Without effort in the HSEQ space, plenty of workplaces still get finely rewarded for their laziness. It’s fundamental. It’s easier, often faster and you often then make more money etc. etc.

It’s a common thing to see work occurring for an organisation which I know has strict HSEQ requirements of their team members and/or contractors. At a contractual level, the businesses doing things well can often get beaten into submission by the race to the bottom when they get out bid by a competitor who undercuts them – but them makes profit by failing to follow through with any of their HSEQ commitments.

Now I’m not talking about general ones about “duty of care” and “work safely” which can have a wide range of interpretations. I’m talking about ones where the commercial client has made those tendering for the work to state they’ll comply with very specific requirements and provide evidence of this in order to be in the running. That’s not a bad thing and in today’s age of cost effectiveness and efficiency, I’m the first one to agree with reducing wastage and that includes money wasted in the HSEQ space. The issue is when a contractor bids at a price they know they cannot achieve, so does the high risk work at 3-4am in the morning – clearly and knowingly breaching the explicit requirements they said they’d achieve in order to generate a profit margin where before there was none.

The sad thing is that, it’s probable they’ll get away with it most of the time. That’s the nature of risk – you’re basing things off a probability, and it might work out ok. It also might not.

The ISO 31000:2018 definition of risk is “the effect of uncertainty on objectives”, so are you willing to put catastrophic consequence potential into a job just to make a profit? I hear and see (including just today…) this still commonly.

But, I am not here to police people to do the right thing when they’re only going to hurt themselves. If they wish to do dumb stuff, then that’s their call. What I am concerned about is the ubiquitous race to the bottom for price and the impact it has on those doing the right thing to cut corners in order to win work. My morale challenge is knowing despite increasing pressure to demonstrate how they’ll do the right thing, but budgets and market pressure encouraging them to not follow through. It’s perfectly understandable that people give up and leave their relevant industries or just end up cutting corners knowing they’ll likely get more reward for the wrong thing than the right thing……..well that is until someone falls out of their EWP or gets hit by a car that never saw them working there.

My advice is always that the cowboys are getting less and less now given most people don’t do the wrong thing out of clear knowledgeable violation. They generally do it thinking they’re OK. So while organisations are asking for contractors to demonstrate they’re going to be doing the right thing, those who don’t know what the right thing is are going to win less and less work, and get forced into smaller and smaller sections of the market. Once this is occurring, the impact of price becomes less of an issue because then the true positive impact of reliability and good HSEQ outcomes will be far more profitable than risking everything on a small gain.

To summarise, I’ll say to keep on doing the right thing regardless of these cowboys out there. They’ll be winning less work and be having more incidents. When you’re talking about significant falls from heights, or a fire at a fuel station, or a worker or member of the public getting hit by a vehicle in your workplace, it’s not likely to be cheaper than all the profit margins you’d save by cutting a few corners. In fact, for most small to medium sized businesses, it’s unlikely they’ll still be in business afterwards.

And all that will be left are those doing the right thing. Then you’ll be thankful for the outcomes you deserved from your hard work. And the cowboys will be regretting the outcomes they deserved…

While Game of Thrones has now ended and it showed how harmful a grumpy girl on a dragon can be, lead is a far bigger concern for us mere mortals. While we know lead is a hazardous substance, it is still not uncommon for organisations to struggle to understand what defines lead-risk work and how to manage this risk.

Our advice has generally been that if any of your team members work in contact with lead or products containing lead (even if it’s a model dragon like the picture), they’re quite likely working in a lead-risk job unless you can prove otherwise. If the contact is minimal and you’ve got no data confirming their blood is lead free,  you’ll likely be hard pressed to justify not treating them like they could currently be or may become exposed. If lead contact is incidental and you’ve got a system in place that shows workers have no lead in their blood over the range of work situations, it’s possible you may have the hazard effectively managed. Obviously each situation is unique so this blog post isn’t to be taken as advice from Dr Google – we’d need to dig a little deeper to do that!

There is further detail in the Occupational Safety and Health Regulations 1996 (WA), but one update recently has been the reduction in the threshold of levels found in the blood before escalated actions are needed for the protection of the health of the worker. Having worked in industries for a number of years where I lived with a baseline blood lead level in a range now deemed unacceptable, I cannot express enough the need to work hard at managing lead exposure at the source. It takes time to drop after it’s discovered in one of your workers, and for cost reasons if nothing else, it’s quite an expensive exercise while you’re waiting for them to come down. That goes without saying, the impact on being TOLD by Worksafe to fix certain things in the workplace is likely greater than doing them under your own direction at your own pace.

If you wish to chat to us for further clarification or ideas on translating this section of the legislation into human speak, give us a call or drop us message on the Contact Us tab of the website.

