Harnessing the full cultural potential of your organisations management of safety is achievable.   Shaping the safety management essentials at a senior level in your organisation is at the core of establishing and sustaining safety performance reflecting a healthy safety culture.  

Steve Lee is a specialist consultant of health & safety management with extensive experience in resources, infrastructure, construction, maintenance services industries in either public, government and not for profit organisations. 

Many large organisations have diverse and complex operating structures with highly technical service capability situated in one or many Australian states.  In these organisations, the health and safety management system is generally well established and may have evolved into a complex range of management processes, practices and programs developed to address/control the organisations WHS risks within their workplaces and operations.

Sustaining the management of safety across the organisation takes focussed management effort.   Influencing organisational practice and culture within, present significant challenges.   However is the management feedback saying… 

“I’m looking for simplification of our WHS management system!”

“We need to consolidate multiple WHS systems into one system across all of our divisions.”

“We have these safety initiaives but we arent getting traction.”

Where this type of feedback emerges the challenge is where to look for the areas of real improvement.

What is Workplace Health and Safety management? – a business function with management processes to identify and manage WHS risk.  Managing WHS risks involves people.  Helping people to better understand how we want those risks managed is at the core of improvement.

The real questions to ask are… 
“where do people go to find the safety answers they need?”
“is the information available with the level of detail they need?”
“why do people think safety seem less important or more difficult than a year before?”
“what has changed or is adversely influencing the current knowledge about safety management practices?”
“as a manager I find our incident reporting and audit/inspection activity gives too basic information to be useful”.

Steve assists companies to identify sources for real improvement by looking deeper for the symptoms within key areas…        
– educating people about safety matters, and hazard and risk awareness, and developing safe work practices
– verifying workplace compliance, observation practices, response to incident/injury, engagement of leaders with safety,   
– influencing safe work attitudes & habits with good communication and response to improving workplace safety
– providing IT solutions to record safety information, assist with record keeping, and
– making avaiulable easily accessible sources to find relevant safety information with answers to questions.