Section 2 - Outcome 1 - 0-2pts

You are unlikely to be effectively consulting your workers or involving them in safety matters.

Your responses indicate that you need to take immediate action to implement formal consultation arrangements to ensure that your workers have the opportunity to express their views and contribute to WHS issues.

What you can do to improve:

Develop your consultation arrangements

Employers must consult with all of their workers about workplace health and safety. ‘Workers’ has a broad meaning and includes contractors, labour hire, temporary workers or anyone else who performs work for your business.

Ensure that your consultation captures all WHS issues and views. Consider how shift work and remote workers, trainees and apprentices, people with disabilities, language or literacy barriers or anything else will be addressed in your process.

Formalise your consultation process

Your agreed consultation arrangements should be recorded and displayed in the workplace. It is a good idea to include the names, roles and contact details of anyone with specific WHS responsibility.

Ensure you consult effectively

At your regular workplace meetings tell your workers about any plans you may have that could affect their health and safety (e.g. new equipment, changing work tasks etc.). Before making a decision seek their views on how any safety issues may be addressed.

Encourage your workers to raise their safety concerns. Make an extra effort to include young workers or workers with special needs.

When discussing safety issues with your workers, try to reach an agreement. Ultimately, however, responsibility for safety sits with you.

Record safety decisions

Keep records of significant safety decisions to demonstrate that you take safety issues seriously and are prompt in addressing them. It reinforces the actions that need to be taken, outlines who is responsible for undertaking them and indicates when they need to be completed.

Provide an agenda before your regular workplace meetings to inform your workers of the issues to be discussed. This affords them the opportunity to include other topics, and enables them time to consider possible suggestions and solutions.

Useful links

• Record of safety discussions template