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SPEAKERS

JS – John Sumser, Principal Analyst, HRExaminer

[00:00:04] I want to tell you the story about what happened to safety departments. When farmers came from the fields to work in factories, essentially every factory had a medical department, because if you went to work in a factory, you could cut off a finger or poke out your eye or lose a foot or get killed.

[00:00:23] And so there needed to be some sort of medical attention in the heart of every factory as we. Turned the factory idea into offices. And it’s worth noting here that the basic theory of an office is that it’s a kind of factory and the basic theory of workflow, the idea that a workflow is how you get things done is exactly applying factory principles to work.

[00:00:52] But what happened is the work got more intellectual and more about moving information and giving information. And so there wasn’t any real need for a safety office and the company nurse and the company doctor went the way of the Dodo. And now there are very few places that have safety offices, but what happens with the pandemic because there’s so little that we know is the pandemic restores it to the primary HR function.