As a business leader, it’s vital that you feel confident in the abilities of your workers. Not only do you need them to be able to do the job competently, you need them to adhere to safety regulations and best practices to ensure WHS compliance at all times.

Health, safety and environment (HSE) professionals most certainly have their work cut out. Every day they are responsible for maintaining a safe working environment and protecting your workers. That means assessing hazards, putting control measures in place and continually monitoring performance.

As a leader, no doubt you’re well aware of the importance of safety in the workplace. But, is it something that is always front of mind, do you continually push to make improvements, or are you stuck in a safety rut?

Workplace health and safety (WHS) officers have a strict and uncompromising responsibility to both workers and the workplaces they are employed in. Their main focus is the prevention of accidents, injuries and work-related illnesses in the workplace.

Across the globe, aged care homes have been at the centre of the coronavirus pandemic, and Australia is no exception. As of the 8th June 2020, there were 99 cases of COVID-19 among people receiving Australian Government-subsidised aged care, and in recent weeks Victoria, in particular, has seen a sharp rise in cases of COVID-19, with many attributed to the virus spreading in workplaces - including aged care homes.

If you care about your business and the people that work within it, you need to have measures in place to protect their safety, your liability and your reputation. Unfortunately, accidents can happen.

As COVID-19 begins to retreat (and I say that cautiously), organisations across the world are looking at how to resume operations fast and efficiently. However, while the risk is now lower than it was before, the experts seem to think that COVID-19 is something we are going to have to learn to live and work with for a good while longer.

As COVID-19-related restrictions are eased across the country, we are facing the challenge of returning to work while retaining social distancing measures. As business leaders, this is our opportunity to get back on track, resuming key projects that have been on hold.

We all have a right to be safe at work, whatever our role. However, ensuring that happens involves understanding and accepting government legislation as well as demonstrating a true organisational wide commitment to safety.

In the last few months, the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted people all over the world. The outbreak continues to unfold daily, having already delivered a devastating blow to the Australian economy. Let there be no mistake about the facts of our current situation.

As a safety leader, you are the key to creating culture in your organisation. And, the culture you create will be founded on the mindset that you foster in your employees. You have the power to encourage a safety culture that merely survives, or you could encourage one that actually thrives.

One of the most important aspects of running a business should be workplace health and safety. It is the responsibility of the organisation to have processes in place to manage the prevention of work-related injuries, incidents and diseases. It is vital that both managers and employees understand the importance of safety.

The world of workplace health and safety is filled with terminology, acronyms and definitions. Amongst the terms that are used within the workplace to describe health and safety, incidents and accidents are extremely common and often interchanged. In most cases, they indicate the level of damage that results from a workplace occurrence.

As a business leader, you have an obligation to maintain a safe and healthy work environment. While that looks different for every organisation, what it will no doubt include is carrying out workplace health and safety (WHS) risk assessments.

While we all like to think that they’ll never happen to us, incidents are a certainty. What makes a difference, however, is how your business deals with them. By taking all incidents seriously and documenting them, you are demonstrating to your employees that you are trying to cultivate a safety culture.

Over the last couple of months, just in Sydney alone, there have been multiple news stories about workplace accidents. These have been extremely serious, with severe injuries and even deaths. We all like to think it will never happen to us or at our workplace, but surely the recent events show us that it easily could.

Many things compromise workplace health and safety, our level of training, our understanding of regulatory compliance and our overstretched budgets, to name but a few. But, one of the biggest enemies of workplace health and safety is, in fact, complacency.

We’ve all felt stressed and overwhelmed at work. We live in an always-on society, with constant emails, texts and push notifications alongside the pressure of meeting deadlines and delivering on expectations forcing us to work harder, faster and smarter.

Recently, I posted an image on LinkedIn that displayed the quote, “When it comes to safety, common sense is the friend of compliance”, and asked for people’s thoughts. Over the next few hours, I received a tirade of comments that were ‘passionate’ to say the least.

Workplace health and safety (WHS) audits are often dreaded, striking fear into managers and employees alike. But remember, audits aren’t trying to catch us out or expose our failings, their purpose is, ultimately, to help protect our workers.