The Noggin Blog

If you’re a person conducting a business or undertaking, risk is everywhere. And it’s been like that since well before the COVID-19 safety crisis. With business interruption increasingly becoming a matter of when not if, what can teams do to ramp up their risk management processes for the new normal?

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the underreporting of accidents, injuries, illnesses, and other safety incidents loomed large as a major hurdle to improving safety performance. Since then, the pandemic has scrambled many safety priorities. But return to work shouldn’t be a return to safety underreporting. And here’s why.

The imperatives of social distancing during the pandemic have created unprecedented changes to work. Foremost among them: the increased need for people to work alone or in remote arrangements.

For PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking), more people working alone mean more lone workers in need of a new class of safety protections, documented internal policies to keep this high-risk occupational group out of harm’s way. How to go about mitigating the risk so you don’t incur the liability?

PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking) in the Australian state of New South Wales woke up this month to a more aggressive safety compliance regime.

Amendments to pre-existing safety law now put employers who fail to meet health and safety obligations on the hook for stiff new penalties should their negligence lead to a worker dying on the job. Those penalties include up to 25 years in prison for individual actors. Add to that, millions in fines for companies.

For many organizations whose physical operations were forced to close due to COVID-19-induced lockdowns, reopening day is coming soon. Indeed, employers are busy planning for a safe reopening as the day approaches.

While planning matters, it’s the quality of those plans that will determine whether a safe reopening is possible. And as it turns out, too many organizations follow one-size-fits-all strategies that can actually compromise the safety of returning employees, imperiling business recovery from the crisis. How, exactly?

After months of disruption, organizations are eager to return to normal as part of the recovery lifecycle. For many, that means resuming operations in work facilities vacated due to local, state, and national lockdown orders.

With the spread of the coronavirus, the health and safety of our workers is back in the news. Indeed, frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic – their heroism matched only by the level of safety risk they court to do their jobs, with data sources showing a disproportionate number of healthcare workers among those infected with the coronavirus.

Frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In areas hard hit by the rapid spread of the coronavirus, like Lombardy, New York City, and New Orleans, stories of the noble sacrifices of healthcare workers who have had to risk their personal safety to treat patients without an adequate stock of personal protective equipment (PPE) have proliferated – incomplete data sources point to at least 5,400 healthcare workers COVID-19 infections in the U.S. alone, with dozens of deaths.

The COVID-19 public health crisis is rapidly changing the way we do work. And safety regulators aren’t staying on the sidelines.

As major shifts occur in the workplace, safety regulators are issuing new recommendations and descriptions of mandatory safety and health standards. For PCBUs, the question remains, though: will your health and safety software adjust to the changes?

With a surge of coronavirus cases around the world, new reports of workplace closures due to fear of exposure are emerging outside of coronavirus-epicenter, China, and outbreak hotspots like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Italy.

Hiring employees to perform remote and isolated work often helps businesses improve their productivity. But lone work isn’t without operational risk. For one, managing the safety risk to lone worker populations is part and parcel of a PCBU’s (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking) duty of care obligation.

Safety teams have long understood employee health and safety to lie at the intersection of health protection and promotion. In turn, those teams have developed sophisticated programs to enhance worker wellbeing and prevent injury and illness.

The modern workforce is changing and changing fast. Nowadays, most firms – from industry incumbents to plucky startups – employ third-party contractors to perform essential business tasks.

The story is well known. Hazardous substances were long bedrocks of the industrialized, global economy. But subsequent advances in environmental and health science caused a reevaluation of the use of hazardous waste in industry. In turn, governments installed thoroughgoing regulatory regimes to safeguard the health of workers, especially in heavy industry.

Spare a thought for your lone workers. After all, they’re likely your highest-risk employees. And without your active intervention, they might end up in harm’s way.

Enhancing the future for health and safety professionals, SAFETYconnect 2019, brings new papers from local and international experts to the expo floor. A premium exhibition featuring the latest products, services, and technology solutions in the ever-changing WHS sector, the two-day event attracts senior WHS and business professionals from a broad range of industry sectors, including transport, construction, education, infrastructure, manufacturing, mining, utilities, government, and more. And the best part…

As a Safety leader, you’ve probably built a strong portfolio in the organisation. So too has your counterpart in Security. And now both of you see key safety and security priorities, like keeping employees safe at work or mitigating threats to facilities and people, reflected at the highest levels.

