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Safety responsibilities in your business have not been made clear and safety may not be seen as a priority.

Your responses indicate that you should take immediate action to develop a safety culture by defining your role (the employer) and the roles of other managers and workers within the business. You will also need to allocate resources to meet your safety responsibilities and demonstrate your commitment to a safe workplace.

What you can do to improve:

Determine safety accountabilities and responsibilities

Speak with your workers about what is expected of them regarding safety in the workplace and about what you as the employer need to do to help them achieve your expectations.

Define everyone’s role in in safety and develop responsibilities and accountabilities for everyone, making sure you start at the top. Demonstrate your commitment by acting on your responsibilities and acknowledging when others act on theirs.

Commit resources (time and money)

Once responsibilities and accountabilities have been defined, commit adequate resources to enable these responsibilities to be met.

Spend time to:

• develop safe work procedures
• supervise and train your workers and managers
• act on safety reports and issues.

Spend money to:

• maintain and repair equipment
• provide personal protection equipment
• fix any safety issues.

Make safety a priority

Once responsibilities are defined and resources allocated, take the initiative to make safety a top priority.

Your safety management approach should include:

• developing and implementing safe work procedures for all tasks that expose your workers to risk
• ensuring that safe work procedures are followed at all times
• involving workers in decisions about their health and safety
• training your workers
• ensuring that safety issues or problems are reported quickly and acted upon promptly
• providing resources to address safety responsibilities.

Useful links

• Work health and safety policy template

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

It is likely that you have not identified your key risks and hazards and that they are not adequately controlled. This puts your workers in serious danger of injury.

What you can do to improve:

Inspect the workplace and review all tasks

Check for risks including:

• using chemicals
• lifting and moving products
• working at heights
• slips, trips and falls
• electrical equipment
• housekeeping.

Make sure you talk with your workers and involve them in identifying hazards associated with their work. Develop and implement safe work procedures for those tasks that pose a risk.

Prioritise the tasks based on risk

Time and money can be in short supply in a business. It is therefore important to prioritise tasks and make sure that the highest risks are controlled immediately and lesser risks are addressed as time goes on. You will need to document this via an action plan so that you make sure you get all of the risks controlled systematically.

Develop safe work procedures

Follow these steps:

• Involve your workers. Workers are more likely to follow a procedure if they have been involved in its development. Workers are usually the best placed to understand the tasks they do every day and their experience will help with developing a safe, practical procedure.
• Identify each element that makes up a task. A task may contain several steps such as lifting and carrying product or goods, bending, use of machinery or tools, repetitive processing and many other individual elements.
• Identify the hazards and risks that these elements pose. Ask yourself; are there any risks from lifting and carrying? Does machinery or plant have moving parts that could cause injury if not guarded? Are there any environmental hazards like noise, fumes, heat or cold? As above your workers are an excellent source of this kind of information as they perform the work every day.
• Control the identified risks. Once hazards and risks have been identified they must be controlled. Generally the best method of control is to eliminate (remove) the risk entirely, however this is not always possible so ask yourself: How can the risk be best controlled? Is there a mechanical lifting alternative to manual lifting and carrying? Is there a less hazardous substance that can be used instead of the current chemical? Can guarding be fitted to machines to cover moving parts? Is there personal protective equipment available to help mitigate the risk of exposure to noise, fumes, sparks etc? Safety data sheets, manufacturers manuals, employer associations and the SafeWork SA website can all be used to help decide on controls and to provide practical suggestions.
• Document the safe work procedures. Safe work procedures are meant for workers to use every day. They should be simple and easy to understand. There is no set format that they need to be in – you know your workforce and what they are likely to be able to understand. Remember that having a safe work procedure that is difficult to follow or not practical is exactly the same as not having a safe work procedure at all!
• Have workers review your draft procedures. Have your experienced workers review the procedures and make amendments as necessary. If you have a safety committee this is also a good forum for procedures to be reviewed.
• Train workers in the use of the procedures and safe work practices in general.

Once procedures have been developed and agreed, train your workers in their use. Ideally this training should involve workers demonstrating that they understand the procedures and can work safely.

It is not enough to simply distribute the procedures and ask your workers to sign a piece of paper saying they have read them.

Review procedures regularly

Review procedures whenever there is a change in the workplace and after any incident or near miss. Regardless, you should have a regularly scheduled review that makes sure the procedures remain relevant to the task.

