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Category Archives: General
Why use qualified H and S specialists?
I must admit I let out a wee gasp when I read about the successful prosecution of a health and safety advisor by WorkSafe in New Zealand. It’s a clear warning to all of us in the health and safety industry. The case summary revealed that the advisor had identified significant concerns with the traffic management system with a Contractor client. Despite assurances that these issues would be addressed, six months passed with no action. This ultimately lead to a worker suffering a serious head injury. This incident was entirely preventable, had the advisor followed through on their responsibilities. As a result, the Contractor (Client) was fined $270,000, along with $50,000 in reparations. The advisor was fined $70k and $28k respectively.
WorkSafe emphasized, “Businesses paying for specialist health and safety advice need to know both they and their consultants have responsibilities under the law. You need the right consultant helping in the right way to get the right outcomes for workers.” The Health and Safety Association (HASANZ) serves as a reliable source for professionals who can provide expert advice.
The challenge in hiring any advisor for your business is that you often don’t know what you don’t know. As this case demonstrates, even though the advisor failed to manage the risk, the business was still held accountable. Frustrating I’m sure!
The Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) is unequivocal: your business, your responsibility. You depend on the advice of experts, so how can you be sure they are what they claim to be?
Start by hiring an accredited health and safety professional, just as you would a qualified accountant or solicitor. Additionally, ensure they have relevant industry experience. While many tourism operations are low-risk, they are not without risk. With the complexities of the HSWA, GRWM, Transport ACT, Maritime Act, HSNO, FENZ, ……….., it’s crucial to work with advisors who understand the specific needs of the sector. This is especially relevant for activity operators who may subject to the adventure activity regulations.
Check the level of accreditation the practitioner holds. Advisers can be members of associations without actually holding any professional accreditation. This can include NZ Safety Council and affiliate members of NZISM (New Zealand Institute of Safety Management). NZISM has four levels of professional accreditation. Once members achieve professional accreditation, they can apply to become HASANZ registered. NZISM and HASANZ practitioners are bound by a code of conduct, ensuring they maintain professional accreditation and consistently meet industry standards.
Accredited health and safety practitioners may come at a higher cost, but so do good accountants, SEO providers, and media companies. Having spent many years teaching people how to sell travel, I would always emphasize three key selling points: saving money, saving time, and ensuring safety. Somewhere within that triangle, customers find their comfort zone. Actively promoting a robust safety system shows a commitment to visitor safety, and working with accredited health and safety practitioners adds credibility to your system. If you’re making the commitment, be proud and put it front and centre in your business collateral!
In case you were wondering, I’m proud to be HASANZ registered, hold NZISM Professional accreditation, and am certified by IOSH (the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), a global organization based in the UK.
Can Chat GPT write my safety plan?
ChatGPT is certainly a hot topic of conversation at the moment. While debate rages over the benefits and the dangers, the fact remains that it is a powerful tool which has the potential to save small businesses countless hours and allow them to get on top of all of those administrative projects that sit in the ‘gonna get to’ basket, so can it do my health and safety?
I’ve experimented with ChatGPT and asked it to write a safety management plan for a number of different types of tourism operations. The results were underwhelming at best. I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on it to demonstrate I had met my health and safety obligations. While it did provide (very) basic frameworks, they are lacking in useful content. Even specifically asking to see a SMP which would be HSWA 2015 compliant, the result was exactly the same as other SMP’s. It appears while ChatGPT is able to identify 7 basic elements of a safety plan, it isn’t currently able to identify the requirements of the HSWA and provide a SMP to meet them. So, would I rely on ChatGPT to write my safety plan? Highly unlikely, at this point in time.
While this might be a disappointing result for people looking for a quick fix, it’s probably doing them a favour. Health and safety isn’t about having a suite of swanky documents. The true litmus test is the activity which captures the organisations safety culture. A safety management plan should set out the actions and resources required to effectively manage health and safety. We have seen a number of significant prosecutions where businesses have had a SMP in place, however there was no activity to put it in to action. Without any activity a SMP might as well be a text book. Capturing activity is an important topic, but not the focus of today’s post. Check out our blog to learn more about this.
