to engineer some of the work environment to better suit those people. Now, the gentleman we showed at the start of my original presentation, there's not much we could do to engineer a solution there. They had to be out on the roads. The roads are outside. They have to be out in the sun, but how do we protect them? Can we build some tents while we're making these tunnels. Thinking about air ventilation or at least covers to keep them out of the sun. We know that their skin is getting thinner we know their cardiovascular health is poorer. So in the sun temperature rises and your body works harder to keep cool. So think about ways you can engineer your work environment not only to keep your people well and safe at work, but engaged. Imagine if you were out on the road in one of those gangs and suddenly someone from your company came and erected or taught you all, how to erect a really cool Maki if you like, or shelter that had good airflow that kept you out of the sun, maybe some chairs to sit down on if you're having a rest or you're rotating as part of your gang. So think about all the things that you could do to engineer the work environment to support your aging workforce. The individual you need to think about their health. They need to think about health promotion and disease prevention services. I think Jack in the earlier presentation did ask how do we do wellness strategies? What does a good wellness strategy look like? And I would argue that you need to understand the health risks of your people. The only way you're gonna do that is through a pretty robust, private of course, health risk assessment and then get the data and think about, okay I've got health issues here in this particular population. These guys look okay, so let's keep them well but we need to improve the health of this lot over here. And so all of these things, the work environment, the individual, start to think about your action plan. So you've got the person going to work in the environment. We need the person to be well, we need the environment to be safe. Get started now has a little action plan as to how we're gonna do this. And then finally life balance. I keep putting work life balancing because it's what people think about rather than life balance sounds a bit wishy-washy. But I do think COVID-19 has allowed us to think about life a bit differently and how work is involved and so flexible choices for people. You can be rest assured that in all of the companies where I have given advice on aging or helping them develop an aging policy people stay at work longer than they need to because they don't know they can retire. And they don't know how much money they've got, what retirement looks like. How do you use their superannuation. And sometimes as well as having a health promotion activity or a health risk assessment or looking at disease prevention for your people that financial piece is pretty strong. And they're looking outside the workplace to community resources for the family run department store I was talking about earlier, we wanted to maintain the sense of purpose for our people that we're exiting from the business now that they had realized that they had enough money to leave. And so we went to the Salvation Army who were always looking for volunteers and rely on people turning up regularly on a rostered environment. And so we were transitioning our people working two days a week in the department store and getting paid for that and transitioning to retirement by spending one or two days a week, working for the Salvation Army and then slowly they would transition their work into the total volunteer role funded by their superannuation but still had that absolute sense of purpose. And I think as an employer if you can farewell people like that, then you can go home at night knowing that you have done your job. And so therefore, is the third action plan. So action plans that work. So some projects fail and others succeed. And in my opinion these five points really crucial to making that get started, let's get an action plan drawn up and see if we can get it to work. So we need to choose actions that are important to people and to the business. We need to choose actions that actually matter to someone. So you need to think about going out and surveying. So in this particular population, we surveyed them initially and there were only about a hundred people around the country to survey, that was pretty easy. We couldn't do it by technology. Half of them didn't have an email or a computer. They just turned up to work for 40 years, some of them and did their job and loved their job. And that turning up to work was, and people were relying on them to turn up to work, gave them a sense of purpose. And so that real sense of purpose was so easy to help them in transitioning to retirement, by going to someone like the Salvation Army or another volunteer organization it really mattered to these people that they didn't just leave the business with a party. They wanted to keep feeling a sense of purpose at work and think about immediate actions. Think about, yes, it's nice to have in 2030 this age friendly work site and we're gonna work towards that. But I can tell you in the meantime, people will be 10 years older. And if there's no immediate actions where people start to reap the benefits, then usually that action plan doesn't work and we need it to be a smooth fit. So just not, not just one more thing we've got to think about here now. Simone Ryan told us we need an age policy. Just think about, Hey, it's probably time to start thinking about aging. We need to fit this in somewhere. Where are we gonna put it? Probably somewhere between people or human, human resources and safety. So that maybe you might get an HR person and a safety person and a people and culture person together and think where does this sit? And it probably considered amongst all three. And then we need an effective method that we're gonna