Do you need a license to do audits and investigations in the area of health and safety?

The Private Security Personnel Licensing Authority (PSPLA) has been looking into whether their laws require external auditors and investigators of health and safety to be licenced. The Authority agreed that there were parts of health and safety investigators' jobs that were similar to those of private investigators, so they thought the Act did apply to them. Section 5 of the Act doesn't include health and safety auditors in the definition of a private investigator. This means that the Act doesn't require them to be licenced or certified.

Health and safety professionals whose job it is to do health and safety investigations are private investigators, as defined by section 5 of the Act. They should be licenced or certified with the PSPLA, except for the proviso below. This decision applies to employees who work as health and safety investigators, which is what section 13 of the Act says. The Health and Safety Association of New Zealand (HASANZ) and its member organisations are better equipped than the PSPLA to regulate and keep an eye on health and safety professionals. So, anyone on the HASANZ register or who is a member of a HASANZ member organisation does not need to also have a licence or certificate from the PSPLA, and the Authority will not accept complaints against them for not doing so. With their codes of ethics and ways to file complaints, member bodies are best equipped to handle any problems that might come up.

Here at Bedrock Solutions Sarita is a professional member of the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management and HASANZ accredited Health and Safety Practitioner, so you can be assured that she is committed to maintaining her skills to ensure compliance with all legal requirements. If you’d like some help in the health and safety space, do not hesitate to reach out 03 337 0493 or click here to contact us.

Date Posted: 07 October 2022

Avoiding Time Confetti to Dial-Up your Wellbeing Efforts

When you are busy juggling multiple demands at work, there is often no time to look after yourself.  Here are six tips, to help you, courtesy of Wellbeing Specialist, Lauren Parsons.

1. Daily Non-Negotiable

Make an appointment in your calendar (and set an alarm in your phone) to get out for that 15-minute walk, sit and eat lunch in a relaxed setting, or read your book for 10 minutes with your favourite cuppa. Small breaks in the day help your biochemistry reset and switch you out of fight-or-flight mode, that demands, and deadlines can trigger.

2. Avoid Time Confetti

Block chunks of focused time to work on key projects to avoid days filled with time confetti (where you shred useful blocks of time into tiny pieces). Switch off all alerts and remove visual distractions. Set a countdown timer and get in flow on that key project so you can knock it out of the park. When you’re done, ‘snack on exercise’ or have a dance party. Movement boosts your mood and energy ready for the next block of focused work.

3. Celebrate the Small Stuff

Sign off the day by sharing your wins with a colleague (or your notebook.) Reflect on the day’s highlights. This doubles your happiness factor as your brain doesn’t distinguish between these great things happening and you reliving them

4. Set Clear Boundaries

Clearly and respectfully communicate your boundaries. These can be things like staying off your work phone on Sundays; not checking emails before 8am or after 6pm or on the weekends; only attending meetings with clear purpose and agenda.

5. Dial the Right Things Up and Down

Sick of listening to negative news on repeat, doom scrolling or watching people’s highlight reels on social media? Take practical steps to limit the negatives. Choose one reliable source of news and tune in just once a day, once a week, or whatever frequency suits you. Remove social media from your phone and access it only via your laptop. On the flipside, ring-fence time for uplifting content such as inspiring TED talks, podcasts, and articles.

6. Switch on Your Internal Motivation

Want to nail that fitness habit? Rather than picturing yourself out there pounding the pavement – your lungs aching, muscles burning, instead, picture yourself running back up the driveway feeling proud, elated, and energised. You need to ‘picture the satisfied feeling of completion’ to switch on your motivation to get started. This works for anything you’re putting off. Imagine the joy of working at that decluttered desk, holding the published book in your hands, or getting those tax records sent off.

Which of these six tips will you start with?

As always if you need help implementing a wellbeing strategy as part of your health and safety improvement do not hesitate to reach our. Click here to contact us.

Date Posted: 09 September 2022

Five Key Reasons for Reviewing your Health and Safety Policy

So, your company has a Health and Safety Policy. Have you looked at it recently? Does it align with how your company operates in the health and safety space? Well, let's start with what your policy is. Put simply, a health and safety policy is a written statement of your organisation’s intent to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its workers, contractors, and other stakeholders. It should specify your company’s approach in three critical areas – leadership, risk management, and employee engagement. To ensure your policy remains effective it should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis.

