I would have thought an essential service would be far too busy providing essential services and simply would not have time for meetings. That is, meetings that don't have agenda items solely focused on addressing current operational risks.

Hi Andrew,

Yes it is very busy though my concern is to be able to provide a formal platform for employee input. In your opinion, would daily staff briefings suffice to meet the requirements of the legislation? These also would not likely be minuted or recorded in any way as to be able to prove of the topics raised and discussion had.

Nadine

I imagine one of the best ways to use your H&S committee would be to have them remind people of the need to retain focus on their normal safe and healthy work methods, so they do not become distracted by any additional measures required to protect against the virus.

Hi Nadine
I am not the best person to ask about compliance - because I believe we do things for the right reason and compliance follows.

I also hold the view meetings must have agenda items and every agenda item has an outcome assigned to a person with a deadline for getting something beneficial done.

Mix that with my view that most things we do must have a "proportional response". That is, if it is important we do it, do it straight away and get the right person to do it. If its a "nice to have" in today's situation it simply gets put aside.

And the next step from the proportional response is that managers MUST step up and make sure their critical safety responses are being followed. So no need for meetings about that.

As for compliance risk, I would say there is next to 0% chance of Worksafe investigating any complaint that an essential employer is not holding Safety meetings. They must have much, much more important things to do.

Much more important to set up a communication lines to quickly resolve risk management breaches that could lead to major harm. Which should, theoretically be business as usual

Thanks for your thoughts!

Thanks Peter!

Taking the normal concern about meeting for meeting sake for granted. We are an essential service in a trying time for our workers. There's lots of new stuff as well as the same old. Part of the challenge is workers choosing (more often then 'normal') to choose expediency over safety when all our customers are doing it hard as well. For these reasons engagement systems that work for worker participation are still vital in our firm. We have implemented a virtual committee that has a closed chat group to enable discussions to be contributed to when workers have the space in their day rather than concentrating it into a 90 minute monthly meeting.

It's new so I can't speak to whether it works, that'll be determined by the workers we've set it up for.

We will continue to have safety meetings, especially as we are an essential business that is continuing to operate. Our agenda will be mainly about COVID-19 actions and activities, as well as an opportunity to check in how people are going.

We have implemented an agenda that uses a checklist kind of template, which we fill in before the meeting. Every agenda item is assigned to a person who will be tabling it and an estimate of time allocated for that topic. Our agreement is always that if something requires additional time, the committee can determine amongst the people present whether they want to continue on that topic and extend the meeting time accordingly, continue on that topic and drop something else from the agenda, or schedule a separate meeting for that specific topic. That way we don't hold people hostage and we keep meetings on track for their allocated times.

This is one of the aspects that I hope that our new norms after all this are that the standard/typical format of H&S committee meetings change in the future. The comments around meetings for meetings sake and lack of (real) agendas are what bugs me about the majority of H&S committee meetings I have seen.
During the current times employees consultation is even more critical - but this is not sitting in a room together every month for 60-90 minutes going over the incidents we had last month and all the outstanding actions that still haven't been done - what is needed is to really listen to what our employees need (and a way for them to voice this efficiently) and then providing the resources to meet those needs.
I have seen this effectively happening relating to COVID-19 risks, and I hope this will continue and expand in the future for all risks to workers and work (including non-safety risks).

Nice work here Sheri, a positive and refreshing initiative that I believe will help work teams to own their risks and develop effective solutions to manage them. Look forward to your case study and facilitation guide for those struggling with this (hint, hint) Nadine - good on you for putting this out there.