You're amazing Tania! Congratulations on completing your Graduate Diploma of Professional Practice (OH&S), and thank you for your commitment to improving safety practices in NZ.

I agree - more often than not, many managers focus on passing the audit to get the auditor's badge of approval, rather than genuinely achieving appropriate safety management practices. I've seen the same happen with other audits, too - e.g., ISO9001.

It doesn't help when managers - including the OHS / compliance managers themselves - set up their management systems rigidly following the standard, often mirroring the standard clause by clause.

A standard sets out the essential requirements; it is a checklist, NOT a template! But it takes some time and effort to grasp the underlying intentions of each requirement and apply them to the organisation. It's very common to see a safety / compliance management system in ways that seem primarily aimed at making the audit easier for the auditor, while completely overlooking the accompanying lack of coherence in this approach with the organisation's core business processes and needs.

When I advise client companies on their management systems, I like to tell them, "The auditor doesn't live here - YOU do!" I aim to interpret requirements for the organisation, to be 'the bridge' and facilitate solutions that make sense for the business, rather than being the tail trying to wag the dog.

If the systems don't make sense for the overall business, and even more importantly if they don't make sense to the workers required to carry out workplace safety processes, management systems are unlikely to gain any depth of traction, and they are much more likely to fall over due to enduring resistance and neglect.

It doesn't help when senior managers impose performance KPIs on safety practitioners that include passing an audit without providing appropriate support from the top and sufficient resources to achieve it. It all becomes quite a rort then, doesn't it?

Any organisation that rigidly mirrors a standard should definitely be questioned on its leadership and authenticity of commitment. Such an approach signals loudly that they are setting out to do the least possible and mainly want 'the badge' to provide the right kind of appearances to their customers, rather than genuinely doing those things.

Ports of Auckland used to have different colours of hi-viz vests for different functions across the business, as well as clearly labelled VISITOR hi-viz vests. That meant the only remaining h--viz colour left for fire wardens was fluro pink, which the mainly male workforce clearly did not want to wear every day. The mostly male fire wardens also complained loudly at being required to wear a fluro pink hi-viz vest, even just for the short and infrequent experiences of fire evacuation (thankfully only drills and smoke detectors set off by burnt toast and food remnants in kitchen ovens!).

A further useful identifier was used in addition to hi-viz vests. Workers were required to wear hard hats in that environment, so visitors and newbies (first 6 months, I think) wore white hard hats to inform others in the area that they may not be as familiar with the hazards and risks so their workmates could keep an eye out for their safety. In addition, with manufacturer recommendations to change hard hats every two years to prevent deterioration of their protective function, an orderly system was used to rotate a series of colours, with two colours being considered 'current' at any given time.

This colour system made it easy to identify hard hats that might be too old (i.e., UV exposure, wear, etc, as per manufacturer recommendations) to reliably provide adequate worker protection so they could be changed out for new ones.

Major near-misses may be easier to grasp and may be more likely to be reported. Smaller scale may not be reported either because people don't really think they are important enough to report, or they may not recognise the experience as really having been a 'near miss', or because they are minor, they may be more likely to just move on with the next activity. Another possibility I have seen at times is that they may just be reported as a hazard, without reference to a near miss.

- What about those with MORE experience, including adjunct essential skills and competence in disciplines such as leadership, business, management, communication, neuroscience, learning and development, risk management, business and compliance management systems. communication, team-building, coaching, etc - developed through real world experience rather than studying theory and theoretical models - who don't have the MEANS to undertake formal studies that are likely to be much more 'siloed' / tunnel-visioned by comparison?

What are safety training programs doing to ensure they are keeping pace with the real-world demands of businesses in today's context, where business leaders have a lot more on their plates than just traditional safety management and compliance requirements?

- Check out Sarita McLean of Bedrock Safety Solutions. She has been an accredited ACC auditor as well as a range of other accreditations - highly experienced as a consultant, auditor and training provider. https://bedrocksolutions.co.nz/System%20Audits/

- great clarifying questions - important information to provide context to these statistics.

