A Deep Dive into Workplace Health and Safety

Date: 23rd of July 2020

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We cannot manage what we don't understand! Understanding hazards, root causes, risk events and risk impacts is critical in being able to intimately understanding the WHS risks we face. Being able to bring that all together in a succinct picture to illustrate how WHS risk manifests itself and behaves is the foundation on which good WHS risk management is built.

Summary

• Understanding the range of WHS risks
• Understanding the components of WHS risk: Root Causes, Hazards, Events and Impacts
• The importance of a central taxonomy of risks
  • Creating and maintaining the library of risks
  • Ensuring quality in your risk libraries
• Defining the scope of your function. What does it cover?: Physical Health, Mental Health, Safety, Wellbeing, Compliance, Environment etc.
• Using Bow Tie Analysis to analyse and document WHS risks
• Recording the risks
• Aligning with WHS legislation and standards

Date: 6th of August 2020

Risk treatments and the hierarchy of controls – these are our front line in managing WHS risk, yet do we know them intimately and are we confident that they are effective and efficient?

Understanding the different types of treatment methods and controls and how they map between WHS and ERM is key in ensuring our frameworks are aligned. It is also crucial that we understand how controls modify our WHS risks and what the total cost of our controls are.

Summary

• Type of risk treatment for WHS risks
• Hierarchy of controls
• Types of control
• Identifying the Critical / Key Controls
• Safe work procedures
• Understanding how treatment methods and controls modify WHS risk
• Assessing the relative cost / benefit of each type of control

Date: 20th of August 2020

A Risk Management Framework (RMF) provides the skeleton on which great WHS risk management is built. The RMF provides the jigsaw puzzle of how an enterprise approach to WHS is achieved. The development of an enterprise approach to risk "ERM" requires WHS as a critical organisational risk to be fully integrated into the ERM framework.

Summary

• Risk Management Framework components: People and Culture, Governance, Systems and Processes, Escalations / Reporting / Response, Continuous Improvement.
• A focus on Risk Appetite for WHS risks
• A focus on Processes and Systems
  • Risk Assessments / Inspections
  • Risk Metrics / Key Risk and Control Indicators
  • Incident and Hazard Management
  • Controls Assurance / Safe work practices
  • WHS Compliance
  • Issues and Actions

Date: 3rd of September 2020

The hazard / risk assessment is the core of managing WHS risk. It is the periodic health check of our environment and our people to identify and assess the critical and key WHS hazards and risks and their related controls. The assessment provides the essential link between risk, our operating model and ultimately our strategy and objectives.

Summary

• WHS Risk Assessment Methods
• The key steps in an assessment: Objectives, Critical processes, Risks, Controls
• Inherent and Residual Risk
• What does As Low as Reasonably Practicable mean?
• Practical application to WHS: Site inspections, Checklists, Hazard Assessments etc.

Date: 17th of September 2020

WHS risks produce many red flags, symptoms, and evidence as they develop. These are our key risk indicators. Also, the performance of many WHS controls can be tracked using key control indicators. The development of a robust set of key risk and control metrics is crucial in making our risk management more dynamic and real time and in providing the basis for quality risk reporting to executive management and board. Metrics also provide a basis for which adherence to, and monitoring of, WHS risk appetite can be performed. Identifying and operationalising a strong suite of indicators unlocks this powerful tool for proactive WHS risk management.

Summary

• Safety Cultural Maturity Model
• What are key risk and key control indicators?
• What are the types of metrics (Single / Composite, Leading / Lagging, Strong, Weak)?
• Identifying good metrics using Bow Tie Analysis
• Collecting metrics – the process
• Scaling metrics to reflect risk appetite
• Using risk metrics for effective WHS risk reporting
• Moving to real time monitoring of WHS at the coal face

Date: 1st of October 2020

Theory is OK, but practice is better! Making great WHS management happen requires the collection, processing and reporting of a substantial quantity of data on an ongoing basis. Spreadsheets go so far but in order to build first class WHS capability, automation is required. How does the theory look in practice?

