If you’re a senior leader or director, you will no doubt be sensitive to the regulator’s cross-hairs in the event that something serious happens to one or more of your workers – particularly in Victoria from 1 July this year. The upgrade in penalties for negligence is probably well known to anyone fitting the category of “officer”, and while few in larger organisations will have much to overtly worry about, it does get interesting when you closely examine the following two excerpts from the OHS Act 2004:

There is a duty “to monitor the health of employees and working conditions”, and

Negligent conduct includes a failure to act, ie “does not take reasonable action to fix a dangerous situation, where failing to do so causes a high risk of death, serious injury or serious illness.”

This is interesting because even in the most mature safety cultures, the systems and resources to monitor and resolve challenges in working conditions (most importantly including ‘critical controls’ for high risk activities) are almost always constrained by a few key factors:

• A lack of systemic oversight of how work is actually done versus how it is imagined
• Inadequate engagement of the frontline to determine how exposure could be better managed
• Wrong or inappropriate criteria and metrics used to assess performance

To obtain evidence of this, you have only to look at safety performance dashboards and board safety reports cluttered with lag metrics and trend lines that mean very little, completion of exposure reduction tasks with little or no assessment of effectiveness, incident investigation reports that look and sound a lot more like a policy document, and the status of improvement initiatives ritually green-lighted.

It's still a rarity amongst Australian organisations to see consistent and effective verification that workers are properly set up for successful and safe work, and how often the work conditions allow them to do exactly that.

So as an “officer” of your organisation, what can you do to promote those capacities, and truly protect your people from the harm this legislation is intended to avoid?

1. Start with sincere and curious field engagement to find out the true nature of risk at the frontline
2. Put simple but powerful risk management tools in the hands of your people
3. Verify that critical controls (fatality protections) are in place and effective
4. Analyse the verification data to provide useful operational business intelligence to leaders
5. Strengthen the safety governance structure and make decisions from a solid evidence-base
6. Objectively examine past incidents to determine systemic causes of failure

Incident Analytics are experts in this space, and we welcome the chance to discuss and share what we know with you. www.incidentanalytics.com.au

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