go through this. So of course, all of this is pie in the sky stuff sounds really great here on a Wednesday morning but we needed someone to say, we've got to make this work. And this is, we need to break through what we're doing now and make sure that we have a process that people don't get left out. And so for the company I was talking about earlier, what we decided as part of the aging policy, if you like is that everyone would have an option from 50, 55, 58, 60 to sit and talk to someone confidentially about their health, their physical and psychological wellbeing, and also about their money. So we made that mandatory, if you like. It was optional, but at each of those points, you would be given an opportunity to sit down. It removes discrimination. It removes the old, Oh my God, why are they coming near me now that HR person and that financial advisor, are they gonna tap me on the shoulder and tell me I'm getting too old? Or what are they doing? So by eliminating that worry we just had, everyone had an option and it's worked beautifully in that people are continuing, okay, I don't really wanna talk to anyone this year. I'm still gonna work for another couple of years in my permanent part-time job but at 58, I think I might sit down and talk to someone about my retirement. So you need to have a process whereby everyone is included and no one thinks, oh, are they coming to tap me on the shoulder? And then finally putting it all together. Review it regularly, decide if it's working. Maybe it's not. And think about the next steps. And here is my very high tech actually plan. If you invite me to come out to your company, this is what I do. I take an April sheet. This is on an endless black and white. And I think what is the work environment? When do people come to work here? How do they come to work here? Who's working here? What are the challenges? Oh my God, what could we do about this? So that's just the work stuff. Thinking about my earlier scenario where they had the whacker belting downtown into a road. The work environment, what is it? It's an outdoor, heavy manual, awkwardly ergonomic job. Who does it? Men who are 55 years of age. When do they do it? Eight hours a day, five days a week. How do they do it? In gangs with a leader supporting each other and not disclosing anyone's medical condition. The challenges are clear. I could write a page about the challenges. What are we gonna do? We're gonna tell them that we value them. We need them to stay on. We don't have anyone to replace them. And we're gonna look after them and think about how we can engineer a solution for them at work, to keep them safe and healthy. Then we go to the individual. What's the individual's goal? Who is that individual? Is that a single mom who's got, usually got more month at the end of her money. She needs that job. Who is that person? When does she work? How does she work? What are her own challenges? And how can we look after her? And then if you have got an aging workforce, start to think about, gosh, if we're gonna develop an aging policy and we do wanna assist people transitioning safely and healthfully and beautifully into retirement, how are we able to do that? Can we manipulate their work arrangements? What does that mean for our business? Who's gonna come in on the back? What's around us, that we can tap into some volunteer resources and still give these people a purpose of get up, dress up, turn up, people that are relying on them. That gives us all some value. And so that's actually my action plan. I've been using it for eight years. I use it again this week. And it's pretty easy if you can think, we just wanna get started and that's how you would get started. So that's the end of the first part of the preso of the second presentation. We're right on time. And then I might just keep going. There's only 15 minutes to go and this is really how are we gonna make safety cool, and I've said, is it again, has it been cool before? Or is it time to make it cool now? So we talk about our multi-generational workforce absolute topic of today. Vulnerable people. So vulnerable to touch on the COVID-19 scenario while we're sitting here, people that have lived more years than about 55 to 60 have been vulnerable as part of the COVID-19 viral pandemic. I've told you earlier, their respiratory system isn't as good as we're now younger. Their cardiovascular system isn't as good as when they were younger. Their T-cell count is down meaning they can't fight back as hard. We can't change that. Physical activity and nutrition will help maintain it and we've heard will reduce the risk of decline of intelligence, but it is what it is. And so if there were people that were older working in emergency departments of large community hospitals where people who were coming in might have had COVID yes, we would tell them to stay home. It was business chaos. We had people wondering how they were gonna pay them were they on sick leave? Were they on some other kinds of labor? Or did we force them to take leave without pay? The companies who did it very, very well had an engaged, beautiful, supportive employee population who were very keen to come back to work. The people who didn't know what to do and did it poorly and communicated poorly have more workers' compensation claims now than we could ever have imagined. People were feeling like they were forced to go home because they were vulnerable. It wasn't communicated well to them. They had no purpose at home. No one rang them from work. If they had an underlying mental health condition an existing anxiety, an existing depression that their business would not have known about, did this exacerbate it or was that a work-related exacerbation. And so borrowing in the COVID-19 scenario have been people that have been older and lived more years than others but also of course, other people that had elements of chronic disease that probably would best not to contract COVID-19 