We often come across health and safety committees that are struggling to make a tangible difference to the health and safety of an organisation. Senior management are keen to support the committee’s endeavours but find themselves approving expenditure on initiatives that seem nice to have, with no real evidence that the initiative is addressing a critical risk.
Meanwhile, the Board is largely in the dark about whether the PCBU has allocated appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks to health and safety, as required under their third due diligence obligation.
Our people can help your people to improve health and safety in your organisation.
H&S Basics
If you need help to get started, we can develop a meaningful hazard and risk register, with appropriate controls and workable business processes that your team can follow to keep themselves and others safe.
Off-the-shelf H&S packages are available in the market, with checklists, forms, policies, and procedures. But our experience is that the “package” is too much for many businesses to get to grips with and so it stays on the shelf. They are often generic and not particularly relevant to your business. They also tend to encourage a “tick box” mentality and add no real value to the challenge of improving New Zealand’s health and safety record.
The opportunity here is to work smarter, build stronger engagement with your team, and generally become more productive and profitable.
To add real value, we will spend time in your business, so we understand how you work and how best to embed health and safety into your business. We go at your speed to help you build something that is fit for purpose, having regard for your budget.
- Identify: We sit down together and identify the hazards and risks in your business, building a hazard register that includes a risk assessment.
This will help you to meet your very basic requirement – to understand the hazards and risks involved in your business.
- Control: If you don’t have the controls in place to manage the risks of harm, we can help to develop tailored controls and embed them into your business processes.
- Report & improve: A hazard and incident reporting process is introduced to ensure you are promptly addressing any new hazards, and if necessary, refining your controls to make them work better.
Some businesses have complex supply chains and need to understand whether their contracted workers are competent to work safely. Others need to ensure they are complying with their “upstream PCBU” responsibilities, making sure their products or designs are without risk to the health and safety of everyone who will be impacted by them in the workplace.
Result?
We know that businesses are busy, and paperwork is burdensome. We can show you how introducing simple steps into your business will:
- help reduce the risk of someone being hurt or your equipment significantly damaged
- give you a competitive advantage because you can demonstrate to hiring clients that you have assessed your safety risks and have the right controls in place to manage them; and
- provide assurance that your business is complying with the health and safety legislation and regulations.
Independent Investigations
MCG can either undertake an independent investigation for you or review your internal investigation into significant incidents, to provide assurance that the root causes have been properly identified.
If you’re an officer, you need confidence that investigations into near misses and accidents are robust enough to get to the root cause – not simply default to a person having a bad day – so that the chance of something happening “next time” is greatly reduced or eliminated.
MCG uses use the Incident Causation Analysis Methodology (ICAM), considered best practice in root cause investigation. ICAM focuses on uncovering the facts to identify systemic issues that contributed to the incident. It avoids the tendency to assign blame, instead looking at how the system can be improved to eliminate or minimise similar incidents in the future.
Note that the Institute of Directors and WorkSafe NZ recommend officers consider an independent review of the PCBU’s investigation, to verify the organisation’s controls are effective, as part of meeting their due diligence obligations.
H&S Strategy
Following an assurance audit, we use the recommendations to develop a health and safety strategy to start you on your journey toward an embedded safety culture.
The strategy is supported by a detailed work plan that allows you to confirm priorities and resources and monitor progress.
The strategy can be broad ranging, but we also condense it on a page to make it easier to share with all your stakeholders. Each area includes quantifiable measures of progress on your safety culture journey.
Bespoke Business Processes
The PCBU is responsible for all its workers, not just its employees, and for ensuring others are not harmed by the PCBU’s activities.
New or improved business processes may be required to ensure the PCBU is working with competent people and that the activities they undertake on behalf of the PCBU do not put others at risk of harm.
You may need to consider Safety in Design principles if you are responsible for the design, manufacture, supply or construction of substances, plant or structures.
If you are lacking the capacity or capability to design and implement key business processes, MCG has the skills and experience to tailor business processes especially for you.
We focus on building your internal capability to manage your health & safety risks.
Virtual H&S Support
The idea behind the Health and Safety at Work Act is to manage the risk of harm proportionate to the risk, not to manage absolutely everything to the nth degree.
Perhaps you have a health and safety management system, but just need periodic advice or assistance to make sure it is working properly? Perhaps you are in a comparatively low-risk business, but would like to be able to call on someone you trust to bounce some ideas around with?
Our virtual health and safety support package gives you access to the collective wisdom of our health and safety consultants – whenever you need it.
You can get the advice or assistance you need when you need it, either over the phone or live online.