And maybe migrants are more willing to accept lower rates of pay and more challenging workloads / conditions than Kiwis - that happens in a lot of roles, not just S-roles (I don't even want to use the S-word any more!).

- I love this! Thank you for the inspiration!

- YES! The S-word seems to carry a lot of baggage, not unlike working for IRD, being an accountant or a lawyer. It's more often than not seen as a policing function to protect the organisation from legal penalties and fines, along the same lines as Employment Relations and other general compliance functions - typically being assigned responsibility for being the conscience of the company and expected to contain all non-compliant behaviours despite lack of resources, recognition or support. I'm taking inspiration from Amy Richards and taking the S-word out of my profiles and CV, especially since both my head and heart are not aligned with mainstream thinking on this.

Despite job advertisements proclaiming they want people who can influence and communicate (this seems to be a code for being expected to do the impossible without any resources or support!), recruiting managers seem to feel much more comfortable sticking with what they know and people who are unlikely to rock the boat. Especially when it comes to the S-word - they are overly fixated on technical aspects and somehow completely missing the genuinely human elements. The HASANZ accreditation framework does little to address this, so it seems like a vicious circle.

Few senior managers, including CEOs have a good grasp of vision and strategy themselves - most typically rely on some iteration of the past and largely theoretical and 'textbook' vision statements that fail to inspire because they have no concrete foundations. I have worked with a number of organisations for which this is the case, and I have read about many more.

I recall some years ago reading an article in NZ's Management Magazine, in which the publication interviewed 6 of the country's most prominent CEOs. What struck me most was that 5 out of 6 of those CEOs had no role model to inspire them, and their 'vision' was largely a re-hashing of past performance. The one CEO who had a role model and had a genuinely future-facing and inspiring vision is the only one of those 6 we still recognise today - Stephen Tindall. I heard him speak at a conference in 2002 and came away inspired and energised enough to track down and read some of the books that had inspired him to implement Triple Bottom Line reporting at The Warehouse Group and to push back on suppliers to reduce packaging so TWG would not have to pay to have waste packaging disposed of, and so New Zealand would not have to cope with massive amounts of incoming waste. His vision and determination were inspiring, as was his ability to initiate integrated and meaningful solutions.

Just because people achieve senior / executive manager status does not mean they automatically master leadership skills such as vision and strategy. Management skills are distinctly different from leadership skills; they are complementary and both are vitally important. The English language (and possibly other languages, too) does not have a single word that encompasses them both, and all too often people use them interchangeably.

From the management perspective, various analysis tools can be very useful for making a business case, which is the approach most board members would be most receptive to.

Useful tools include ROI analysis, SWOT analysis, Cartesian Coordinates, using input from relevant stakeholder groups, summarising for board members and senior managers, and supporting your position with structured analysis. Then walk them through step by step.

From the management perspective, various analysis tools can be very useful for making a business case, which is the approach most board members would be most receptive to.

Useful tools include ROI analysis, SWOT analysis, Cartesian Coordinates, using input from relevant stakeholder groups, summarising for board members and senior managers, and supporting your position with structured analysis. Then walk them through step by step.

The tricky bit about educating the board is that the two groups - ie directors / officers and the people working at the coal face - typically operate at vastly different logical levels, a gap that can be frustratingly difficult to span. People at the coal face have little notion of those strategic perspectives and are quite rightly focused on the details of the work they do. Directors and senior managers are typically bored or get lost when people start talking about day-to-day details.

I had to learn this myself in an exercise when I was undertaking my NLP Practitioner certification - while I have great capacity for detail and sought to be thorough, the important information was getting drowned out by details.

This is why management reports typically include a management summary or overview.

So what can we do to help bridge this gap and translate the important and relevant information between different logical levels??

Well said!

Yes - so much comes down to personal responsibility and learning HOW to think for yourself, rather than allowing ourselves to be programmed WHAT to think.

This thread makes a very good case for proactively developing relationships with WorkSafe inspectors, who are familiar with the work you are doing, and also get a clear sense of your organisation's culture and commitment. It can be very useful to have someone on your side in a moment of need, especially if a time comes where you are not sure what to do, and they can see you are taking steps to do everything that is 'reasonably practicable' in response to events.

