October is National Safe Work Month. Each week, Cooper Grace Ward’s workplace relations and safety team will ask you to think about the safety systems and practices in your business.
In this first instalment, special counsel Gemma Sharp unpacks week one’s theme, ‘For life: why work health and safety matters’. Safety should be woven into the fabric of a business, not bolted on afterwards – it is a responsibility shared from leadership to the shop floor. Gemma covers the duty on PCBUs and officers to take all reasonably practicable steps to protect workers, noting that psychosocial risks, such as excessive workloads, carry the same legal weight as physical hazards.
Video transcript
October is National Safe Work Month, and each week we’re going to be asking you to think about the safety systems and practices in your business.
I’m Gemma Sharp, a special counsel in Cooper Grace Ward’s workplace relations and safety team.
Behind every workplace injury or illness or fatality is a worker, a colleague, somebody’s family member. For a business that’s not just a statistic or a compliance matter. It’s something that touches the everyday fabric of your team and your workplace culture.
National Safe Work Month is a timely reminder to sit back and consider what your safety systems look like. Safety is not just a policy or a procedure. It’s how we go about our everyday operations. It’s how we consider the needs of the business, the needs of workers to ensure each day everyone can get home safe.
This week’s theme is ‘For life: why work health and safety matters’. and I want you to sit and think about that for a moment, because it applies to everyone in an organisation. The people at the top making decisions for the business and those on the ground. Each and every person has a responsibility to ensure everybody gets home safe at the end of the day.
For those running a business, work, health and safety isn’t just a side issue, it’s a core management responsibility. As a PCBU, or as an officer of the business, you have a legal duty to ensure that the PCBU is taking all steps reasonably practicable to ensure the health and safety of workers and others, and that duty doesn’t just sit still. It needs to be reflected on how you plan work, resource teams, set deadlines and make operational decisions each and every day.
Good safety outcomes come from safety being part of the fabric of the business, not something that’s just bolted onto afterwards. It’s also worth remembering work health and safety duties go beyond physical hazards. It turns to how you set work for individuals, whether you’ve got adequate support structures, whether there are excessive workload demands. Those all create psychosocial hazards in your workplace. And for a business that carries the same legal and practical weight as a physical hazard. Part of managing a business is managing those risks well.
That said, safety isn’t just something that needs to be managed from the top down. It’s a responsibility that applies to each and every worker in the workplace. Every individual, whether leading a team, working on the ground, have a responsibility to ensure that they’re taking notice of work health and safety risks in the workplace. That they’re taking steps to manage how their own actions create a risk not just to themselves, but also to others.
A safe workplace is created from a lot of small actions, all adding up. It’s not just through the implementation of policies and procedures at a high level. That’s a useful message to take back to your team. Whilst it’s critical businesses have their own systems in place, it’s also critical that everyone is working collectively to ensure the safety within the business.
So, the invitation this week is simple. Identify one thing, big or small, that could make a real difference to safety in your workplace. Go back to your teams and have an honest conversation about these things because ultimately that’s what this is for, life. So we can ensure every worker goes home safely at the end of the day and that collectively, businesses can continue to operate in a way to maintain great workplace culture and to ensure safety on a day to day basis.
If you have any questions about anything I’ve spoken about today, or any questions generally on how you can improve the safety systems within your organisation, please don’t hesitate to give me or another member of the Cooper Grace Ward team a call so we can assist you on your safety journey.
