Leadership – Page 51 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Australian safety awards are important but require rebooting

The 6th annual Safe Work Australia awards concluded a couple of hours ago. The event was an opportunity to meet Australians prominent in the safety profession, celebrate innovation and to acknowledge individual efforts. The winners’ achievements were largely significant but there are problems with the OHS award processes across Australia and the Safe Work Australia Awards reflected some of these.

The event, held at Parliament House, included a good collection of corporate, legal and government decision-makers in the audience of 350 guests. The Industrial Relations Minister, Chris Evans, delegated Senator Jacinta Collins (media statement available HERE) to attend the function and she expressed a rudimentary understanding of workplace health and safety. She, like many others, stated that “all workplace incidents are preventable”, a statement whose value is becoming dubious. If safety professionals desire evidence-based decision making, someone needs to research the “preventable” statement as it risks creating unreasonable expectations of safety in the community, if it has not already.

Category 1: Best Workplace Health and Safety Management System

Private Sector – Ballina Bypass Alliance
Public Sector – Courts Administration Authority

Category 2: Best Solution to an Identified Workplace Health and Safety Issue – CSIRO Livestock Industries Continue reading “Australian safety awards are important but require rebooting”

Online media slams Workcover SA report

Online newspaper, Indaily, has released a report by DeakinPrime which summarises a November 2010 summit conference on workers compensation. DeakinPrime facilitated the summit

InDaily focuses on the following criticisms, amongst others, from the report:

a silo approach by Workcover
the lack of feedback
injured workers were not the prime consideration of Workcover
politicisation was leading to instability
a disassociated claims management process.

These criticisms are present in the full report but the presence of criticisms should not surprise as the nature of these summits are usually twofold – the creation of innovative solutions and an avenue for complaint. Continue reading “Online media slams Workcover SA report”

Success from enlightenment not compliance

An article in the InDaily online newspaper for 4 April 2011 provides several safety management issues that are worth pondering. (Thanks to the readers who brought the article to my attention)

Keith Brown was the CEO of South Australia’s Workcover Corporation earlier this century. He has told InDaily that he lost his position due to a change in the politics of the state and has not been welcome since. (A more personal perspective on Brown was provided by Rosemary McKenzie-Ferguson in a January 2011 blog comment.)

Brown says that the most effective way of reducing the unfunded liabilities of workers compensation is to communicate with all stakeholders in the injury management process. He believes that

“WorkCover now operates more to service the needs of the bureaucracy compared to the operation he ran for six years in favour of the clients.” Continue reading “Success from enlightenment not compliance”

Rotting fish, safety leadership and wizards

In business, government and public authorities, CEOs and executives regularly resign during periods of controversy. Within the 24 hours of each other in 2010 two prominent Australian executives resigned – Brian Waldron and Russell Rees. Waldron because the rugby league team, Melbourne Storm, his previous CEO appointment, was found to have operated unethically during his time at the top. Rees resigned because, he said it is the right time to leave, however there had been serious questions put in a Royal Commission about his handling of the events in Black Saturday bushfires when over 170 people died.

The dominant mantra in occupational safety management is that safety cannot be improved without leadership from the executives. Australian safety conferences are laden with mentions of leadership. Leaders have the potential to inspire, although some stay on for too long.

The leadership sellers in the corporate marketplace (some not dissimilar to wizards) are all pushing the positive benefits of leadership. But there are good leaders and bad leaders. There are inspirational leaders and there are selfish leaders. There are those executives who lead in positive directions and there are those who lead organisations and others astray. There are some people who are not suited to being leaders at all. Continue reading “Rotting fish, safety leadership and wizards”

Understanding people is understanding safety

SafetyAtWorkBlog reader Ken Malcolm submitted this comment in response to Yossi Berger’s article of 21 March 2011 but I think it warrants a post of its own:

It is often said two safety professionals never agree however I do agree SA law has been ineffective. However let me explain why I think this way.

I am in Victoria, in the business of making sustainable changes in the workplace. I am convinced that prescriptive legislation does not cut it when you want to improve safety, as Lord Robens recognised. All you get are thicker law books and people less willing to read them. In most businesses I consult to, they have a problem and the problem is quite simple. They have excellent systems but nobody is implementing or enforcing them; or the employees are just not following them. In many cases they have an eager OHS Manager with perfect sets of graphs and records; he or she is busily tracking failure. What they can’t do is drive a culture change. BTW, safety culture is what you get when the boss isn’t there.

The requirement to find hazards and manage them according to the unique circumstances of the work environment and of the persons within it, does affect culture if this process is supported by senior execs and fostered or encouraged properly. Laws that encourage that approach are desirable. With regards to getting tough, fear motivation does not achieve lasting change and with a normalisation of deviance, greater risks are tolerated by degree until people are climbing on safety rails to clean equipment 6 metres from the ground. Continue reading “Understanding people is understanding safety”

Raising awareness about stress instead of controlling it

In March 2011, in response to one of the several Stress Awareness Days, HRLeader magazine ran an edited version of a Personnel Today article called “5 steps to tackle employee stress”. The Personnel Today had “6 steps”, so are Australian readers being ripped off?

Personnel Today included a step called “Refer the Health and Safety Executive’s management standards”. HRLeader’s editor must have made the call that HSE information is geographically specific and therefore not relevant to Australia but the change is more indicative of the fact that Australia does not have anything to match the HSE management standards to help control stress. According to the HSE website:

“….the six Management Standards cover the primary sources of stress at work. These are:

Demands[1] – this includes issues such as workload, work patterns and the work environment. Continue reading “Raising awareness about stress instead of controlling it”

The Asphyxiation of OHS

Good OHS thinking and practice are being slowly asphyxiated. By far most suggestions by workers, unions or good consultants for Health & Safety improvements are ‘choked’ by management naysayers and bureaucrats more in touch with their current minister’s moods than workplace reality. Not choked immediately or blatantly. In fact, that person may be patted on the back and encouraged to raise more OHS matters, “Yes, mate, good! Tell us what else we’re doing wrong, very very helpful. You just keep on telling us”…….. And slowly any significant discussion about OHS problems is suppressed and killed.

The majority of workers in Australia work in small workplaces where (typically) practical OHS programs are regarded by managers as a nuisance, a bit of ‘over-the-top’ nonsense that slows down productivity. It’s regarded as an irritant of fashion that will pass, like the fashion-related, politically correct things to say. Continue reading “The Asphyxiation of OHS”

Category: Leadership

Australian safety awards are important but require rebooting

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Online media slams Workcover SA report

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Success from enlightenment not compliance

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Rotting fish, safety leadership and wizards

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Understanding people is understanding safety

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Raising awareness about stress instead of controlling it

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The Asphyxiation of OHS

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