particularly in scenarios where it was running rife. I run workshops all the time about aging, and these are some of my favorite things that people have said. So why do you love your job? One girl said, keeping people safe. That's the theme of my career. I just think that's such a beautiful thing to say. And one of my other favorite things, I always say, people go to work. Maybe they don't love their job but they know they need their job. And they don't go to work, hoping to get sick. And they don't go to work, hoping to get into. And one young man said, ultimately people want to get home to their families at the end of the day. And no one really wants to be in an accident. Another person said, Oh, I'm sorry. It's shifting away. I'm just having to move my little toolbar, I'm sorry. It's shifting away from being negative at all about punishments and laws. They were wanting to make safety, this was a seminar that we ran, we were trying to make safety call again. And then finally, it's all well and good to go into a business and do a load of risk assessments and tell them what they should be doing but chatting with people and seeing what their issues actually are means they're more likely to take what you advise on board. It's about using their knowledge. And I can tell you in the family run department store where we were trying to transition a hundred people into retirement, this is what worked. So just to remind you in case I haven't said it enough this morning the population is aging. Here is a snapshot from 1975, the year I was born to the current year and how our population was changing considerably looking at the numbers of people going through the years. So I go back down again. So 1975 and the population increased. So people are living longer and usually meaning they're having to stay at work longer. So now, I think COVID-19 has been the great equalizer. I think about H as humans and when I develop programs for companies through Totium, I think about why would, I understand that Mr. CEO gets a big executive health check? And if he has a heart attack, that's devastating to the business and it's devastating to him but is it any more devastating to the man who has been on the shop floor for 35 years and given all of his life, service to one company who has as a heart attack. And I feel like COVID-19 has kind of even this all out, we've had bigger things to worry about than some of this aging stuff and workplace stuff and workplace issues, we're kind of all being kinder to each other. We're more appreciative of technology and we're becoming more patient with technology. I've banged on enough about humans being the resources for most of the workforces until we have completely automated system of business, we're always gonna have humans. And so what I've done, to think about safety and just flipping it on its head is taking the hierarchy of control. I have a master's degree in environmental health and safety, possibly the most boring three years of my life is learning that, but it gave me such insight into how I can use my medical expertise to talk to people about safety. And so when I was rewriting this presentation purposely before Safe Work Month, I thought about other hierarchies in medicine and Maslow's hierarchy of needs talks about physiological things for humans, how people feel safe, loving and belonging, self-esteem and actually self-actualization. And we see the pinnacle, the hierarchy of needs here with self-actualization really in people who are older they do bring a lot of information at that very tip of the hierarchy into businesses. They are able to problem solve things because they've been there a long time. They're part of the culture. They lack prejudice. They don't care about other things anymore. In their earlier career, they might've been fighting to get up the ladder and fighting with their friend and whatever else to get a job. But at a particular age, people become more content acceptance of who they are and what they're doing and they just wanna get on with their job. And so what I've thought is we could focus on in safety. Caring for that person and their hierarchy of needs. So if we did that as a workforce, that person doesn't have to think about those things at work and all they've got to do is focus on their work. And we know people that focused on their work make less mistakes and they are actually safer. So they're ultimately basic needs. And if we don't look after them, either as an individual or in the work environment, remember go back to the action plan, then we can be interfering with their ability to complete their work safely. So let's think about these. These are real life examples, I'm embarrassed to say. If your employee is worried about, gosh, I'm wondering if I can run off and have a way. I wonder if that's okay or I wonder if someone's gonna be watching what I'm doing. I wonder if I'll get time to eat my lunch today yesterday, my lunch break was like an hour late. And then I still only got to have half of my break. I wonder if I'll get home on time for dinner this week last week I missed the train four days. And so then I had to get home by other means. I wonder if the whispers about redundancy are true, I wonder if my kid gets sick, if I can have some time off, or if work's gonna be really damning about me having more time off work, because I've got a sick kid. I wonder if I'm actually respected around here. These are real life examples. And you can imagine if you're going to work thinking about one or two or all of those things, then you're probably gonna be wondering about your financial security. You're gonna wonder if work values you and I can guarantee you, they're not focusing on their work. And so we know when people don't focus on their work, that's when accidents and mistakes happen. It usually involves some kind of workers' compensation claim, whether work was the major and most significant contributing factor to that claim is decided by