Not only does this provide important insight into the physical demands and requirements of a given job, this can be a very powerful tool combined with a pre-employment medical screen in mitigating workplace health and safety incidents. A job dictionary also provides an important foundation for businesses to identify risks in their workplace and action changes through a further manual task risk assessment.
What is a Job Dictionary
A job dictionary is a breakdown of the requirements required to a specific role, job or duty. This includes considerations in the set up of the working environment, repetition and duration of the job and a breakdown of the critical physical demands and frequency of physical demands required for the job.
Benefits for your Team
Continuous improvement
Completing a job dictionary allows business to review the current demands required from employees to perform a job. By having objective measurements, controls can then be implemented to improve working conditions and workplace health and safety for all employees.
Improving workplace engagement
A job dictionary is another great opportunity for employees to collaborate with employers on improving the systems and processes currently in place with specific jobs. This provides a voice for employees in the workplace.
Health through working the body
Completing a job dictionary provides a detailed description of the physical requirements of a job. By understanding the specific demands employees perform everyday, this allows greater awareness and planning of a health program or considerations with training for hobbies outside of work.
Benefits for your Business
Simplifying pre-employment decision making
Understanding the physical demands required for specific positions and jobs in the business allows for greater informed decision making when combined with a pre-employment medical screen, as candidates can be assessed to the inherent requirements of the job itself.
Proactive Workplace Health and Safety
Completing a job dictionary for an entire business provides a foundation in understanding all the critical physical demands required for all jobs in a workplace. This then allows insight for further intervention, such as risk managing specific tasks through a manual task risk assessment, and the implementation of control measures through the hierarchy of controls.
Cultural engagement
The performance and completion of a job dictionary often requires participation and involvement from employees themselves. Completing job dictionaries across a business provides an important piece to engaging workers and opens opportunities for greater workplace culture.
What Does A Job Dictionary Include?
Task outline
A job that a worker is required to perform is broken down into separate tasks and is summarised in the task outline. An accompanying picture or video of each task is often collected to support in the quality of detail provided by a job dictionary
Critical physical demands
A job dictionary breaks down all the physical postures and movements required from a worker. These movements are broken down into each musculoskeletal region of the body in detail and aims to provide a concise summary of the inherent requirements of a job.
Manual Task Risk Assessment
Once a task outline has been created for a job, a manual task risk assessment can then be further conducted to determine the manual risk involved with performing the task.
Why Employ Health?
Easy, secure, reliable access
Employ Health provides easy and secure access to all job dictionaries through a “Job Hub”. With multiple logins available, this makes sharing and accessibility to job dictionaries across stakeholders easier than ever.
Integrated software platform
Employ Health’s software platform allows integration of Job Dictionaries into many other applications, such as physiotherapy reviews and pre-employment checks. This allows for powerful data capture and statistical analysis.
Industry experience
The team at Employ Health have captured countless job dictionaries in various work industries including construction, food, health etc. The expertise and recommendations Employ Health provides is second to none.
Frequently Asked Questions
A job dictionary describes all the tasks a worker may be required to perform in their job. A manual task is usually a component of a job that a worker will have to perform. A manual task risk assessment specifically breaks down that task.
This varies, however, given the amount of data collection and analysis required, this can take up to 1 hour for a job.
Job Dictionaries are also commonly used in the return to work process of employees. By having a concise summary of the critical demands inherent to the role, this supports doctors in the decision making process of returning employees back to work safely.