PRACTICAL HEALTH AND SAFETY THAT IS PEOPLE FOCUSED
Health and safety needs to align with your business and be people focused.
It’s not just about compliance.
Your own health and safety, that of your staff, your customers, and the public you interact with is fundamental to your business. While this has always been the situation, the legislative changes in 2015 following the Pike River tragedy have heightened the obligation facing the owners, directors and managers of every business in New Zealand - no matter it’s size.
But a good health and safety culture and good health and safety systems and the decisions we make about our health and safety are not just about compliance with the law - it’s not about the fear of prosecutions or punishments. It’s about ensuring no one gets injured at work. Your thinking needs to be fundamentally focused on this. You first must ask:
“What do I need to do to ensure everyone goes home healthy and well?”.
If you get this right, compliance will follow. Sadly, many health and safety providers focus solely on compliance - providing health and safety documentation that meets the relevant laws, regulations and standards. This documentation may not work for your business or, worse still, it is left on a shelf and not embedded in the day-to-day activities of the business. Your staff don’t know about it, don’t understand it, or simply cannot do their job and comply with it.
We have worked in industries and in countries where we have seen the huge human and legal cost of getting health and safety wrong. In many cases the systems and processes were very compliant, but people were still injured and killed. We know how critical people are in delivering a safe workplace - far more than any system or procedure. Health and Safety is not just about systems, processes, documentation and compliance. Safety is about people making decisions. People make mistakes. People get stressed, distracted, and complacent and when this happens people get hurt.
When we work with you on your health and safety, we look at what suits YOUR business, as we always work on your WHOLE business. We can help with your systems and processes; we can advise you on how to consider the human elements of health and safety and we can support you in implementing systems and processes that suit your business and your people.