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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

There are consultation procedures in place but these may not be working effectively or capturing all of your workers’ input.

Your responses indicate that you do consult with your workers but that it is inconsistent or that you may not reach all of your workers. You may also not provide feedback or consult with all relevant workers about health and safety matters.

What you can do to improve:

Make sure that your consultation process is suitable for the workplace

Your consultation process may need to be changed to take into account the different needs of your workers, the size of your business, the location of your site or sites if you have more than one, shift arrangements, transport workers or workers who work at client sites or any other special arrangements you may have with your workers. Some workers may not be able to attend regular meetings and may be missing vital information about their safety or changes in the workplace. You may need to introduce alternative methods of consulting with these workers.

Encourage workers to consult and always provide feedback

Sometimes workers can appear to lack the desire to consult but that may be as a result of the process of consultation rather than the consultation itself.

You can help address this by:

• Scheduling safety meetings as a priority. If safety meetings are held at the end of the day or a shift, you can run out of time and workers may feel rushed or too tired to contribute. Schedule safety meetings at the start of the day or shift so that there is enough time and workers are fresh and alert.
• Show that you value your workers’ views. You can develop a method to demonstrate to your workers that their concerns and feedback are considered. This could be in the form of an action plan or some other method that clearly shows you are listening. Sometimes workers are told about decisions rather than being consulted. If your workers believe their concerns are ignored they will be reluctant to participate in the consultation process. Don’t make safety decisions without regard to your workers’ feedback. If a decision is made that is contrary to worker views, provide reasons that clearly outline why.
• Involve your entire workforce. Some of your workers may be unaware of their WHS responsibilities. Train all of your workers in WHS consultation procedures, including your supervisors and managers. Workers from non-English speaking backgrounds and those with special needs should be consulted individually to ensure their concerns are addressed.
• To be effective, consultation needs to be consistent and inclusive and safety issues need to be addressed in a timely way. Discuss safety concerns as part of your regular workplace meetings rather than ad-hoc meetings. Making safety part of the regular agenda and having meaningful discussion will go a long way to integrating safety into the normal business culture and demonstrating to your workers that it is an important aspect of business operations.

Useful links

• Record of safety discussions template

You identify and control some or most of your hazards and risks but you may not have effective safe work procedures in place for all of them.

Your responses indicate that you have started to address the risks associated with work tasks but you may need to look more closely at the tasks, identify any hazards you may have overlooked, and ensure that your safe work procedures are appropriate and help your workers do their jobs safely.

What you can do to improve:

Review work tasks

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.

Plan your approach

Sometimes, business pressures or uncertainty about what to do next may delay the development and implementation of safe work procedures.

Plan the process carefully so that you are able to develop safe work procedures gradually, within the constraints of your business demands. You should prioritise those tasks with the highest risk and involving the entire workforce in a structured way will help a lot with time. A good plan will help you overcome the limitations in time and resources and will let you track progress against targets.

Ensure procedures are up-to-date

If you find that your workers are not always following safe work procedures, review the procedures to ensure they are still relevant and are up to date. Sometimes procedures are not followed because they use old methods or talk about steps or machines that are no longer in use. If procedures are up to date, have your workers been trained in their use? Are your workers being properly supervised? Do your supervisors and managers make sure they always follow the procedures?

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”.

You are training and supervising your workers but this could be done more effectively or consistently.

Your responses indicate that you do have processes in place for education and supervision but that there are gaps in the process that could be addressed.

What you can do to improve:

Identify any areas where there may be gaps in your training or supervision

Have you captured all of your workers? Are casual, shift and part-time workers adequately trained and supervised? Do you make sure all contractors (including labour hire, cleaners, installers of equipment etc.) are inducted to the worksite?

Look for signs of misunderstanding

Inconsistent performance by workers and a high level of incidents can be an indication that your training and supervision needs improvement. Check to make sure training has been provided and is clear. It may be necessary to retrain if the problem is persistent or if there is a major breach of the procedure.

Retrain and refresh as needed

Undertake periodic assessments of your worker’s skills. Keep records of training and ensure training has been signed-off as complete. For key risks (e.g. manual handling etc.) consider regular refresher training to ensure knowledge is fresh and up to date.

If there are any major changes to the workplace or plant/tools training should be provided as soon as practicable in the changes.

Be clear about your expectations

Provide clear and consistent instruction and supervision. If instructions are unclear or rules are applied inconsistently you will increase the chance of confusion and decrease safety. Just as important as this is to practice what you preach. It is doubly important for managers and supervisors to follow the rules. If workers see the boss flouting procedure they will likely do the same.

Useful links

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

You have processes in place to maintain a safe workplace but there may be some gaps in your system that could mean that your workers are exposed to an increased risk of injury.

Your responses indicate that you undertake some measures towards providing a safe workplace but that there are some gaps in your system.

What you can do to improve:

Carry out regular safety checks

You should perform regular inspections of your worksite. These inspections should be scheduled and 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

Make sure that you register all of your plant and equipment (including hand tools). 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.

Put simple and effective incident and accident reporting procedures in place

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 that any investigations that need to be done after an incident involve the reporting worker(s) and ensure that the theme of any investigation is to fix any issues – not to apportion blame to anyone.

Make sure you train all of your workers and managers in these procedures.

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.

Useful links

• Hazardous and risk register template
• Incident hazard report template

Incidents are being reported but this may be inconsistent and they are not always investigated. More could be done to analyse trends and drive continuous improvement.

Your responses indicate that you are aware of the benefits of incident reporting and investigations but that there may be an inconsistent application of your procedures or that your workers do not always report incidents promptly or at all.

What you can do to improve:

Make sure your workers are aware of your incident reporting procedures and how those procedures help to keep them safe

Some workers don’t report what they consider minor incidents because they do not feel as though they are important enough. Other workers may delay reporting because they feel that an incident means they have done something wrong. In order to encourage your workers to report incidents you can:

• train your workers in your procedures from induction onwards – make sure they are aware of the importance of reporting incidents
• make sure you emphasise the link between incident reporting and safety – you cannot address an issue you are unaware of and lodging an incident report can help you improve systems and make your workplace safer for your workers
• reinforce the fact that incident investigation is not about finding someone to blame but rather to find any issues and fix them so no one gets injured.

Monitor your incident reports and investigation outcomes so that you can identify any trends or emerging safety issues

When an incident or injury occurs it may mean that:

• you do not have a safe work procedure in place for the task
• the current procedure is insufficient, old or incorrect – it may be that the task or equipment used has changed, that the original procedure did not cover all risks or it has not been reviewed for a long time
• your workers are not following the procedure properly.

In all of these cases there is a danger of recurrence or more serious incident if nothing is changed. By investigating the incident and identifying root cause you can put preventative actions in place that will keep your workplace safe.

Provide regular reporting to senior management on incidents, injuries and investigation outcomes

Regular management reporting and review will assist the senior management team in ensuring that business resources are directed to the best areas to improve workplace safety. It will also provide managers with the ability to track progress against safety targets and to make sure those with safety responsibilities are held accountable.

Useful links

• Health and safety checklist template