Summary

• What value are we needing from our WHS systems?
• What are the key requirements of a WHS management system?
• The systems jigsaw – how do all the components fit?
• A focus on the core: Risk, Cause, Consequence, Hazard and Control libraries
• A focus on Risk Assessments, Risk Metrics
• Reporting for Risk Assessments and Risk Metrics

Date: 15th of October 2020

Unfortunately, even with great WHS management, incidents will still happen. When they do, our focus needs to be on effective and efficient management of the WHS incident from initial response and management, through effective communication and reporting to using the incident to learn and feed that learning back into stronger WHS management.

Summary

• What should be our focus on managing incidents?
• The key differences in managing incidents poorly and managing them well
• Having a pre-prepared and well practiced incident / crisis management plan
• Incident investigation. Getting to the root of the problem with root cause analysis 
• The incident management process from initial communication, recording,sustainable management, analysis and reporting to incident close. Building a tailored and efficient process.
• Factoring in regulatory requirements for management and reporting
• Achieving optimal communication and reporting for incidents

Date: 29th of October 2020

Controls are our first line of defence against WHS risks. They are the main source of protection and the main techniques we have to reduce our risks to As Low As Reasonably Practicable. However, controls are often misunderstood and poorly monitored. The effectiveness of the controls in managing the WHS risks are not always known. In addition, very few executive management teams and boards have appropriate visibility over the nature and effectiveness of the WHS control framework. Ensuring optimal control design and ensuring we are regularly testing the effectiveness of our critical controls is key in being able to provide the required assurance to executive management and board as to the strength of our internal control framework over our WHS risks.

Summary

• Identifying our critical controls
• Articulating control objectives correctly and consistently and in a meaningful way
• Identifying the priorities behind control monitoring
• Factors to consider in assessing control effectiveness
• Design and operating effectiveness
• Designing and carrying out a Controls Assurance Program
• Using practice aids, such as checklists to gain assurance

Date: 12th of November 2020

The proliferation of WHS legislation at every government level makes WHS compliance seem overwhelming. Yet, WHS legislation is fundamentally a codification of minimum control standards we must have in place to meet society's risk appetite expectations for WHS risks. The efficient and effective management of our WHS obligations as well as the management of our WHS compliance risks need to be integrated to ensure we are not only achieving compliance but also managing our WHS risks effectively.

Summary

• Recording and maintaining our legislation and obligations libraries
• Ensuring our obligations are in plain language
• The compliance management process from building compliant processes to ensuring ongoing compliance.
• The role of compliance attestations and checklists
• The compliance risk management process and the importance of integrating into your overall WHS risk management process
• Effective reporting for WHS compliance

Date: 26th of November 2020

Risk management and risk reporting has traditionally been “point in time”, infrequent and backward looking. WHS risk is dynamic, it is always changing. We must move to a more real time, dynamic view of WHS risk that provides a complete picture of each critical risk based on all available information available at the time of reporting. This should include the latest risk metrics, the latest controls testing, up to date summary of WHS incidents and so on. This can only be achieved through integrated dynamic risk reporting.

Summary

• A summary of information available that speaks to our key WHS risks
• The importance of linking data to the dimension that we wish to report against
• The concept of "In Motion" reports: WHS Risk in motion, Hazards in Motion, Obligations in Motion etc.
• Aggregating risk information from the coal face to the Board
• Using Dashboard reporting with drill down capability
• Ensuring risk reporting assists in providing assurance / non-assurance and decision-making
• Risk / Reward decision-making – applying ALARP and SFARP to WHS decisions

Date: 10th of December 2020

Making it work in practice. The operationalisation of the concepts requires efficient and effective automation. Visualisation of the concepts in practice is key to making a link between theory and practice. The use of technology to effortlessly capture data, communicate to whoever needs to know, transform, aggregate and amalgamate data and report at all levels of the organisation is key. One source of data truth and multiple uses of the data is the answer.

Summary

• Revisiting the core libraries of risks and controls and the importance of linking through a hierarchy
• A focus on incident management
• A focus on controls assurance
• A focus on compliance
• Reporting using dynamic aggregated reporting
• What does each level of management need to see?
• Empowering "Everyone's a Risk Manager" through accessible technology