Useful links

• Hazard list and risk assessment template
• Action plan template

It is likely that your workplace does not place a high priority on the health and wellbeing of workers, and that there are no formal ways to report issues that contribute to work related stress, including incidences of bullying and harassment.

Your responses indicate that you need to take immediate action to ensure psychological hazards and risks are identified and addressed, as you would physical hazards and risks at work. In particular, it is important to ensure processes are in place whereby workers can report incidences of bullying and harassment, and workers are educated about how to do this.

In addition, there are many business benefits (such as improved workplace culture and morale) for workplaces to place more importance on promoting a healthy workplace, including introducing health promotion activities and initiatives on topics such as mental health, healthy eating, physical activity, quit smoking etc.

What you can do to improve:

Reassess the importance the business places on the health and wellbeing of workers, and consider how it can be viewed as a priority for the business

There is increased awareness of the importance of health and wellbeing in workplaces, however, sometimes workplaces are unclear on how it can be addressed in a planned and proactive manner. This can be achieved by developing a formal health and wellbeing strategy/action plan. Important steps include getting management commitment to health and wellbeing, reviewing what you have and don’t have in place, asking staff what they think is important to their health and wellbeing and then developing a plan/program of health and wellbeing activities based on this information. It is important to communicate this strategy/plan to workers so they know what activities they can be involved in. In this way, health promotion activities such as mental health, healthy eating, physical activity, drug and alcohol, etc. are regular events during the year, and address the needs of the workforce.

If you are looking for further tools and resources in this area, go to the Heads Up Website and SA Health “How to create a healthy workplace “resources and toolkit.

Review your health and safety system and make sure it includes the management of psychological hazards and risks – those workplace issues that could contribute to work-related stress

The employer has an obligation to eliminate or minimise risks to the health and safety of workers (as is reasonably practicable). Under the WHS laws, the definition of “health” includes both physical and psychological health. Therefore, it is important that workers are encouraged to report hazards that can contribute to work-related stress, such as high workloads, exposure to traumatic events, work-related violence, fatigue, poor workplace relationships etc. This should be integrated into standard incident reporting procedures so workers know how to report these types of issues, the incidents can be appropriately investigated and suitable control measures can be put in place.

One psychological hazard which needs to be addressed is the prevention bullying and harassment. Education is a significant factor in preventing and managing workplace bullying, particularly to enable early intervention in workplace conflict before it potentially escalates into bullying. It is important that management educates workers on acceptable workplace behaviour and conduct. This should be part of induction procedures and regularly reinforced through refresher training. Workplace bullying behaviours should not be tolerated and early reporting of these behaviours should be encouraged. Workers should have a clear understanding of what is bullying and harassment and how to report unreasonable behaviour. The workplace’s procedures should also include how reports of bullying will be appropriately investigated and responded to. If a worker considers they are being bullied, they will be more likely to report it if they know there is a transparent reporting process in place and that it will be followed as soon as a report is received.

For more information on managing work-related psychological health and safety, go to a Safe Work Australia “Work-related psychological health and safety. A systematic approach to meeting your duties”.

For more information on the prevention of bullying, go to Safe Work Australia “Guide for Preventing and Responding to Workplace Bullying”.

Your workers are unlikely to be properly trained or supervised whilst at work.

Your responses indicate that you need to take immediate action to provide training to your workers in their roles and in safe work practices generally. You may also need to review your supervisory arrangements to ensure workers are receiving adequate and consistent supervision.

What you can do to improve:

Establish a safety induction process

When you employ a new worker, train them in your policies, procedures and the expected behaviours. Induction training should include:

• health and safety roles and responsibilities
• how and when to report safety issues and incidents
• your consultation process
• general safety rules such as the use of personal protective equipment
• emergency procedures
• training in specific tasks.

Make sure you review your induction and training information periodically to ensure it is up-to-date and relevant. You can provide the training in a manual for your workers to reference but the manual is for reference only – it is not a substitute for you personally training your workers.

Provide adequate supervision

What is considered relevant supervision will be largely dependent on the role, associated hazards and risks, the experience of the worker, any language or understanding barriers or any other factor that may be pertinent in the worker’s circumstances.

Supervision of workers is a good way for you to be sure that your workers are working safely and following your procedures.

Practice what you preach

If your workers see you or your supervisors flaunting the procedures, taking shortcuts or otherwise failing to follow the established safe work practices they will likely do the same. This leads to dangerous work practices which will in turn inevitably cause injury.

