POISED FOR CHANGE
Nicole Rosie, the chief executive at WorkSafe New Zealand, is a woman on a mission. She wants to ensure that New Zealand’s leaders embrace the idea that leading in the health and safety sphere is about genuinely caring for your people, both mind and body, and about operational excellence.
Nicole Rosie, the chief executive at WorkSafe New Zealand, is a woman on a mission. She wants to ensure that New Zealand’s leaders embrace the idea that leading in the health and safety sphere is about genuinely caring for your people, both mind and body, and about operational excellence. It’s also about understanding your key risks and the key controls to manage that risk.
The absolute importance of the role that health and safety plays in our workplaces was tragically underlined when Management interviewed the chief executive at WorkSafe, New Zealand, Nicole Rosie. As we wound up the interview, Rosie turned on her phone to see a mandatory notification of a workplace death that had just occurred. She is notified of all workplace deaths immediately and it’s hard to imagine how difficult it would be to get 50 to 60 of those notifications each year.
But, says Rosie, who has an extensive background in health and safety and change management, New Zealand is poised for real changes in its health and safety culture. “I am the change person, there has to be a big vision. New Zealand is poised for change on how to create the country we want and the way we want to be doing things.”
She says Pike River may have been the catalyst for change but at the present point in time we have leaders in New Zealand who really do care.
“Once we had the new legislation in place you start to understand how poor we were at health and safety in relation to other countries.”
And there is a big part of New Zealand that thinks, “that is not us… we are a country that looks after people.”
As she sees it there is a groundswell of opinion among leaders for change. She
says leading in health and safety is about caring for people and ensuring operational excellence. The sentiment has moved from being captured by a compliance mentality and a systems checklist and where the board spends perhaps an hour discussing health and safety.
If you are not improving the risks in the business and are not supporting, engaging and caring for your people, then you are not doing health and safety, she says.
The message also needs to get out to the service sector too, such as accountants, management consultants, who may not appreciate that the number one cause of death in the workplace is vehicle accidents and those in the services sector are in workplace vehicles frequently.
While accidental deaths might attract the headlines, WorkSafe is also heavily focused on the 600 to 900 deaths each year from work-related health issues. There is no one cause, she says, it might be asbestos or concrete dust, but hairdressers and cleaners are also exposed to a lot of chemicals. In turn, shift work and long hours of work can lead to a higher incidence of cancer.
There is also a focus on mental health in the workplace. Suicide is one of the key causes of workplace death as evidenced by tragedies in the agriculture sector in recent years.
Rosie says psycho-societal harm, in all its forms, is without doubt an emerging area in workplace health and there is growing awareness around it. The pace of change in any workplace is creating more psycho-societal illness. Work is more flexible and the separation between home and work is blurred. In the early 1900s workers slept an average of 9.5 hours. Today it is 6.5 hours and if you are fatigued you cope less well with stress that may come from being bullied or harassed or working long hours or being in an environment you find controlling.
She sees this as a very challenging area and WorkSafe’s agenda is to build a strategy around this type of wellness as there needs to be in-depth assessment on how to approach it and how to work with other agencies involved.
Another area WorkSafe is addressing is the long tail of the supply chain. Those at the top of the chain, need to be thinking about those at the end of the chain, who are perhaps paid the least but their health and safety is also the responsibility of the whole supply chain.
It may be that a contractor isn’t earning enough to make the capital investment he or she needs for their own safety.
This means New Zealand needs to ensure those at the bottom of the supply chain are economically viable. It could mean that industry leadership may see the answer as trying to support some of these businesses to invest in their own safety
For any business, the risk is not about stopping stuff from happening but in underlining the risks in what you are doing, and fully understanding that risk.
This is about people thinking critically about their key controls around that risk. If your key controls at height are your ropes or strapping, it is there that the risk lies.
If you are obsessed about staff wearing high risk vests but have 50 people on the road in old vehicles, on 14-hour shifts, you need to understand the key risk and the key controls. It’s always going to come back to some sort of engineering controls for critical risks, she says.