Hi Michael, maybe get them involved in monitoring the 'on the job' understanding & effectiveness of your controls in the risk registers, JSA's etc. Especially focus on the higher risk tasks. Does work as done agree with work as planned? The art of safety comes into play here through coaching the reps how to positively do this for their workmates without coming across as inspectors or 'know-it-alls'.

Hi,
I think the most important thing for HSR’s to do is think outside their scope. H&S is just one part of what work is and to add value they need to learn Human Centred Design to learn how to ideate, iterate and intergrate ideas into solutions, the Cynefin framework to help understand resourcing and also how to pitch a business case on the whole cake not just the Safety slice.
Hope this helps

Respectfully yours
Matt

For me, there are two approaches. You can take the legislative "Safety Rep" approach in which case the things they can do are defined by statute and in particular Schedule 2 of the Act. This creates lots of processes and Check Boxes which will keep people employed for many a happy day. Thus its self limiting - and needs to be. So therefore limits adding value - hence its not our approach.

The second approach (which is the one we use) is the bin the Act and instead have Safety Advocates. They do loads of stuff like act as a mouthpiece on behalf of their department, have areas of particular expertise to answer questions (eg welding), get involved in new machinery implementation or product trials, help with re-hab / return to work plans (which are for non-work injuries since we don't have bad work ones), advocate on behalf of the business / employer. All sorts of stuff. None of it on a list. If it needs addressing it gets done.

We are deliberately a non Rep, non unionised site. Purely because we reckon we can do a much better by working with employees at all sorts of levels without the need for official "reps". We like to keep things simple. Really simple!

As a consequence when Worksafe come through we are able to check off all their compliance tick boxes and more.

Kia ora tatou

One idea which will get them more engaged (if that's what your after) and adding value to a business, is to get them running and organising a H & S Committee meeting. Due to the size of our single site business, we have three committees, with one being run/managed/organised by our h & S reps. This gives validation and ownership back to the staff and becomes more transparent. The safety reps get good hands on experience and confidence, it's one less administrative area for management to worry about and our staff feel they have more input into these meetings.

Nga mihi
Grahame Andrews

Kia ora tatou
Here at HNZ we have developed a H&S Rep Toolkit that assists new and existing Reps to be engaged, active and take ownership of their really valuable role.

I have attached it as something we can share for all our colleagues...….. it was going to be submitted as part of our Safeguard entry!

Enjoy and we have one for officers and one for all employees so will look to share others if there is interest.

Tarn

Thanks

This is great, thank you for sharing it. I'd be keen to check out the other toolkits.

Support that second point Andrew.
I fully realize and support the legislative "Safety Rep" role requirements, however it would be far wiser not to bring the "Whole Forrest" of safety compliance as a safety rep into engaging with the staff.

The acronym KSS "Keep It Simple Stupid",comes to mind
I have found if you cannot grab your (audience) or work colleagues attention in the first two minutes, of a safety discussion there tends be a bit of eye rolling and disinterest, the goal is "Keeping" simple.