I have to ask the question - why does it matter?
He has had a serious injury. Presumably, you have done what you can from a learning and understanding perspective and implemented any improvements you can. Does it make any difference to how you operate whether he is off for 2 weeks or 12?
https://safetyquo.com/2016/07/03/lost-time-injuries-breaking-the-cycle/

Thanks Ross - I had no idea this was in place and we're linked into various channels, including directly to the MBIE and all of government response to the pandemic.

We have abandoned it (sorry - not the question you asked!). We focus on the potential of the incidents that occur and the lessons we learn from investigating them. There are so many pitfalls with TRIFR and, even worse, LTIFR. The main one being that it drives people to spend all their time manipulating categories to stop things being recordable, rather than focusing on what happened, caring for whoever was hurt and how to improve.

This might help a little https://worksafe.govt.nz/topic-and-industry/electricity/testing-and-tagging-electrical-appliances/. It is worth noting that testing and tagging is not a mandatory legal requirement, which most people are unaware of. It's about risk management, not blindly following pre-set intervals.

There is also a significant difference between directors of small organisations who are very hands-on and those of larger businesses that are operating a genuine governance model. I believe the officer duties were intended to emphasise the latter, but the Australian experience has been almost entirely owner-operator type convictions. I imagine these are easier to make stick.
I would rather see an educational strategy first. Looking at most boards, there is a significant lack of people with detailed operational knowledge, let alone specific safety knowledge and, related to @Sheri Greenwell's comment above, almost every board went to lawyers to understand their obligations, rather than safety specialist to understand how to get better. The IoD guide has a very good set of questions for officers to ask, but no real guide as to what a good answer looks like.

We have used this model as the basis for our wellbeing approach - it has been very well received so far and is a finalist in the Diversity Works awards

I assume you mean "not a legal requirement" rather than "not legal"?
Some previous discussion here https://forum.safeguard.co.nz/discussion/78/signing-for-attendance-at-toolbox-meetings/p1
There are requirements for making people aware of hazards etc. A toolbox talk is one way of meeting some of these obligations, so it is a bit more complex than whether it is or is not a legal requirement.

It's a very interesting question and far too complex for simple numbers that governments try to put on things.
Risk is highly subjective. If we put a multi-million dollar cost per life when thinking about medicines for example, things get very costly. Latest figures (2017) gave about 25000 new cancer patients in NZ. Admittedly not all will be at risk of death, but you could suggest that untreated, they may all be. At $4m per life that is $100bn which is four times the health budget - just for cancer patients (this is obviously over-simplistic). You can do similar numbers looking at the NZTA spend against 350 fatalities per year. Individual projects stack up, perhaps, but a higher level view may not.
But if you look at a probabilistic analysis, a widely used 'broadly acceptable' limit for workers is 1 in 100,000 risk of fatality per year. A cost benefit analysis would suggest $4m is too low. In my view, anyway, but as I say, it is very subjective.

Hi Joanne
I'm interested in the direction of causality - it's easy to see how MSDs could lead to mental wellness issues, particularly if they are chronic, but less obvious how it might work in the other direction. Is there definitive causation, rather than just correlation and does it work both ways?
Also (bonus question), what impact do you imagine the double whammy of covid-19 stress and poorly designed home-based workstations may have - how should people manage that with their workers returning to the office?

Hi Amy
Find someone who knows what they're talking about and invite them in for a fact finding discussion and then a review of effectiveness. Once they know what you do and what you intend, they can select a framework to do it. Any worthwhile auditor will be able to draw on a range of sources plus their own experience to give you an indication of what you're doing well and where you could juice things up a bit. In my previous role I developed this process https://www.advisian.com/en/what-we-do/services/asset-advisory/strategic-asset-management although here it has been co-opted by the asset management team. The first two steps mean that the actual review is targeted on what you need rather than wasted spending time reviewing a list that some committee thought up without any context.

What is the balance to be struck between the risk to our individual employees, which may be extremely low given the likelihood of transmission in their area/job, and that of the broader community which may be much larger, when we're considering what is reasonably practicable?

Hi Hillary
We are often asked to demonstrate progress for the initiatives we put in place.
How can we measure improvements (or not) in mental health?

Thanks everybody - great questions.

I enjoy the ambiguity and grey areas. There is no right answer, despite the way many people have approached safety as a compliance issue. I guess this is a nice way to close the strategy discussion as well. There is no right strategy. Some are more successful than others, but often you won't know until later. It's messy, it's uncertain, it's complex. A lot of people struggle with that because they like certainty but I would be very bored, very fast in a certain world. Safety captures that complex stuff really well and that keeps me challenged.

@Jon re frequency rates
I have replaced it with a simple graph of incidents occurring broken down by potential harm. Those which were high potential get a detailed review in the monthly report. It’s a rolling graph so we can see if they’re increasing or not without putting a number to it, because I’m interested in direction of travel not absolute numbers. I’m also tracking effectiveness for critical risk controls. I changed our reporting template with a Board paper explaining the rationale and there was no pushback. I’m also looking now at ways to get better information coming through from the field and reporting on that – see the sensemaker tool from Cognitive Edge as an example.

@Jon's advice question
On a personal level, be bolder. I’m naturally introverted and it took me a long time to learn how to assert myself in meetings etc. Not sure that’s very strategy-related, though. On a professional level, be prepared to challenge convention. As safety people we all challenge the ‘I’ve always done it this way and never got hurt’ answer. But I think we need to turn that type of challenge on ourselves more.

Hi Emma See my earlier response to Russell. I believe most senior leaders genuinely care. It takes a while to educate them, though, that compliance and counting may not be the best way to do this. I think that this education is the key factor. Unfortunately, the most effective tool in practice is a bad accident. Sometimes a very high potential near miss is a good lever, but please don't try to engineer one!

@Robert P
Lots of questions here - see my earlier reply about the role of the leadership in setting strategy and worker input. Keep the conversation going and help them understand their role in delivering the strategy that is relevant to them – I wouldn’t expect them to know the whole thing, but would like them to be able to talk about their components of it.
Partners – yes if they are embedded enough.
I don’t believe there is too big a tension between compliance and progressive practice if it’s all done well. WorkSafe is moving in the right direction, I think, to help with this but their job is not easy. I wrote a blog about this here https://safetyquo.com/2016/09/04/stick-stick-stick-carrot/

To Chris
A bit of both. Regularly review and tweak (although most tweaks will be to the shorter term actions rather than the strategy itself) and then a more detailed review every year or so. I would only advocate a hard re-set (by which I mean completely changing things) if there is a major upheaval in the business environment. In terms of KPIs, be very wary about the behaviour they drive. On the whole, we have indicators, but not targets. These help you steer without biasing the direction.

To Jon’s covid-19 question. We are moving into thinking much more about complex systems. Our overarching strategy suddenly just becomes recovery + adapt to the new normal. There are many interlinked factors and we cannot honestly predict how it will go. We are currently developing different broad scenarios and high-level approaches against each of them so that we can respond to whichever arises. It’s about putting in things that are resilient and agile. It’s a great case study for bad strategy – if you project ahead and fix on an outcome to move towards you may get it hopelessly wrong and fail spectacularly.