Improving Safety Culture - The Power of Surveys
Surveying workers in your workplace can be a very useful way of obtaining information to help improve Safety Culture and your WHS management system. It is common today for businesses to do periodic "How are we doing?" surveys to its customers. What about doing something similar internally too? See what the staff think?
It has been over 10 years since the Model WHS Laws were adopted in New South Wales. During this time the state of health and safety in workplaces overall has notably improved. The facts of this highlights the merits of the Model WHS laws, their emphasis on properly training people to do their jobs safely, and the enforcement actions carried out by SafeWork NSW over the years.
In 2014 Safe Work Australia published an infographic called Thoughts About Workplace Safety that showed results of a health and safety perceptions survey they conducted in 2012 as part of a nation-wide research program. A total of 1,572 businesses and 1,311 workers took part in the survey.
At that time the Model WHS laws were new and thus the opinions and views in the survey apply more to the repealed OHS laws which were in place from 2001-2011. Nevertheless, it may be interesting to compare what people thought then to what people may think now.
The results in that infographic are shown below.
WHS Perceptions Survey (2012)
Employers
90% think their workplace is safe
87% encourage workers to talk to supervisors about problems
9% think minor incidents are a normal part of daily work
18% think risks are unavoidable in this workplace
4% accept risk-taking at work
Workers
89% think their workplace is safe
88% encourage workers to talk to supervisors about problems
24% think minor incidents are a normal part of daily work
36% think risks are unavoidable in this workplace
15% accept risk-taking at work
It would be interesting to see what the results would be if the survey was done today. Would they be more positive or less positive? What about just in your workplace?
Creating and Doing a Survey for Your Workplace?
You could create a "How are we doing?" survey and use this modern feedback system to find out the sentiment in your workplace about the WHS management system and about the general Safety Culture of the business.
Surveys as part of PCBU consultation
In a more specific application, surveys could be one of the ways that a business consults its workers on WHS matters. Section 47 of the WHS Act states that every business must consult staff on WHS matters at work that will or might affect them, before making any final decisions on the matter. It is up to business owners and company directors to ensure this happens, however that is achieved. Surveys can be one way of gathering that information.
For more information, or if you would like help to make your WHS management system even more robust, please feel free to contact us at train@courtenell.com.au or phone us on 02 9552 2066
NOTE: Material in this article from Thoughts About Workplace Safety remains the copyright of the Commonwealth of Australia © Commonwealth of Australia 2014 and is used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence (link is external) (CC BY 3.0).
Copyright © 2015, 2024 Courtenell. "The pinnacle of WHS training." All rights reserved.
Comments