other people. But if we can assure people they're gonna have a lunch break it's usually at the same time each day you're gonna get time to eat your lunch. We make sure everyone gets home in time for dinner. Yes, there's redundancies on offer. We will communicate with you as we know more at the moment 50 people out of our two and a half thousand workforce will have their positions made redundant. We're not sure who that will be but we will continue to communicate with you rather than worrying, Oh my God, who's that person coming around the corner. Are they gonna tap me on the shoulder? So every level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs relates to safety. That very, very lowest level, if I just go back is about breathing food, water, sexual relationships sleep, homeostasis is the most beautiful word in medicine. Homeostasis means everything kind of in balance. So a sense of homeostasis is feeling reasonably well feeling like you've got enough nutrition, feeling like you've had some exercise and just in a state of being. So thinking about that lower physiological care if you can provide that in your workplace helps employees focus on their physiological needs and then they can start to think well, that's all taken care of. I'm gonna get my lunch break. I'm gonna be able to do a wait, there's water here for me to drink. And then I can start thinking on the higher levels of personal fulfillment. And as I said earlier that very highest level is where I see all of these beautiful people at work who are older. They can problem solve with the best of them. They're creative. They accept the facts of various things at work. They accept that there are redundancies. They accept that they're not performing like they might've been 10 years ago. They usually have a huge amount of corporate knowledge. So if you are transitioning people to a retirement or a different phase of their life or their working life, please make sure that you give them an opportunity to share their knowledge with people coming through the ranks. Why are we driving this now? There is a growing skills gap, particularly in manual labor. So we have baby boomers who are still running tools, construction, road gangs, mining, they don't know anything else and so they just keep working. And so we really need to care for those people. Not only to care for them because they're people but to care for our business to continue to run. Lots of people who are getting older and have some need for secure superannuation. So if you could give them some guidance and advice on what their superannuation looks like as part of a financial health package that is important. People are losing confidence in their pension. People losing confidence in parts of the government. People losing confidence in their retirement age. They're not sure if at 45, I'm gonna be retiring at 65 or 67, or is there going to be an age or can I go now? No one seems to know. So we just need to keep looking after people who are at work. Now, earliest signs of response a few years back was just, let's keep everyone at work and just increase the retirement age. So the way we were gonna look after the aging population at work was just make them work a bit longer until we figured out what to do. And eliminate retirement earnings that might be required and elimination of mandatory retirement. So all of this is about when we're gonna cut you off. And I don't know that that's the right way to behave when we're caring for people who are working for us. And so the last slide I think is, so what do we do? Do we wait and see what happens? No. People that have this wait and see approach, Oh, you know what? Aging isn't in our budget for 2021. As I said earlier, you really just need a piece of paper, a couple of people who interested write a bit of an action plan and see if you can get some likes. Whining and saying, well, what happens probably isn't going to work because at the end of the day, we're all aging and it would be great to know, Oh, I work for Totium, they've got an aging policy I know what's going to happen when I'm 45. I'm gonna get a health check, a financial check. I know what happens when I'm 50. I know what happens when I'm 60. Just be mindful that older workers and younger workers are different. Yes, age is not just a number, but they behave differently. And the culture is different and their lifestyle is different. And then think about, well, how are they the same? And if so where you've got the discrepancy and you're trying to bring people together. You need to think about that as part of your action plan. And is there a way to prepare for all aging workers. At the end of the day, we're all getting older. So in addition to those who are already older what are we gonna do for the people coming through? That's the end of my preso. I have been given permission by the guys at OIR and the Safe Work Month team to ask you to keep in touch with me. I do have newsletters and lots of ways. The first thing I've done is created a video about aging, a little three minute video about aging that I thought I would just share with people that were interested in sharing that with their business. So this slide is an SMS whereby by filling out your first name, your last name and your email that comes to me and it entered into our database and we can send you newsletters and other tidbits about safety and health. We don't bombard you. That's not my nature and it's not what I'm interested in, but it's just about sharing information to people who are engaged. So if you are interested, there's an SMS on the screen or those people that might be visually impaired. You could ask someone for the number. It is 0438 431 368. That's 0438 431 368. We just need your first name, then a space your last name, then a space and your email address. And you can have access to me and all of the fun things that we're doing at Totium. And that's back to you, Chris. Bang on time, thank goodness.

