Consultation is an absolutely fundamental part of creating a safe workplace. It underpins and supports every decision and action you take to improve the health and safety of your workers.
I’m passionate about genuine consultation and have spoken about it many times. And I’m pleased to say there’s an article in this edition that captures the essentials of consultation — so you can move beyond mere compliance (consulting is a requirement of our WHS laws) and use it to shape a robust and positive safety culture in your workplace.
Consulting with your workers should be obvious. Why? Because as the people ‘on the floor’, workers have direct experience and knowledge of tasks, operations, equipment and processes. They will have good insights into what will work to improve safety, and what won’t.
But I’d encourage employers to expand your scope of who you consult with to include health and safety representatives (HSRs).
HSRs are a valuable bridge between employers and workers. They can help you tap into that experience, knowledge and insight that your workers have. HSRs represent the WHS interests of workers in their work groups, and as such can convey to employers important information to consider when making decisions about WHS.
If you’ve got a small workplace, you can probably talk directly and in person with your workers fairly regularly. But perhaps you have a larger organisation, or you have diverse workers (like field workers and office workers), or worksites around the state? Then having HSRs, who can communicate with you because they’re part of those locations or work groups, can be your consultation solution.
There is a process to go through for HSRs to be elected. Your workers can ask to have an HSR, or you might like to suggest creating HSR roles and consultative mechanisms. You will need to consult and agree with your workers on the different workgroups in your business as you might have an HSR for each workgroup. Then seek nominations and hold an election. I strongly encourage HSRs to be trained in their role so they can best support workers, and the safety of your business.
Once in place, invite HSRs to the table when you’re creating or reviewing your safety policies and safe work procedures, when you’re thinking about buying new equipment or chemicals, or when you next conduct a risk assessment or workplace inspection — anything that affects the health and safety of your workers.
HSRs are not expected to be experts in WHS. Their role is to be a communication link between employers and workers — willing and able to raise matters on workers’ behalf and ensure their concerns are considered. This makes resolving WHS concerns not just easier, but more robust, too: together you’ll come up with solutions that everyone can get behind.
Properly trained HSRs do have powers to issue notices and to cease work to ensure safe work environments for the workers they represent. Don’t be alarmed by this. We can get so focussed on achieving outcomes that we might not see or hear all the concerns our workers have. I think you’ll find that having HSRs delivers so much value in helping you make your workplace safer and healthier and fulfil your WHS obligations. HSRs can help in every decision and action you take to improve the health and safety of your workers.
If you’ve never considered HSRs at your workplace or want to do more to support the ones you do have, our Advisory Service can help set you in the right direction. We also have online resources for HSRs to help them fulfill their role.