Here are our five top reasons for reviewing your policy:

1. Changes in legislation and/or guidance
2. Enforcement action has been taken by the regulator
3. A sufficient period has elapsed since the previous review
4. Significant organisational changes have taken place       
5. There have been changes following consultation with employees

While you are reviewing your policy, check that the statements in the policy are easily understood and can be easily communicated to the workforce. Involvement of the senior management including the board is important as is sufficient resources being available for the implementation of the policy. And when should you update your policy? Only when you need to!

If you would like to know more about how we can help you streamline your operational health and safety processes do not hesitate to reach out.

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Date Posted: 17 August 2022

Why officers shouldn’t bury their head in the sand when it comes to health and safety

If you have been following health and safety news, you will know that individuals and directors have a range of health and safety responsibilities. Today we explore the responsibilities of “officers.” The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 defines an officer as a person who exercises considerable influence over the management of a business or undertaking (PCBU). Officers include directors of companies and potentially senior management positions such as the chief executive officer. If a PCBU has a health and safety duty, its officers must exercise due diligence to ensure that the PCBU complies with that duty. The PCBU has the primary duty to ensure the health and safety of workers. The officer must ensure the PCBU is able to discharge its obligations.

WorkSafe’s approach is now the enforcement of due diligence. In the past year, several officers have been prosecuted for breaches of the Act. In October 2021, at sentencing, the District Court warned directors (or people in similar positions of responsibility) that they can no longer expect that the consequences of decisions they make or do not make will be the sole responsibility of the company. In that case, the company director was convicted and fined for his failure to comply with his due diligence obligations. Familiarity with the day-to-day health and safety procedures will not necessarily be adequate to discharge the due diligence duty.

The due diligence process is a continuous cycle and at its most basic will require:

• Plan: The officer needs to have a clear understanding of what good health and safety practices and governance look like as it applies to the PCBU’s operations. Ignorance is no excuse.
• Do: An officer needs to ensure that resources are allocated, and systems are implemented effectively, especially in respect of hazard identification and control, and the provision of resources to workers, eg. the right equipment, personal protective equipment, training, and supervision.
• Monitor and verify: An officer needs to verify that the systems, processes, and other resources are in fact effective in delivering the desired health and safety performance. This part of the cycle then feeds directly back into the planning phase.

The work required can be delegated to other persons within the business, but the ultimate responsibility is the officer’s. An officer must be able to show that she or he was satisfied to standard of a reasonable, prudent person as to the effectiveness of business health and safety systems. Finally, do not forget to document the due diligence process – board papers and minutes are a crucial tool in documenting health and safety compliance.

If this is worrying you, remember that all WorkSafe prosecutions are considered on a case-by-case basis. Not every breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act by a PCBU will mean that the officer has also breached her or his obligations: if an officer has acted with due diligence, the officer will not be held liable for the conduct of the PCBU.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you streamline your operational health and safety processes do not hesitate to reach out 03 337 0593 or info@bedrocksolutions.co.nz

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Date Posted: 01 August 2022

How to Review your Health & Safety System using Four Easy Elements

The review process is a critical component of every system, much like planning, delivering, and monitoring, yet it's surprising how often companies don't analyze whether their systems are fit for purpose and represent best practices. One pre-audit Bedrock Solutions carried out for a company seeking international certification had stopped some of its earlier activities due to a restructure. While policies and procedures were in place, evaluation mechanisms tended to ignore their effectiveness. As a result, there were many uncontrolled, redundant, and useless health and safety paperwork. The company had little participation in the design of their forms or procedures, and there was little or no consultation with the entire team, especially end users. Several procedures were complex, and "low-risk" activities were emphasized. The company possessed many risk assessment matrices, but no one knew how to apply them. The company was not aware of the systems approach to managing health and safety.

A systems approach must include the following elements:

1. Evaluation mechanisms in place to measure your system’s effectiveness
   • Specific reviews
   • Systematic reviews of entire systems
   • Staff representatives from different departments involved
2. Document control processes
3. Regular reassessment of health and safety goals
4. Risk management processes with suitably trained staff

As part of your health and safety practises, you may periodically examine hazard identification, worker consultation, and risk analysis. In revising these, have a regular calendar for check-ups on different components of your health and safety system; for example, set aside a few days each month to revise the next system on the list (cycling through them). That means you may plan regular reviews (making it easier to stick to them) and avoids any individual review from being overwhelming.