Thank you Simone and there are a number of people who would like you to share your expertise including Patrick, who says the strategies you have suggested are great and would make a huge difference to our aging workforce. But Patrick asks, how do you change the mindset of senior management so that they get on board and appreciate the benefits of these types of strategies rather than ultimately just looking at the cost?

Yeah, good point. So we need to work out a return on investment. I have a return on investment piece, which is called Ryan's rule which does look at screening people and looking at their risk for physiological risk and psychological risk and other risks about, do you have a second job? Do you enjoy your second job versus your first job? And these people come out with a score. And then ultimately we try and get them to think about areas of higher risk and improving those through GPs or through interventions at work, and then asking those people to come back and take that test. And what we can show, Patrick, is risk reduction. Every single risk that is reduced in a person who is older. Say they might have started an exercise program. You might do that at work. If the exercise levels increase their risk for cardiovascular health and a whole stack of other things goes down and we can measure the return on investment against that person's salary. So CFOs, company secretaries, your financial controllers of your business love to hear that story. So, yes, it is an investment pace. We do need results for you, Patrick, to grab two of your mates to just do this on the side of your desk, you could probably do on your lunch break to start with, but at the end of the day, you would need some money and you need to tell your business how are you gonna make them money back? So again, feel free to reach out separately and I will share with you the productivity and risk reduction, ROI calculator that we have.

