March Updates
Axento Safety: Providing you with expert risk management solutions to enhance your business success.
Axento Safety’s focus is to help create safe, healthy, innovative AND PRODUCTIVE workplaces. By working with Axento Safety, you can refocus on your productive activities, achieve them more safely and with greater peace of mind.
Axento Safety specialise in taking the pain out of health and safety management, reducing the paperwork, making your life easier, enabling increased compliance, enabling productivity improvement and doing it cost effectively. Partnering with Axento Safety enables you to sleep better at night and grow your business.
Safety – the Investment, not a cost centre
Many people who regularly read this newsletter will have seen my articles on investing in safety rather than viewing safety as a cost centre. The strategy creating the investment is based on using health and safety to encourage better communications, greater engagement, flexibility and innovation within the organisation rather than being overtly focused on compliance which can have negative connotations and outcomes. Good compliance is an outcome from the good management of engaged workers. In addition to improved Officer due diligence and general OHS compliance, other outcomes from the Axento Safety approach to health and safety management includes more workers contributing to innovation and growth, greater productivity, fewer incidents (and regulator interventions), reduced downtime, reduced industrial unrest, greater retention and becoming an employer of choice.
The conversion from cost centre to investment in health and safety is supported by Norton Rose Fulbright partner Alena Titterton, an OHS/WHS legal specialist and Joshua Kwong who stated in mid February 2015: “Work health and safety has often been viewed as a “cost centre” – a compliance-driven expenditure where spending is kept to the bare minimum to satisfy legal requirements. Most often, safety expenditure will be justified by reference to legally imposed penalties for non-compliance. Rarely will organisations view safety spending as an investment, even though productivity gains from decreased incidents and worker confidence provide a quantifiable return on investment. Recent studies have demonstrated that the better view is that expenditure on safety is a capital investment.”
The third paper in the series of studies is available here: Role of Accounting in Work Health and Safety – The business case for safe, healthy and productive work. “This paper discusses the way in which the business case for health and safety is often analysed – and misunderstood. The paper focuses its discussion on the techniques used to back the business case for safety, and outlines factors to be included when making a business case for health and safety investment.”
Jons Comment: It is not just a ‘capital investment’ but also an investment in your employees, your management team, organisational growth, reliability and resilience. I am happy to forward an electronic copy of the two earlier papers to those who request them.
Planning: Health and Safety and global risk
The World Economic Forum recently released the 10th edition of the global risks report. It evaluated global risks under the following categories: economic, environmental, societal, geopolitical and technological. The report highlights “five global risks that stand out as both highly likely and highly potentially impactful: interstate conflict; failure of climate-change adaptation; water crises; unemployment and underemployment; and cyber-attacks.” Further information is available from: Five Global Risks
Jons Comment: It is important to regularly review health and safety and other organisational risks so that we can prepare to successfully meet future operating conditions. Our internal reviews will often be limited to a combination of internal organisational risk and the market places we target. The World Economic Forum Global Risk Report helps to provide a big picture, context and possible opportunities for your further research and forward planning.
High risk work licences revoked
Almost 300 high risk work licence holders have received a letter in the mail informing them some of their qualifications are not valid. Read more
Jons Comment: This is a symptom of a problem occurring within health and safety training. Earlier Axento Safety Updates have included concerns about dodgy Cert 4’s and Diplomas in OHS/WHS. As an employee, it is very tempting to get a cheap 1 day high risk permit, 1 week Cert 4 in health and safety or a two week Diploma, BUT if I am the employer, I need to know that my employees have the depth of knowledge and skills necessary to do the job competently. This competence does is not provided by the quick, cheap and nasty qualifications coming from some very dodgy (or very ignorant) RTO’s. During recruitment, do you satisfy yourself that the persons qualification is a good one, then verify their competence before allowing the person to get to work – initially under skilled supervision? If not, now is the time to do something about it.