Useful links

• Induction checklist template
• Training plan template
• Training record template

You are unlikely to have any processes in place for ensuring that your workplace is safe.

This score indicates that you need to take immediate action to ensure you maintain a safe workplace.

What you can do to improve:

Design and implement a process to carry out regular safety checks

You need to set up a system of regular safety inspections of your worksite. These inspections should be scheduled and there should be checks performed to make sure they occur as planned. Once you have established a routine, it is a good idea to have a regular rotation of people doing the inspection including managers, supervisors and workers.

Any issues you note as part of these inspections should be documented and actioned. Always inform workers that this has occurred as it will help keep them involved in safety and also demonstrate your commitment to keeping them safe.

These regular inspections do not take the place of your normal incident reporting procedure and you should continue to report incidents as normal.

Implement a preventative maintenance schedule

It is vital that all of your plant and equipment is safe and in good working order. Make sure that you record all of your plant and equipment (including hand tools) in a register. This register should form the basis of your regular preventative maintenance schedule. Make sure you check the schedule regularly to ensure that any faulty plant or equipment is in good working order.

You can get good information on the maintenance required by referring to manufacturer manuals or websites.

Design and implement a simple incident and accident reporting procedure

Put in place reporting procedures that make it easy for your workers to let you know whenever an incident occurs; and encourage them to do so. Make sure you train all of your workers and managers in these procedures.

Make sure that you investigate each incident that occurs and that you record the outcomes. Involve your workers in the investigations and let them know what the results of any investigations are. Ensure that all required corrective actions are recorded and that there is a clear accountability for closing out any actions. Follow up corrective actions to make sure they are done.

Implement an emergency plan for all types of emergencies – not just fire

Most organisations have a fire emergency and evacuation plan but there are other kinds of emergencies that can arise. Make sure you have plans in place for medical emergencies, bomb threats, chemical spills or other major events.

Consider:

• the impact an emergency would have on the workplace and any nearby workplaces
• how workers and visitors would safely exit the workplace
• where to locate a safe emergency assembly point
• how you would make sure that everyone has safely exited the workplace
• what specific training is needed (e.g. fire warden, first aid, fire extinguishers etc.).

Once the plan is developed you will need to provide training and instruction to all of your workers to make sure they know what to do in the event of an emergency.

Useful links

• Hazardous and risk register template
• Incident hazard report template

You are unlikely to have a system that documents safety incidents and lets you identify safety issues and develop prevention strategies.

Your responses indicate that you need to take immediate action to ensure that you have a documented system to report and investigate safety incidents and injuries. Your procedure must also include management review and reporting.

What you can do to improve:

Develop and implement a simple and effective incident reporting procedure

Involve your workers in developing a simple to use and effective incident reporting procedure. Your goal is to make it easy for your workers to report incidents and injuries and easy for you to investigate them.

When developing your procedure consider:

• What incidents, hazards or injuries are to be reported (e.g. unsafe equipment, chemical spills, injuries, near-misses etc.)?
• To whom will the incidents be reported? Make sure the nominated person is someone who has the authority to act upon the report such as a manger or senior person.
• How will incidents be reported? Make sure the procedure addresses how a worker will report issues and requires management to act upon the report and provide feedback to the reporting worker.
• Who will investigate the incident? It would be a good idea to nominate a person (perhaps a safety officer or manager with appropriate training) to coordinate investigations and to be ultimately responsible for them. Ideally the investigation should involve all relevant people including the reporting worker, their manager/supervisor and the nominated investigator.
• How will corrective actions be recorded and closed out? Minor incidents will usually involve simple and immediate fixes (although these should still be recorded) but more serious incidents will require more complex actions. It is important that these are recorded and responsibility for closing them out assigned.
• How will incidents, injuries and investigations be reported to senior management? Consider how often incidents will be reported and reviewed by senior management and what the mechanism is for the reports (e.g. a weekly or monthly meeting with managers/supervisors, a written report etc.).

As part of the process you need to create a register of all incidents, investigations and outcomes. This is generally a simple summary of incidents that can be accessed easily. Examples of incident registers can be found on the SafeWork SA website.

Use your incident reports and register to help you improve your workplace safety

Incident reports and their associated investigations are a good source of information on the health of your work health and safety systems and general workplace safety.

Whenever you are reviewing your safety systems or your workplace always consider incident reports as they can help you identify adverse trends and help drive improved safety.

Useful links

• Health and safety checklist template