Improvements in WHS only happen with planning; how complex your planning is depends on how complex your organisation and operations are.
Your legal environment
What laws apply to your operations? There’s the WHS laws of course, but do you need to abide by other industry-specific laws, Australian Standards or codes of practice to ensure the safety of your workers? List them all, and keep this list up to date.
Make sure job descriptions list any specific responsibilities (especially those for employers, managers and officers). Your WHS policies, procedures and other safety information you provide your workers should also reflect these requirements.
Licences, certificates of competency and more
Keep a register of:
- the licences, certificates of competency, registrations, approvals or exemptions, and notifications that are required;
- the workers who hold them; and
- copies of the documentation/proof.
Examples include the requirements for high risk plant or high risk work, construction industry induction cards, and even driver’s licences.
Objectives and targets
What do you want to achieve? To come up with your WHS objectives and targets, consider:
- your legal requirements;
- the WHS risks and hazards in your workplace and industry;
- your operations and physical work environment;
- your past WHS performance (including incident reports);
- your risk assessments;
- changes in technology that affect your operations; and
- your workforce and your safety culture.
Objectives can be broad, and cover the whole organisation. Targets are the detail, the ‘how’. Targets should be specific, especially as they apply to your departments, business units or workgroups. For example:
- your objective is ‘Provide WHS induction training to all new workers’; and
- your target is ‘Induction training to be provided to 100% of workers within their first week of employment’.
Set achievable, measurable but motivating targets to make your workplace safer and healthier.
Involve your workers to develop these objectives and targets. Their experience can provide valuable input, and it will foster greater buy-in for safety in the long run. It’s important that everyone identifies with and contributes to your objectives and targets.
You’ll also need to think about the human, financial or other resources and actions you need to meet your objectives and targets.
KPIs
Remember, what gets measured, gets done! Performance indicators are simply measures of the actions you’ve taken. So, in our example above, what percentage of your new workers were actually given induction training in their first week on the job?
Tracking how you’re going can demonstrate you’re on the right track, or help you see where you need to work harder and smarter.
Make your safety management plan
You can now pull all this work together into a safety management plan. Keep your plan simple and straightforward, and state:
- your legal requirements;
- who has responsibility for what;
- your hazards and risks;
- your safety objectives, targets and performance indicators, including the how (resources, actions) and the when;
- the policies, procedures or other things you have in place to help you achieve your safety objectives; and
- how you’ll consult with your workers to develop the plan and tell them about it once completed.
Your plan might also include, for each year:
- the number of workplace safety inspections you’ll do;
- the number of safety committee meetings you’ll hold;
- the lost time injury frequency rates (or equivalent) you want to achieve; and
- how many polices and procedures you’ll review or write.
Build it in
Now you can integrate your objectives and targets across all the departments and functions of your organisation, and make them integral to your every day work. Workers will see safety as part of their routine activities, not just for the obviously dangerous ones.
Make WHS a regular agenda item for your staff meetings. Include your objectives and targets in your business plans, and in individual performance plans. Display them on your noticeboards and include them in any staff newsletters or emails, with regular progress updates on them.
Review your plan
Monitoring your plan will help you see if you’re making the improvements you desire, if your targets are realistic, if your resourcing is adequate — or if you need to take a different approach.
Changes to your plan are inevitable. Changes in your operations, industry, clients, workforce, technology and laws can impact your business and so affect your WHS outlook.
Review your plan regularly (say once a year) or whenever changes happen that affect your organisation.