Measuring Safety
Companies that have a higher proportion of remuneration weighted towards safety measures tend to have lower injury frequencies, according to Credit Suisse. Read more
Jons Comment: This links with the finding: “Research demonstrates a robust inverse relationship between an organisation’s work-related injury and illness prevention efforts and the subsequent frequency and severity of damage to people at work.” (‘Issues Measurement: Reporting WHS performance’ Safe Work Australia 2014”. These findings support the business case for investment in good safety systems and practices: How well do yours measure up?
How can WHS/OHS be innovative and creative?
Defining and operationalising the term “innovation” is problematic and ambiguous for many professional disciplines, and work health and safety is no exception, according to Professor Mike Behm from East Carolina University and member of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), USA. Read more…
Jons Comment: This topic needs further discussion. A number of my clients are already seeing the benefits from encouraging innovation, using safety as the ‘lever’ to boost engagement and productivity. Well targeted safety interventions will usually result in rapid progress and a quick ROI: What are you doing to keep ahead of your competitors?
Machine guarding: Busy grape harvest season prompts call for caution
Farms and vineyards are being advised to review their safety systems and machine guarding as the busy grape harvesting season throughout regional Victoria intensifies. Read more..
Jons Comment: Serious injuries and deaths caused by poorly guarded machinery are not uncommon. Causes of problems arise from many factors but include: damage, poor design, unauthorised removal, not following isolation procedures, not using Lock Out/Tag Out arrangements and bypassing arrangements designed, usually with well meaning ignorance, to speed up work. In the long run, it does the opposite. Are all your machine guards in place and fully functional?
Vic: Mushroom farm blast ends in $50,000 fine
The owner of a mushroom growing operation was fined $50,000 in Bendigo Magistrates court over a gas explosion that left a worker with serious burns. Read more…
Jons Comment: This incident is relevant to all workplaces using gas appliances, especially mobile heating appliances. They should be subject to regular inspections to ensure all safety devices are in place and fully functional.
Vic: Companies fined $450,000 after Dogman dies in rig collapse
Two companies were fined a total of $450,000 in Victoria’s County Court over the death of a worker who fell 40 metres when a piling rig collapsed on a Melbourne construction site in 2011. Read more…
Jons Comment: This is a frightening and tragic example that demonstrates the importance of providing good training, work instructions and support to employees who are unfamiliar with their working environment. Are your new employees adequately trained and supported to do their work safely?
Safety Warning for Australian Tradespeople
One in five of all serious workplace injuries involve a tradesman, according to an Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA) report, which found that tradespeople have some of the highest injury rates, musculoskeletal conditions and other health and safety risks of any profession. Read more…
Jons Comment: How long is it since you reviewed your trades staff incident histories and workplace practices? There will be a good business case for verifying that your current practices are not putting your workers or your business at risk.
Call for Tradies to improve safety
Employers and workers in various trades across Australia should make health and safety a priority to reduce the $60 billion spent on work injuries each year, according to the Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA). Read more…
Jons comment: This short article includes a series of steps to follow should one of your workers be off work with an illness or injury. Its use will reduce the likelihood of the illness or injury becoming more serious and long term than it needs to be.
Temperature and Work-Dangers Rise Together
SafeWork SA recently reminded employers and workers that heat is a workplace hazard and that it is imperative for appropriate measures to be put in place to deal with it. Read more…
Jons Comment: The appropriate scheduling of work and work expectations plus the provision of shade, hydration and adequate rest breaks are necessary for employee safety when the temperature and/or humidity are significantly above normal for those workers. There is an even greater need for these measures when hard physical work is involved.
Are you new to Axento Safety?
If you are looking for a recognised expert health and safety advisor who is well qualified, experienced, pro-active and commercially astute – I invite you to contact me.
Jon Temby, 0439 441 264
P.S. Dont keep the Axento Safety UPDATE a secret: we really appreciate referrals to your colleagues and business associates.
Note: This communication provides a brief Health and Safety update; it does not constitute legal advice.