Table 4.

Quotes of health and safety consultants in the focus group regarding facilitators and barriers for employers and workers for implementation of preventive interventions

Quotes

(1) #5: ‘We’ve already spent 5 years in a row on a toolbox, so that’s going from in-depth to even more in-depth. For a long time it concentrated on the load or burden itself, but last year the focus on the capacity of the individual was taken into account.’

(2) #1: ‘And now you see indeed that managers are often workers who have moved up through the ranks. And they don’t have the capacity or skills at all to promote this [working preventively].’

(3) #1: ‘I keep coming back to the fact that if the employer thinks ‘that’s bound to cost me more social insurance or contractual pay’ then there’s an end to it [it is already based on an assumption].’

(4) #5: ‘A sort of pecking order to put it bluntly, that one person is better than the other, so people are attached to their position. And then they don’t want to rotate work at all themselves.’

(5) #9: In the greenhouse horticulture we once had the problem that when you did task rotation, that when people got more tasks they went up into a higher salary scale.’

(6) #9: ‘What I often see is that companies that really take the time [to implement new tools] say, we’ll try it out for a week first to see if it suits us.’

(7) #1: ‘It has everything to do with the employability of the staff. Once that is at stake, that’s a good facilitating factor for employers, but also for managers for introducing a preventive intervention.’

(8) #6: ‘We’re really getting into the digital age with all kinds of wonderful flashy and great things, but let’s not forget the power of print, the piece of paper, the folder and the flyer which are really important for reaching certain groups who are particularly visually oriented.’

(9) #5: ‘Once for example I went around with a worker in the greenhouse horticulture, just ‘on the job’ and then you can say, ‘Hey I see that you do this. Why don’t you try doing it like that?’

(10) #5: ‘When you come to do a workplace visit and sick leave is already an issue, and even if it is a preventive workplace analysis where someone might go on sick leave, then I think the willingness to act is entirely different.’

(11) #2: ‘What can also be a barrier is that they don’t want to use a certain [technical] aid because they think it makes them a bit of a sissy to use it.’

(12) #7: ‘What I also see as a facilitating factor is when workers have a general idea of what the consequences are, also financially, of being unable to work.’

(13) #5: ‘So the knowledge that there are quite a lot of possible solutions for the upper extremities [regarding preventive interventions] compared to the knee.’