Next question comes from Christina Shepherd. What are your thoughts on older generation workers mentoring younger generation workers and do you think this can work well?

Best thing ever, best thing ever. It gives the older person a sense of purpose. It provides them some value. They're not being pushed out the door. So many people leave companies and say, I had so much to share. I could have shared so much but they didn't let me, they didn't let me do that as part of that action plan or the aging policy, that would be so important, Christina to have an opportunity for people who are getting older to start offloading some of their corporate knowledge to the business and makes them feel really valued as well. And then also to younger people coming through it works beautifully when companies are invested in it.

The next question comes from Michelle. I'm not sure it's not Michelle who works in our office. What are ways to bridge the gap between the differences of young workers and older workers? We have quite a cultural divide in our workplace. It's old school versus new school.

Yeah, great question. Culture is an interesting one that isn't it? I always think about culture as the way we do things around here. And so some of the older people, it's probably the way we have done things around here and the younger people they don't actually really care about too much, we know that. And they're like, cool, I'm just happy to have a job and I'll just go with the flow. And so there is a huge gap between both of those. I'm being a little facetious about the younger people, but it is important to think about the way we have done things around here. And how are we gonna move that into way we're going to do things around here. Again, a bit like the earlier question about the inflexible personality. It does take time for people to understand why things change and why businesses need to change. And I think, my comment about COVID-19 being the great equalizer, really helped people who were quite inflexible and had that well, we've never done this before. We'd never held a Zoom meeting before, never presented to at Queensland organization by Zoom. It's important to get people to understand why the business needs to change and then how it's proposed to change. And a really great way of engaging, making this successful is getting some of those older people on your steering committee as to how you're gonna communicate that. And for the younger people similarly and to recognize that we both young and older people bring different things to the table. I think my first part of my presentation I spoke about how we're quite different but also how valuable we are. It's important for young people to look at the older people they're so wise, they problem-solve so easily. They've been here such a long time and be respectful of that similarly, the others to look at the younger people think, gosh, they're so creative. Like in my team, they're so creative. How did they think about that? Gosh, is that really a thing? But it's gotta be about how culture how we are going to do things around here not how we have done things around here. It's a big piece.

John offered his question from our registration form and he says, I have a number of workers who due to COVID are now considered vulnerable workers as their health issues which weren't previously issue for work. And now issues due to Corona virus exposure risks. What considerations are reasonable in this space particularly given Queensland has such low rates of transmission.

Absolutely agree. And I'm as top has guts on this kind of stuff. People that may have been vulnerable and may have been more beneficial working from home now need to be given the cold hard facts that their job is in an office for example, and there can be a hybrid way of working. So it's very important for companies to understand that the way we have worked a bit like the culture piece, the way we have worked all of this time isn't gonna be any longer. I look out today, I've got this beautiful big headquarters in Sydney and half the people are here. Half are working from home and personality like me likes to have everyone here but they're not gonna be here, that's just the way it is. And so I think to answer, John, is it John's question? Was you might need invest in that person and get a fitness for work assessment done saying why can't this person come back to work? This is their job. This is what they're saying is wrong with them. And again, you would need to have a pretty strong case as an individual as to why you couldn't go back to work in Queensland, I've got to say. In Sydney, we've just opened up a couple of the very large insurance companies. I was over at one yesterday where I'm their chief medical officer and we've got half the people back at work open plan sitting at every second desk. You have to have a pretty strong case as to why you couldn't. As a business, you might need to get a fitness for work assessment for that person to be fair to them. But then if that's all okay, direct them back to work.

And I'm sure you'll agree with this. Corona virus and COVID-19 has certainly shown or demonstrated to people and to businesses that they need to be flexible, mobile, adaptable and consider new ideas.

Yeah, I think it will be a hybrid version. I think, in our businesses, we have GPs We have 74 partner clinics around the country and I have got a GP who's saying, I'm not coming back to face-to-face medicine. And we said, well, you probably don't have a job. There are elements and we were wanting her to come back just a day a week to do some face-to-face things that you need to do face-to-face not everything can be done over the video computer. So a hybrid model is good. I think it's important for companies to think about flexible working arrangements, not working from home. Working from home used to be like a privilege but these days it's one of the things we've proven can work. So we need to have a flexible working arrangement and probably your industrial relations lawyers or employment lawyers will give you some guidance. But how many days we want you in the office versus how many days you might choose to work from home and work out what works best for the business.

Dr. Lauren wants to know, do you think young workers today are more at risk given the prevalence of social media and should we be embracing this too or shunning and avoiding it?

Yeah, tricky one. You probably need a social media policy. Oh gosh, it's not like all I'm doing is writing policies. We have one in our business. We don't care if people check their Facebook when sitting at their computer, we don't care. If I walk past and someone's checking their Facebook, happy days, as long as I can get their work done. And it's taken a bit of the angst out of it because we have got half of our population are very young. And so you probably need a bit of a policy. So when people come to work, they understand what the barriers are. So for us, we've got really clear guidelines about taking photos in the office and sharing personal office information and intellectual property and all of those things on social media. Of course, if we're out having fun or in a meeting by all means share it. And if you're not sure there's someone that they go on ask. The other problem is when companies don't have a social media policy, you will see people sitting on their phone trying to look at things. And it's all a bit anxiety provoking. The older people with the inflexible personalities Matt shun that and really hate it. And then it creates a bigger barrier between people who are older and people who are younger. So despite having an honest conversation around it saying Hey, getting people, getting some of the older people some of the younger people, all in a room saying what is this social media thing gonna look like for our work and then asking people to adhere to that. It's just the fairest way to go about it.