It may sound like I’m dismissing ChatGPT, but it does have it’s uses. Most business owners are aware of the risks in their business. They have processes in place for daily tasks to make sure workers, visitors and others Stay Safe. What confuses and frustrates, or just gets popped in the ‘gonna get too’s’ is how to document these procedures. This where ChatGPT can save hours of staring blankly at a screen while waiting for a bolt of inspiration. Asking ChatGPT to write SOP’s can save hours of contemplation, pondering and frustration. It appeared that the more granular the request, the more accurate the outcomes were. The results should be compared against the procedures in action. Ask the question, are there any gaps in our procedures? If there are, are they relevant? Do we have procedures in place which aren’t identified by ChatGPT? These should be added to the SOP. Like all things health and safety, they should reflect the nature of the activity. I would caution business owners not to rely on search results to base a safety plan on.
Effective safety management requires business leaders to understand the risks in their operation and how to mitigate them. While it may be able to spit out a template, it doesn’t have the capacity to ensure business owners understand how to manage their health and safety obligations. What it can do is significantly reduce the amount of time businesses need to document policies and procedures. While they wont’ be polished it can be a great tool to get the ball rolling, and if that prompts discussion on what you do and how you do it safely, then that’s got to be a good thing.
ChatGPT should be used with caution. The best mechanism to ensure you meet your health and safety obligations is touch base with an accredited health and safety practitioner.
Demystifying Health And Safety
I recently undertook a poll on a small business page. Of the 126 respondents, 70% stated they had no idea what a PCBU is. While I was surprised it was 70%, I can’t say I was shocked. NZ consistently rates as one of the easiest countries in the world to set up a new business. The issue with this is we have a host of business owners who are unfamiliar with their legislated obligations regarding tax law, employment relations and of course health and safety. I am often surprised to meet with owners of established businesses who have little understanding of their obligations under the Act.
While many operators have low risk operations, they shouldn’t be confused with no-risk operations. Unfortunately, there is still very much a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude with many SME’s. As we have seen recently, incidents can happen in an instant and when they do, what you have is what you have (i.e. documented health and safety activity).
The HSWA is very clear, as a business owner it’s your responsibility to know the risks which might be present and how to manage those risks, so they don’t cause harm. Not having an active safety system in place leaves businesses vulnerable. Guests or workers are more likely to have an incident which leads to lost time injuries, which are particularly difficult to manage in the current employment environment. You are more likely to damage your reputation, and of course there is the possibility of fines, many of which have been quite substantial recently.
I meet many small business owners who genuinely want to do better but are frustrated, overwhelmed and confused by health and safety. They have often had poor experiences investing in health and safety templates thinking this would be an easy fix and find themselves just as confused as when they started.
If this sounds like you, follow us on LinkedIn as we post a series of articles over the next six weeks to demystify the Health and Safety at Work Act. Topics we’ll be discussing include:
- Setting the benchmark– What should health and safety look like in your operation. The HSWA requires you to do what an Officer of another PCBU would reasonably do. We’ll discuss resources you can utilise to ensure you are keeping up to speed.
- How to identify risks in your operation. We discuss the four origins of risk and simple risk analysis techniques you can implement.
- Using contractors: Many small business owners are under the impression that using contractors discharges them from their responsibilities under the Act, and that’s not the case. We’ll clarify your obligations and how to demonstrate collaboration with other PCBU’s
- Emergency Management Procedures. Even with great planning, things can still go wrong, And of course mother nature does what she likes which also presents challenges. We discuss foreseeable events and what you can do to prepare for them.
- Investigating incidents. When things do go wrong, we need to learn from them. We’ll discuss how to identify causal factors, root causes and how to mitigate risks from reoccurring.
- Capturing your health and safety evidence. There are some great Apps and software available these days, however, sometimes paper-based systems work better. It’s all about providing the right tools for your team. We’ll discuss how to implement a system which will get your team engaged in our safety system.
This weeks tip: Define your workplace. The workplace is regarded as anywhere work is undertaken. If workers are required to drive for work, then is part of their workplace. This could include sales reps making sales calls, workers going to meetings, or perhaps the maintenance team collecting supplied or equipment. If you have workers who drive for work, you should have a safe driving policy in place. Last year 38% of Australia’s workplace fatalities occurred on the road!
If you’re frustrated, overwhelmed, want to get started, or want to check you are on the right track, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do to help you sleep easier!
What is a SMS?
Here’s a very helpful and insightful introduction from Civil Aviation. You don’t need to be an aviation operator to use this document.
