All Purpose Safety and Training

SAFETY OBLIGATIONS
The role and influence you have in a business determines if you are an ‘officer’ under WHS laws. This is different for each person and each business.

1. Are you the owner or operator of a small business?
2. Do you make big decisions about all or part of your business?
3. Can you affect your business’s financial standing?

If you answered yes to any of these, you may be an officer and have an obligation under WHS laws to demonstrate a proactive approach to WHS matters.

As an officer, you must exercise due diligence to ensure your business meets its WHS duties. This includes:
- making sure your workers and other persons are protected against harm, and
- making sure your business has suitable safe work systems in place.

You are legally responsible for doing these things under WHS laws.

HOW YOU CAN MEET YOUR DUTIES AS AN OFFICER?
Here are some ways you can meet your officer duty. This will help make sure your business protects workers and others against harm to health and safety.

a) Keep your WHS knowledge up-to-date.
b) Understand your business and its WHS hazards and risks.
c) Make sure your business has reporting processes for incidents, hazards and other WHS issues.
d) Ensure your business is properly resourced to manage WHS risks and the resources are being used.

WHAT IF I DON’T MEET MY DUTY?
You can be prosecuted if you fail to meet your duty as an officer. This can happen even if there hasn’t been an incident at your workplace, or the business has not been held liable.

All Purpose Safety & Training can partner with you to ensure you are meeting your duties as an “Officer”. Give me a call to ask how.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO COMMON SENSE?
Whilst our lawmakers and the Courts would have us believe that common sense is dead, can I challenge that we have just changed terms?

Our safety laws now use ‘reasonably practicable’ or ‘reasonable management action’ to phrase “that which is, or was at a particular time, reasonably able to be done to ensure health and safety, taking into account and weighing up all relevant matters including:
• the likelihood of the hazard or the risk concerned occurring
• the degree of harm that might result from the hazard or the risk
• what the person concerned knows, or ought reasonably to know, about the hazard or risk, and ways of eliminating or minimising the risk
• the availability and suitability of ways to eliminate or minimise the risk
• after assessing the extent of the risk and the available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, the cost associated with available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, including whether the cost is grossly disproportionate to the risk.”

To paraphrase the ambiguity of the definition above, as it is written in the legislation, business owners and managers must ensure they eliminate the risk of harm to others to an extent that the majority of the population would expect. To dumb it down even more, it is to do what the average, common person would do.

Common sense isn’t dead, it has just been rebadged with a fancier title!
Likewise, worker health and safety doesn’t have to be complicated.

As business owners and managers we need to:
• Identify what needs to be done
• Document how it needs to be done
• Instruct workers on how to do it
• Continually review the process to ensure it is being done as identified.

4 basic steps that ensure your workers go home to their families safely at night and you sleep soundly because you are doing what is expected.

Isn’t it time to start making a “common sense approach” the most reasonable course of action?

Risk Assessments, SWMSs, Management Plans, Training....

More often than not these are terms associated with compliance.
- I need these to comply with the law.....
- I need these to comply with a customer request....
- I need these to complete a tender submission....

What many businesses don’t appreciate is how these processes can benefit to the efficiency and profitability of their operations.

Having effective plans, procedures and assessments and a process to train and educate staff on these ensures jobs are completed as you want them completed; safely, in full, on time and on budget.

Start putting your “practice into words” and see the benefits.