Digitalisation – tipping point for a culture of prevention?

Maurizio Curtarelli

MSc, PhD, Senior Research Project Manager, Prevention and Research Unit, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

Emmanuelle Brun

Project Manager, Prevention and Research Unit, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

Advancing faster than any innovation in our history, digital technologies have transformed our society and our daily lives. For workers and employers in many workplaces and in all sectors, digital technology offers increased opportunities but also presents greater challenges and risks in terms of occupational safety and health (OSH).
Aimed to raise awareness, provide practical resources and bring stakeholders together, the 2023-25 Healthy Workplaces campaign “Safe and healthy work in the digital age” is in line with the key priorities of the EU Strategic Framework Strategic Framework on Safety and Health at Work 2021-2027 by contributing to manage change in the context of the digital transition and to the European Commission’s Vision Zero approach by promoting a prevention culture. It draws on research conducted by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) for the OSH Overview on Digitalisation 2020-2023.

The use of digital technologies for work brings opportunities for everybody, including new opportunities for improving OSH:

• Automation relegates repetitive, labour-intensive and unsafe tasks to machines.
• Robotics and AI support and replace workers in hazardous working environments.
• Digital technologies and performance-enhancing technologies (e.g. exoskeletons) improve access to the labour market for disabled workers, migrants or workers located in areas with scarce employment opportunities.
• Better monitoring combined with big data allow for more timely and effective interventions.
• A better work-life balance, flexibility and autonomy experienced by workers who can work from home.

But there are also challenges and risks:

• Digital monitoring, loss of autonomy, work intensification and pressure to perform at a certain standard.
• Middle management jobs are replaced by algorithms allocating tasks to workers and monitoring their performance.
• Loss of job control, fragmentation of jobs into very simple tasks to be executed in a standard way, narrowed job content and de-skilling.
• Isolation of workers, increase of virtual interactions and loss of peer support.
• Incorrect or unfair decisions about workers stemming from automated or semiautomated processes using data and/or software containing mistakes.
• Unclear responsibility for OSH and the applicability of OSH regulations.
• Mobility, flexibility, 24/7 availability, and blurring of boundaries between work and private life.

Campaign resources

More information about the use of digital technologies in the workplace and the new EU-OSHA campaign can be found on the ’Safe and healthy work in the digital age’ website and the section on digitalisation of work.
To clarify the terminology, from ‘machine learning’ to ‘the cloud’ and ‘data bias’, the EU-OSHA Digitalisation Glossary provides definitions of the terminology related to the campaign.
The campaign materials, including a campaign guide and a promotional leaflet, ease the task of promoting the campaign and getting other organisations involved. The campaign toolkit provides step-by-step guidance on how to develop and run successful campaigns. As a new feature for this campaign’s edition, a social media kit is made available. It contains different messages accompanied by visuals and videos ready to be published on social media.
All publications on the topic are freely downloadable. Beloved Napo, a cartoon hero protagonist of short awareness-raising videos, also returns to this edition of the campaign with several Napo films covering the topic.

Authors:
Maurizio Curtarelli, MSc, PhD, Senior Research Project Manager, Prevention and Research Unit, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work
Emmanuelle Brun, Project Manager, Prevention and Research Unit, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work