Reassessing your overarching health and safety processes is an exercise that's done every 24 months. This requires reassessing how your health and safety system interacts with workplace risks and legal requirements. If regular evaluations have been effective, re-engineering may not be necessary. However, if your environment has changed significantly, a rework may be necessary to control risk or meet legal obligations.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you streamline your operational health and safety processes do not hesitate to reach out 03 337 0593 or info@bedrocksolutions.co.nz

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Date Posted: 18 July 2022

The Happiness Advantage

Now, this is a departure from my usual health and safety-related topic, however, I happened to read a blog by Charlotte Grysolle who mentioned Shawn Achor’s work on neuroplasticity. This is the idea that we can rewire and change our brain. This piqued my interest, and I immediately purchased his two books “The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuels Success and Performance at Work” and “Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change”

Shawn has spent over a decade living, researching, and teaching sections at Harvard University and explains how we can reprogramme our brains to become more positive to gain a competitive edge at work. He has isolated the following seven practical and actionable principles:

1. The Happiness Advantage: Positive brains have an advantage over neutral or negative brains; this principal teaches us how to leverage the positivity to improve outcomes.
2. The Fulcrum and the Lever: How we perceive, and experience life is determined by our mindset. This principle teaches us that by adjusting the fulcrum of our mindset and lengthening the lever of possibility we change what is possible.
3. The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see and seize opportunities wherever we look. Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals
4. Falling Up: When we experience stress, anxiety, and failure, our brains form different neurological pathways to enable us to cope with these negative conditions. This principle teaches us to not only forge the pathways to overcome the negativity but also to be happier and more successful as a result, or stated differently, how to learn from our mistakes and setbacks and to be happier for it.
5. The Zorro Circle: the principle by which we can regain control when feeling overwhelmed by focusing on small and manageable goals, and gradually expanding the circle to achieve increasingly bigger ones.
6. The 20-Second Rule: how we can lower the activation energy for habits we want to adopt and raise it for habits we want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.
7. Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in our social support network

If you would like to know more about how we can help you streamline your operational health and safety processes do not hesitate to reach out 03 337 0593 or info@bedrocksolutions.co.nz

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Date Posted: 05 July 2022

Learning Teams in practice

Leading on from our last post on Learning Teams, I thought I would share how I have recently used part of this process.

One of our clients asked for our help in developing a traffic management plan in addition to conducting machinery safety risk assessments for their high-risk site. Sure, enough I could have flicked a guideline that I had previously written on traffic management so they could have followed the process and created a similar-looking plan. Luckily, they asked for a site visit which meant I could work through the process of developing a traffic management plan suitable to their site and operations. In addition, I could ensure that there was input from the remainder of the team as everyone sees risks differently and there is value in getting a group to identify and solve problems. These drive learning and development in a big way.

Taking over their weekly operational safety meeting, I decided to start with a simple exercise. Firstly, I asked them to work in pairs to compile a list of entities/stakeholders who visited the site. Then we collated the list and put these stakeholders in order of priority with Priority A entities being crucial to the running of the business. This generated a lot of discussion as to the importance and influence of each of their stakeholders, how often they were visiting site, and what material they were carting to/from the site. With the group more engaged, the next step was looking at the risks with the current traffic plan and finding the areas of interaction between pedestrians and vehicles. We then looked at opportunities for improvement of which there were several. This was just the starting point of our discussion and I envisage there will be many other opportunities for streamlining the remainder of the site traffic management plan.

So once again, the five core principles of learning teams are:

1. Understanding that Work as Imagined, and Work as Done give context
2. Groups outperform individuals in problem identification and problem-solving
3. Workers have the best knowledge and understanding of the problem. Everyone sees risks differently.
4. The more effort put into understanding the problem, the better the solution outcomes
5. Group problem identification, solving, and reflection drive learning and improvement.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you streamline your operational health and safety processes do not hesitate to reach out 03 337 0593 or info@bedrocksolutions.co.nz

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Date Posted: 28 June 2022

Learning Teams – the new kids on the health and safety block!

You may have heard or read about learning teams. So, what are they? Learning teams is a facilitated means of engaging with workers to understand and then learn from the opportunities that are presented by everyday successful and safe work as well as learning from events or incidents. So basically learning when things have gone well or when things have gone wrong.