Safety incident reporting rates remain persistently low, despite the costs (measured in eventual safety incidents) being so high. The question for Safety teams is why, why are their safety reporting rates stuck in the doldrums?

In the last decade, Australia made serious strides to update its occupational health and safety regulations to the modern era. A pillar concept propounded by the safety policy makers who crafted the subsequent model Work Health and Safety Act: that principal duty holders (or PCBUs) have the primary responsibility for the health and safety of their workers and any other workers under their influence (e.g. contractors). 

Safety reporting rates remain stubbornly low, especially in high-risk sectors, like construction, mining, shipping, etc. Taken alone, these low reporting rates would be reason enough for concern. Remember, chronic underreporting and the devaluing of near-miss analysis don’t conduce to creating a thriving safety culture. But underreporting safety incidents have major cost implications, too. Here’s the cost of underreporting safety incidents.

Conservative estimates of safety underreporting rates show the global total around 25 percent. That’s a full quarter of workplace incidents go underreported.

In Australia, environmental health and safety risk is getting critical. On the contemporary events broadcast, A Current Affair, respiratory physician, Dr Ryan Hoy singled out the silicosis crisis, calling it “unprecedented” – even warning that silicosis was worse than asbestosis.

The reporting makes it clear: the silicosis crisis is back, and it’s particularly acute for stonemasons and other tradespeople. What happened?

We get it, deciding to digitize your manual processes and invest in WHS management software is a big step. But after the decision’s made, there’ll still be a heavy lift ahead.

Risk managers in the world of hazardous operations are acutely aware of the need to implement stringent work controls: documented measures that go far beyond safe work protocols for more routine jobs. 

Nowadays, more people are working than ever before. And with the advent of remote work, those people are working from anywhere, at any time.

Accident reports show that as many as 90 percent of industrial accidents are attributable to human error. But poor procedures and processes can make those human errors well-nigh inevitable, especially in the world of hazardous work. And that’s why teams involved in non-routine work need to implement stringent work controls to keep everyone safe and reduce risk.

We’ve all been following major shifts in occupational health and safety. And perhaps, no one recent change has been bigger than the introduction of ISO 45001. The new ISO standard supplants OHSAS 18001 to give organizations of any size and in any market a systematic, integrated way to manage work safety risk.

The LINX Group is a pretty big deal in the logistics infrastructure and solutions space. How couldn’t it be? Built on more than a century’s worth of ports and logistics experience, the company brings together the skills and expertise of four market-leading operations. As a result, it boasts customers across a wide array of industries.

In the last decade, Australia and New Zealand launched broad-based reforms to retool their occupational health and safety systems. Australia implemented a rigorous harmonisation regime: its commonwealth Model Work Health and Safety Act now forms the basis of the majority of state WHS laws. New Zealand, then, used Australia’s Model Act as the basis for its regulations.

Nowadays, most jurisdictions impose a strict duty of care obligation on employers. In other words, employers must provide a baseline level of care for their employees, i.e. ensure security and safety. That requirement, however, doesn’t just apply to employees working within the four walls of the traditional office; it also extends to lone workers. 

The Crown agency in charge of housing services in New Zealand, Housing New Zealand (HNZ) has been around since the early 2000s.

By now, we’re all aware of the growing contractor footprint on the modern workforce. In the U.S., for instance, recent projections show that contractors will constitute half of the labor force within the decade.

Twenty-nine miners perished in the tragic Pike River Mine explosion in 2010, one of the worst workplace health and safety disasters in the history of modern New Zealand. The crisis proved a watershed for the country, a catalyst for overhauling its ineffective, occupational health and safety system.

The Case of Australia and New Zealand

Like most advanced economies, Australia and New Zealand relied heavily on substances now deemed hazardous during industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, both countries now have relatively high, per-capita rates of hazardous waste. In response, both countries have installed relatively stringent regulatory regimes to safeguard environmental and worker safety. But some of those regimes have changed recently. This blog will provide an overview of recent changes in hazardous waste regulations.

You’ve read it before, but the nature of the modern workforce is changing and it’s changing fast. Nowadays, most companies, whether a Fortune 500 firm, a gritty start up, or a mom and pop, will employ third-party contractors to perform any number of essential business tasks.