June 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. Axento Safety can partner with you to take the pain out of health and safety management, reduce the paperwork, making your life easier, enabling increased compliance, enabling productivity improvement and doing it cost effectively. This enables you to grow your business and sleep better at night.
What drives your organisational performance?
Most organisations seek to achieve their stated goals and have KPI’s to assist them to do so. A question I find myself asking is ‘Are our KPI’s actually driving the behaviours we need to achieve the outcomes we seek?’ My belief is that often our KPI’s look superficially appropriate but are not really working as intended. Take the fairly common safety KPI of having fewer injuries than last year (or aiming to achieve ‘Zero Harm’). Both versions appeal to our sense of doing the right thing and both are good aspirational goals. When stated as a KPI, “having fewer injuries than last year” could be measured as reductions in raw numbers or in percentages and I have seen versions of it used to compare divisions, sites, projects and/or supervisors and managers.
If the KPI is seen by senior management to be so important that we attach a bonus to its achievement, then what do I do as a supervisor or lower level manager faced with reducing incident numbers? I hide the incidents that can be hidden so I get my bonus. The negative results of this inappropriate behaviour triggered by the KPI are that:
- senior management are unaware of the potential employee and business risk but would be held accountable for it not being addressed (suffering from the mushroom treatment);
- no action is taken to rectify the cause; and
- the organisation remains vulnerable to a risk of serious incidents occurring with their attendant emotional, legal, financial, reputational and productivity costs which predictably occur
- Not only paying increased Workers Compensation premiums but still paying the bonus that drive the behaviours that cause these problems.
If we change our thinking and our KPI’s to ‘achieving our goals safely’, then we can safely improve our productivity, performance, engagement, innovation, etc. as safety becomes integrated in the way we do business. This modified organisational culture translates to safely improving the financial bottom line as well as safely achieving our social, community, environmental or other objectives. Life will be easier, finances flow in the right direction and we can sleep better at night knowing that the organisation is safely functioning – and without the elevated risk that can result from unwittingly selecting inappropriate KPI’s. Do you have health and safety related KPI’s? Do you need assistance to review your health and safety related KPI’s?
Call Jon Temby if you would like to discuss KPI’s that will help your organisation achieve its goals .
Don’t miss out – WorkSafe (Vic) Awards 2015
Entries for the 2015 WorkSafe Awards are now open! Workplaces and businesses are encouraged to nominate individuals who are committed to health and safety and return to work in their workplaces. Be quick, entries close 26 June! For more information visit: WorkSafe Victoria awards 2015 Remember: if you are an Axento Safety client and wish to put in an application, Axento Safety assistance is FREE OF CHARGE. WorkSafe Victoria awards 2015
Horses and other large animals
WorkCover NSW recently published a video which provides helpful guidance on minimising the risks posed to workers and others who interact with horses.
This initiative follows alarming data indicating that 98 people in Australia died from horse related incidents between 2000 and 2012. It is estimated that every day, one person is hospitalised in Australia from a horse related incident. The guide can be viewed at: http://www.workcover.nsw.gov.au/news/safety-alert/working-with-horses. (Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-NbPI9fzls&feature=youtu.be ).
Jons comment: These statistics demonstrate the importance of being experienced in animal handling and being alert to each individual animals likely responses, knowing the temperament of the animals you work with, ensuring the environment you and the animals share is adequate for both your needs; ensuring appropriate protective equipment is used; and having safe work procedures established and used to train others to work safely in that environment. A high risk with many animals, but especially with horses, are sources of fright such as unexpected noises, approaching from a ‘blind spot’, cornering them, blowing litter, changed surroundings plus unsupervised inexperienced and/or nervous people.
Prosecution results summaries
WorkSafe Victoria has updated their prosecution summaries webpage. These summaries include cases associated with the collapse of a house during re-stumping, failing to notify an incident and compensation fraud. View prosecution results
Jons comment: These prosecutions are interesting to skim through and are relevant to all Australian jurisdictions. I suggest that as a minimum, you check the information provided in the column ‘Category’ and look for the frequency of specific types of breach. Then think about your own organisation and your organisations compliance with statutory expectations. Please contact me if assistance is required.
Gruesome Safety Video
If you think that gruesome safety videos might get your message across, this might work for you –its unpleasant but most of the comments from the survivors appear to be sensible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB86FZnjKTw (No responsibility taken for the clips that follow!) Warning – Not for the faint-hearted!
Scaffolding Safety Alert
WorkCover NSW has issued a Safety Alert, highlighting the potential risks of a scaffold collapsing and provides information about preventing it from happening.
Read more
Jons Comment: If you use scaffolding, the Safety Alert includes some useful tips to assist you to achieve safe operations. Scaffolding failures are all too common, this information may reduce the likelihood that occurring.