And following on from this, David asks how can technology influence WHS outcomes in a multi-generational workforce?

That's a big question. I think it could be capturing data better. And it depends on different platforms and how you're recording things. I have worked at an organization where we did have a technology platform and it was to record lost time injuries and things like that in the safety business. Unfortunately, the company was so proud that it hadn't had a lost time injury for something like 517 days. Anytime you went to that site and it was a big kind of engineering site, someone every day would spray paint the wall 517 days, 518 days. Technology didn't help at all in that business because no one wanted to report a lost time injury in case that they rocked this boat this big fanfare that was being made about lost time injuries. And so what we're saying is people not putting in claims when they were injured, a bit like the gentleman we saw at the start in my first presentation, the gang would just carry him. God forbid, if anyone ever turned up as a safety inspector, he'd probably have a day off. And so they can manipulate things depending on the culture. So I think technology is so useful if we have a really good safety culture we're honest about recording and we know what we're gonna do with that data. I think technology serves a great purpose. There are lots of new safety kind of things coming out. Think about the tape management in pilots example, or in train drivers, or bus drivers or train drivers, fatigue management check through technology sometimes through wearables can really give us great data about how someone's going with respect to their health and therefore their safety.

Thanks everyone for joining us. A few more questions to go before we wrap up today's session. Carol asks, I was wondering whether there is an instrument that measures a worker's ability, particular for older workers.

No. Not that I know of, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist cause I live in a bit of a bubble. No, I think it'd be, probably depends on the task at hand. And if someone can do that task well. And so it's probably something like a functional capacity assessment as part of a work site review that you might just see, can that person do that job. And that's quite a reasonable thing to check. But again, you don't wanna target individuals that think Oh God, I hope they can do that job. I'm not sure. You might have a policy as part of your aging, designing an age-friendly workplace that you do get people checked at 50 and 55 and 58, where you do do a functional capacity assessment because it's might be a safety critical task. And you need to make sure that everyone there is fit and safe to do that. So just think about, yes, it does cost money, but it's better that than having someone as a poor performer or an accident happening which costs a lot more.

Here's one from Sam. Simone, young workers often think themselves as bulletproof. What are some tips in your view that I should be sharing with our team leaders to help them understand the importance of safety?

Oh gosh. What a great question. And I don't know, it's my shock, everybody. I don't actually know what to say. I think it's important for, if there is an older cohort of workers in that business that have been there a while. It's probably good to share stories. And to, again, like I spoke earlier about getting the older inflexible people along the road, it's probably a similar thing with younger people. Sharing some stories about things that have happened about safety incident. Most people at work know someone else or the in your business or somewhere else that's had a pretty devastating injury and to share stories about that, but Sam take it offline. Feel free to email me. You can find me anywhere on the internet, Simoneryan@totium. You can look it up so at simone.ryan@totium.net and I feel like I haven't done that question justice and I would like to think about it and come back to you and we could maybe send it out, I don't know.

We'll take that question on notice. So we'll get back to you. And this comes from our registration form as well, from Angela. What are your thoughts on balancing the dynamics in the team when you have a mix of ages in your workplace. All the workers are seeking to remain remote due to COVID risks. And this is probably a common factor in a lot of places whilst they are younger workers express a difference of opinion they haven't been quite as conservative as older people and their opinion of, in terms of risks. So that they've sort of bit more gung ho. For example, they expect their all the colleagues to come in or they see this as unreasonable, so forth. Any tips to reframe opinions within a diverse work group where we all wanna respect each other's wishes. We don't wanna be bulls at gates.

