Staff Culture The Biggest Hurdle in Health and Safety

Staff Culture The Biggest Hurdle in Health and Safety

How’s your health and safety compliance in 2017? Got it nailed?

Really?

A 2017 survey uncovered changing dynamics in industry’s response to new health and safety law and regulations with the biggest issue facing employers clearly being staff culture.

The survey formed part of the MESNZ presentation to the May Southmach Expo held in Christchurch looking at the progress in industrial health and safety in the last decade. In a follow up to our 2008 OHSIG presentation “The Emperor Is Wearing Fluro Clothes” where we revealed that our health and safety stats had got worse under the old legislation, an updated snapshot of what is happening in the modern environment was timely, so once again Barry Robinson and myself went digging.

In an online study of 5000 industry staff, we discovered 91% of respondents now have a health and safety system. While this is heartening, the major issues expressed in managing and staying compliant were overwhelmingly related to staff culture. Negative older staff, lack of buy-in and “she’ll be right” attitude featured at the top of the responses, followed closely by confusion about the rules and regulations.

This year’s presentation, titled “The emperor is STILL Wearing Fluro Clothes” seized on the confusion about rules as a root cause of poor staff culture, quoting numerous examples where poor hazard controls destroy any staff confidence in management. Our advice for management was to follow so called health and safety ‘rules” back to their root documents rather than listening to the urban myths.

A short exercise involving fluro tape, willing participants and a body bag framed up a whole new perspective on creating upwardly driven staff culture. Involving your staff in creating risk controls that will save THEM and their workmates rather than following downwardly driven myths is a key factor in creating positive safety cultures.

A short session on recent case law helped underscore that defendants end up in court for being ostriches; not for failing to follow health and safety myths. The message was simple and clear:
Identify the hazards and risks that could cause issues in your workplace
Ensure all your staff are inducted and those risks communicated to them.
Ensure you have evaluated the ability of every staff member BEFORE they undertake any task or procedure.
Ensure your controls are manageable and recorded for the LONG TERM

Maintenance Engineers are often encumbered with the reality end of health and safety and as such, need to take a proactive stance to making it work in the workplace. This is why the Maintenance Engineering Society (MESNZ) takes an active role in health and safety governance and strives to support practical solutions. That is why MESNZ receives my full support. MESNZ seeks to encourage engineers to share their experience and achievements. The society achieves this by recounting its collective experiences and inspirations to maintenance engineers throughout the country, via print, mentoring, the National Maintenance Engineering Conference or connecting companies with practitioners.

Craig Carlyle
Maintenance Transformations Ltd
For MESNZ

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