This includes understanding what, when, how and why people do things differently from the formal systems and procedures in order to get the job done. By understanding what's necessary to make sure things go right (operational safety), we can focus on ensuring these factors are present in the workplace every day. Worker engagement is crucial to gaining this understanding. In essence, Learning Teams are a worker-focused engagement approach to problem identification, and problem-solving issues, conditions, environments, opportunities, and threats in organizations to support continuous improvement of operational excellence.

There are five core principles of learning teams; these are:

1. Understanding that Work as Imagined and Work as Done give context
2. Groups outperform individuals in problem identification and problem solving
3. Workers have the best knowledge and understanding of the problem. Everyone sees risks differently.
4. The more effort put into understanding the problem, the better the solution outcomes
5. Group problem identification, solving and reflection drives learning and improvement
   
   

Learning opportunities exist with

• Everyday successful and safe work
• Events
• Management of change
  
  

If you’d like to know more about learning teams, please do not hesitate to reach out.

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Date Posted: 16 June 2022

The Basics of Incident Investigations

The main objective of any investigation is to prevent a recurrence, reduce risk and advance health, safety, and environmental performance. It is not the purpose of this activity to apportion blame or liability. It is most important that all members of the investigation team understand this fully. It is equally important to assure colleagues or others that may be called upon to provide witness testimony/evidence or are being interviewed by the investigation team.

The basic steps to any investigation is:

• Immediate actions – this is about ensuring the appropriate emergency response and reporting has occurred; risk assessment to determine the scope, reporting requirements, and the investigation team arriving at the incident site well prepared and in a timely manner with an “investigation toolkit”
• Planning – this includes looking at the resources required from the availability of interviews and meeting rooms to access IT to the requirements of any specialist support.
• Data collection – one technique we use is PEEPO (P – people; E – environment; E – equipment; P – procedures; O – organization). We will look at PEEPO more thoroughly in the next blog
• Data organization – once all the data has been collected, a timeline of events needs to be created.
• Data analysis – here several methods can be used from the popular ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method) or RCA (Root Cause Analysis) or Bow Tie Analysis
• Recommendations – this generally includes one recommendation to address each management system factor that has failed. Recommendations should add value and be SMARTER (Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Reasonable, Timely, Effective, and Reviewed)
• Reporting and Sharing -this is the presentation of the investigation findings and recommendations to all stakeholders.

So, follow these steps to ensure that your team can also conduct effective health and safety incident investigations.

As always if you need some clarification on the above steps or you’d like an external investigation carried out, do not hesitate to reach out.

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Date Posted: 15 June 2022

Is Training Really the Answer?

The following article is courtesy of Instructional Designer Cathy Moore.

To evaluate if training is necessary, we need to answer two fundamental questions. Firstly, what is the goal and secondly what do people need to do to reach that goal.

The goal could be several things such as increasing the number of sales, reducing the number of errors in production, etc. It is essential this goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-specific). And we need to identify the behaviours required to achieve the desired outcome. These behaviours can be determined by asking questions, such as: What are some common mistakes employees make? What do you need employees to do?

So once you have determined the goal and what employees need to do to reach it, you need to focus on the high-priority tasks or behaviours. For each task or behaviour, you need to evaluate why people aren’t doing it?

In Moore’s framework, she identifies four categories to why people don’t adopt new behaviours. These four categories are:

1. Problems in the environment – Is it possible to do the new behaviour?
2. Lack of skill – Can I do the new behaviour?
3. Lack of knowledge – Do I know how to do the new behaviour?
4. Lack of motivation – Do I want to do the new behaviour?

Unfortunately, even, the most capable Learning & Development practitioners cannot remedy environmental problems using training. The same goes for issues arising from the lack of employee motivation.  Training should only be used as a solution when there is a knowledge or skill gap - when people lack the information or expertise to perform a particular task. However, for knowledge gap problems you should first evaluate whether the problem can be solved using a job aid before deciding on training.

Consequently, if the job aid requires some further explanation or is not applicable, this is when you should consider designing training. To reiterate, before deciding whether you should conduct training or not, you should answer the question: is it an environment, skill, knowledge, or motivation problem? If it’s a skill or knowledge problem, then you can consider designing your training. Otherwise, it might be worthwhile identifying other, more appropriate solutions.  If you need help working out if health and safety training is really the answer in your organisation, please do not hesitate to reach out.

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Date Posted: 31 May 2022