Yay, great. The word respect is the first thing that came to my mind. So people are entitled to their opinion. As I said, I can be pretty tough on some of this stuff though. I think it's important for businesses to understand why what that person's job is. So regardless of their age, if they can do that job remotely, and if a flexible working policy supports it then people can work from home if they want to. It sounds like that's probably the safest thing to do. The risk is the big word there in all of that and said multiple times by you, Chris and particularly in Queensland, it's pretty low risk. Please, God, that continues. It's pretty low risk to go and do something in Queensland these days. It's pretty low risk here in New South Wales. I've been out for dinner a lot lately, yesterday, I went over to this large insurer, everyone's back open plan. I sat next to some people. We had some work to do together on their computer. That's my job there. I can't do that remotely. I don't have remote access. I don't have a computer with them. I have to go and sit with someone and look at a case file and give an opinion. And so I think it's important for people to identify the risk. And then if the older people who are being cautious about coming back have a flexible working arrangement that allows them to stay at home, then we'll and good. But I think the risk needs to be identified. The flexible working policy needs to be identified and people need to understand what their job is like my GP. Her job is to come and see female patients and do pep tests and breast checks. We just can't do that remotely. And if she honestly can't do that job for whatever reason, then she's not fit for that work. We just need to have someone else that can do that job. So there's identify the risk, have a flexible working policy in place that everyone understands, respect each other, identify what people's jobs are. And if they're not gonna do their job then the businesses to make a hard decision about what they're gonna do for someone else to do that job.

Time on the wing. We have run a little over time, but let's get in one last question. It comes from Kevin. After struggling to locate some specific research that covers an aging workforce. It would be great to have tips on where to find some papers, et cetera. Simone, got anything, he asks.

Well, Kevin, I will take that on notice as well. And if Amy and the team are comfortable in blasting some stuff out, or actually I'm just gonna write that down. So some papers on this and the one was, what was the other one?

It was aging workforce

Young people. Young people understanding safety. I might do that as part of one of my newsletter blasts. So Kevin, if you wanna SMS your details through, you can get those alternatively, I'm at simone.ryan@totium.net. And I can probably send some stuff out through the--

SMS details on the screen. 0438 431 368. Lodged your first name, last name, email, and Simone will get back to you. All right, now, let's wrap it up. I've got some comments. Are you ready for a comment or two Simone? Amy says what a preso, just mind blowing. Thanks Doc and Chris. I don't know, I haven't played too much of a part in it. And Shauna says, thanks Simone. I won't say, and Chris. Incredible presentation. One of my favorite so far. All right, thanks everybody for joining us today. I'd like you to sum it all up in a very quick one key take home message for everybody that's joined us to stick in their minds other than you're phone number.

Sure. That's actually not my number that goes to--

No, I know. Contact you

I was like, Oh, God, I've actually got my phone on flight mode. Okay, the key takeaway and it comes from my heart is that the H in HR is to do with a human. So this is a person who has a life outside of work, and they may never share the story with you, but everyone comes to work every day with a story. And if you can think about the person and the environment in which you're asking them to work and care for them in the person and the environment, then you will have a much safer workplace and workforce.

And as we say goodbye to a cold and WIC Sidney and Simone. Simone, I forgive you for labeling me geriatric.

Geriatric, no problem.

Right at the beginning. It's 90 minutes of hell, I've had to go through. In all seriousness, thank you for joining us. It's been fantastic and mind-blowing from my point of view, to try and get a feel for having this multi-generational workforce and making it all click and work together.

Thank you.

All right, and for everyone who's joined us today. Thank you. The end of October is near and we still have two free virtual events to go for Safe Work Month, including a session on intelligence enabled work, health and safety and a chat with ex-Olympian, Hayley Lewis. It's not too late to register for these. So please do, if you'd like to catch up on those final two sessions as we bring a close to Safe Work Month 2020. You can also access a full catalog of industry and topics-specific video case studies, podcasts, speaker recordings, and webinars, and films to help you take action to improve your WHS and return to work outcomes. These resources are free to download and share from worksafe.qld.gov.au. Once again, thanks for supporting Safe Work Month and remember work safe, home safe.