Or just click on the link below to their website to see the Worksafe publication on the topic.

Worksafe media release

DMIRS have released their long awaited Code of practice for Mentally healthy workplaces for fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers. See the link to go and check it out and see how this impacts your workplace or how it can be used to support FIFO employees you know.

Code of practice

Worksafe are still campaigning the wine industry throughout 2019.  It’s always better to be proactive, so drop us a line and we can have a chat about some things you can do to help.

Worksafe media – Wine industry

Here at Safety Risk Solutions we don’t ask others to do what we aren’t willing to do ourselves. Recycling and doing our bit for the environment is no different.

Our owner and Managing Director, Vadim Pantall lives and breathes it living on his sustainable off grid property which is not connected to the grid for power and water – even having no mail delivery or rubbish collection. Apart from some fuel for tractors, and a mobile phone signal so he can work and be contacted by you – his valuable clients, it’s a little patch of paradise that is doing more than it’s fair share in helping the environment.

In our offices, we take recycling serious too. We purchase recycling buckets which come pre-paid so that when we do have single use batteries to dispose of, they don’t get placed in landfill, they can be safely transported to an approved recycling facility for processing so the resources can be extracted wherever practicable and avoid any of the harmful components damaging the environment from the disposal process.

If you’d like some tips on how to help manage your waste footprint and do more towards an environmentally sustainable future, contact us on (08) 9840 5901 or drop us a line via the Contact us tab.

Do you want more work with bigger clients instead of all the effort of chasing lots of little invoices all the time?

The bigger clients such as large contractors, State Government departments or local shires often require their contracting partners to be ISO certified for 9001 Quality, 14001 Environmental and 45001 OHS management systems of they want to do project work of any scale.

We can help you gain pre-qualification for these agencies and can conduct certification audits for accreditation against these standards and are locally owned and run, based right here in Albany and work all across the Great Southern, and across the country. Our clients benefit from our expertise in gaining work with organisations such as the Water Corporation, Western Power, Main Roads, Main Roads and many others.

Contact us to discuss the value these processes can offer for your business.

ISO standards win contracts

All puns aside, look after yourself at this holiday period.

Sometimes we have trained out our logic or the OHS systems of our workplace override our common sense actions, but it doesn’t have to be like that….

At Safety Risk Solutions, we help our clients get back to basics with their HSEQ systems to make sure they’re going to work and are not complex beyond logic. If they’re not going to work, we aren’t going to ask for it to be done that way. After all, why are we doing anything at all if it won’t even work.

How to defend yourself from a knife attack.

This guy has got some skills!

#simpleworksbest

I know I need to get around to that Safety stuff one day as it’s gotta be done.

Delaying fixing up some systems of your HSEQ systems or sending people on training can add stress to a busy business, but we all know it needs to be done. But you know what also adds stress? Worksafe or Resources Safety digging through your systems after you’ve had a serious incident or kicking yourself that this delay could be been the factor while one of your team is laid up injured in hospital from something at work.

In David Allen’s book Getting things done, he reminds us that having all of these things in our heads that we know. We need to get to as some stage will add a huge amount of background stress and anxiety u til we can lock them in to an action plan for resolution. It’s not that they all need to get finished to reduce our stress, but that we just need to have them locked in to an action plan that we can rely on is going to make sure we don’t forget.

The biggest barrier he says is often the lack of a clear visible defined Next Action. We know something needs to get done and roughly what it is, but can’t exactly and specifically lock it in to one thing we need to do. This is especially challenging regarding some HSEQ actions for smaller businesses.

HSEQ issues are often founded in seemingly complex systems of legislation that can easily overwhelm a business owner or manager. Also they are often based on more abstract concepts such as providing and maintaining a safe workplace where workers are not exposed to hazards.

By being confused on where to start in finding the information, let alone turning it into a clearly defined and visible physical action only adds to stress and promotes procrastination. That’s where using a trained professional can assist in helping focus you down the right path.

Whether it is just an hour conversation with one of our trained and competent HSEQ advisors and shown where to find the relevant section of legislation or code of practice through to fully operational plug and play solutions, we can help reduce stress and get things moving from when they’ve been stuck.

Drop us a line or give us a call and see if we can help. After all, what will be more stressful? Resolving your issue or tap dancing around it for another year?

With 2 workplace deaths in WA in very recent times, what are we doing differently to make sure our workplace is never going to have to experience the horror of having this happen to a member of your team. And don’t play down my use of the word “horror”, by thinking it’s only others who have to experience this. There is only one way to ensure you’ll not have to……

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-20/worker-dies-at-water-corporation-perth-wastewater-plant/9680552

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-27/man-dies-in-collie-workplace-accident/9702274