Having said that, WorkSafe will always avoid taking a legal position because their main role is to advise and support enforcement.

As has already been suggested, it is also always a very good idea to document all correspondence. As much as I hate the 'cover your butt' approach, we still live in a country with a legal framework and culture that may require this.

Why do organisations only think in binary ways about providing resources for H&S and HR? Both are specialist fields in their own right and both carry important moral and legal obligations. As soon as an organisation throws H&S and HR together in order to justify an FTE, the person in the role will always be forced to juggle priorities, and may at times do neither justice.

Having previously held roles that stretched across a wide range of compliance disciplines as well as HR (I used to tell people my job title was actually "Selly's No More Gaps!"), the reality is that a person can only attend to one issue or task at a time, so it follows logically that other things will be taking a back seat at that time.

While I would love to see NZ organisations mature sufficiently to not 'need' a dedicated safety function, at the moment, if an organisation doesn't have one, those things don't tend to get done, and that can be a big risk for H&S.

I wonder what might be possible if organisations could step back and adopt a different approach to both functions and consider working with experts who focus only on one function and make sure what needs to be done gets done, done well and is appropriately monitored, reviewed and developed*.

The future of work indicates that the rigid 9-5 full-time permanent job as we once knew it is on the way out. Just as fields such as IT are already starting to do, imagine that dedicated resources can be brought in as and when needed so managers don't feel tempted to load up a single person with a variety of tasks for which they may have variable knowledge, skills and experience, and businesses pay for work done (and done excellently) rather than just for time spent sitting in an office thinking about where you might rather be at that time?!?

For workers such as safety practitioners and HR advisors, this could bring opportunities to develop a 'portfolio' career, possibly even something approaching a subscription service, to provide safety advice and guidance when it is needed. This might also support organisations to get their managers and workers to take a more active role in H&S and other compliance disciplines.

*As a footnote to this, the same should also apply to people trying to deliver safety training who have little or no knowledge of sound learning and development methodologies, who simply assemble and relay information without understanding key elements of instructional design, designing relevant and meaningful competency criteria, meaningful assessments that relate to workplace requirements, educational psychology and neuroscience.

- Excellent blog article, and right on the mark!

Like you, I came into safety management through quality management, and also through the 'Zero Defects' movement. Your reframing of the aim of 'Zero Harm' is exactly what safety practitioners need to take on board. Much of what we struggle with in safety management has its root cause in reluctance to take personal responsibility - at ALL levels.

I am going to step out even a little further on this precarious limb to suggest that safety, like quality, is actually only an outcome, rather than the aim of the business. As you suggest in your article, both quality and safety - as well as other key business aims such as productivity and profitability - are desired outcomes that require businesses, managers and safety practitioners to connect the dots, follow Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) processes, take responsibility for the part each of us plays in delivering successful work outcomes, communicate, coordinate, collaborate, engage and involve, and all those other familiar safety themes throughout the business, to facilitate business processes that make sense and work effectively.

Safety is quite simply a significant outcome of efficient business processes, effective managers and good leaders who model the very behaviours they want from their workers, and when things go wrong they start by looking at themselves, their leadership habits, and the organisation's culture and processes.

Unfortunately, the current legislation quite undermines these efforts by wagging a critical finger even more menacingly in front of senior managers, with scolding threats of fines and jail sentences aimed to scare them into complying. Using fear as a weapon is not modelling good leadership for NZ businesses, and seems in many cases to further undermine the principles of effective organisations and workplace safety by placing greater focus on legal compliance than on genuinely caring for workers and accepting responsibility for their workplace experience of safety, quality, productivity, reliability, etc - they become overly focused on avoiding fines and jail sentences and how they might throw someone else under the bus if it goes wrong.

Exactly.

All too often they don't want to take the time to understand what their responsibilities really are, and they THINK they can just pass them down, then blame the safety manager / advisor if there is an incident.

While we know this does not actually absolve the Officers of their responsibilities, the dynamic often results in undue pressure on the safety manager / advisor, who is caught in the middle and afraid of losing their job if they complain about it.