Something to understand is the difference between leading and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators - what are you doing to prevent an incident/accident - proactive for future
Lagging indicators - what has already gone badly - reactive for past events
Here is an explainer https://ergo-plus.com/leading-lagging-indicators-safety-preformance/

Health and Safety can be a very frustrating area - when it is working well, you are measuring an absence of bad stuff. Which means that you have to work quite hard to measure the presence of good stuff.

You mentioned construction... @Chris Alderson
https://www.chasnz.org/articles/chasnz-construction-leading-health-safety-and-well-being-indicators
https://www.chasnz.org/wsnh/understand-your-trades-injury-data

Sustainability is a project I'm working on, moving from just claiming to be in favour of it to having policies and 'walking the talk'. Watch this space, but there are bigger challenges to close out first. — Garth Forsberg

yip, me too.
Something to consider too is hypocrisy and optics to a staff member who has suggested a better way, and is turned down due to 'rules' and 'bigger problems'.
More appropriate might be figuring out some guidance and boundaries for what the company is comfortable with in this space (especially if this person's line manager feels along similar lines to Andrew above), which is actually what you are doing :). Maybe your staff member would be interested in being involved in this too.

Did you find this?
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/walking-cycling-and-public-transport/cycling/workplace-cycling-guide/
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/walking-cycling-and-public-transport/cycling/workplace-cycling-guide/resources/

What is the company culture in terms of sustainability?
Is there any climate change action under way or required in your industry?
Sustainability covers economy, people and environment, so H&S is part of the equation as per looking after people, but so is resource use as per energy and time.

What are your client and customer expectations of your company? In many industries, someone arriving on a bike would be considered a very good thing indeed, does your company need to walk the talk?

I would consider the issues to be broader than just H&S, and it depends on what your company values.

Edited to add, if my internet sleuthing is accurate, then the tagline for your business is "Find Better Ways"... now there is a challenge.

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From what I understand, the RAT test will continue to give a positive result well after the infection ceases to become active — Aaron Marshall

Quite frankly, you are wrong.
Not sure who told you that, but you seem to be muddled with PCR and rat tests, an easy thing to do.

from earlier in the thread
https://www.monocent.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Web-Covid-gradph.png
PCR picks up cases well after infection ceases to be active.
Rats pick up active infection, your body is busy making the spike protein for the virus and exuding the freshly made virus. The rat detects the spike protein in your nose.
A NZ explainer https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/09-03-2022/siouxsie-wiles-toby-morris-feeling-covid-positive-but-your-rat-is-negative-heres-why
On day 7 you still had an active infection regardless of symptoms. This is why the day 7 test matters as a household contact, if you test negative earlier.
If you had have tested on day 3, you may have had the covid confirmation sooner, and would have isolated until day 10. You will never know now.

Because once the household case tests positive they stop being a household case and are now considered a positive case — MattD2

in this case, the household case hasn't become a confirmed covid case until they tested pos at the day 7.
They were symptomatic and tested neg on Day 0 and 2. The Day 7 test requirement for being a household contact doesn't just disappear because of symptoms coming and going.

This is not a technical situation at all, it is quite clear that the day 7 test is positive and the person is now a confirmed covid case (looking like asymptomatic and yet carrying spike protein and virus in their nose), and should be at home.

The positive covid case can leave after 7 days with no further testing.
The household contact can leave with a negative day 7 AND no worsening symptoms.

The household contact does not get to leave with a positive day 7 test.
Which bit of your quote above says the household contact can leave with a positive day 7 test?

f it were me I would test again before leaving my home (only leaving once I had a negative test) - but keep monitoring for reoccurring symptoms and taken extra precautions for the next week such as face masks when in close contact with anyone else and religious hand washing / sanitising. — MattD2

yeah, knowing what I know about the testing, there is no way I would be leaving the house straight after having a pos rat test. That goes against every public health measure we have in place, and I would love to know if it was a hcw who said that leaving the house straight after getting a pos rat was ok.
Personally, I would encourage people to stay home for 7 days after having a positive rat test. And there is no way we would accept going to work with a pos rat that day in my workplace or my husbands workplace.
Rats can throw up false pos's, but there are protocols to deal with that. Best be cautious.

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If I am reading your post correctly, you are a household contact of a positive case, so needed to test on day 3 and day 7 while isolating. Your viral load was high enough to be detected by RAT on your day 7 test. That would mean you need to stay in isolation, regardless of symptoms.
Your wife, however has done her 7 days isolation since testing pos, and can leave isolation so long as she has no further symptoms.

I would add, RATs are most unreliable in those with a low viral load.
Rats are more reliable with a high viral load, and these are the most likely people to be infectious.

PCR tests for the virus.
RATs test for viral load and therefore level of infectiousness.
2 different things.
People want them to mean the same thing, but they don't. Timing of the testing through the viral infection matters as does how the infection progresses in each person.

Pregnancy tests also return negative tests before your period is due, even if you are pregnant, because the levels of pregnancy hormone in your wee is too low to be detected. So a negative pregnancy test, does not always mean that you are not pregnant, it might mean that you are testing too early.

Everyone accepts a neg pregnancy test may have been taken too early in the course of the pregnancy, it shouldn't be too hard to correlate that to a neg RAT test being taken too early in the course of a symptomatic infection, there may be a pos RAT test to come.

Sure, but a few million million in the world, and a few million RAT tests in NZ have already been done and the results reported. Not sure what is so scarey about the RATs that requires control cases or empirical data. It is like a pregnancy test, but instead of testing for a hormone it is testing for a protein made during a viral infection, and it uses a nose swab not wee.

The process around RAT testing is more important than taking the RAT itself. Rather than testing the tests, concentrate on the process, supporting your people and the means for getting your business through the next few weeks, there is plenty enough to do as I am sure you are doing already.

Please don't think of your people with confirmed covid as your samples to test. Maybe wait until you have it and run your experiment on yourself.

To be honest, if I was "M, Heavy set, Active smoker, 45-55yrs, Dbl vax + booster" I would be telling my employer to F off and I would be using my self isolation to find another job.
Being a close contact is hard enough, without being a participant in a trial of RATs for my employer. H&S is all about the people and making things better, not making things harder.

Diagnostic testing is a mixture of art and science, and intepreting results is best left to the doctors. There is a lot of grey area when it comes to test results that most people aren't comfortable with, most people like a pos to be actually pos and a neg to be actually neg, but when dealing with people, medical complexities and biochemistry, life often isn't like that.
There is such a thing as a weak positive that may have been identified by the lab, but it is unlikely that you would get this info. Note too that at the moment there can be up to a 7 day delay between testing and the PCR result being confirmed. PCR can pick up historical cases whereas RATs only pick up active infections.

RATs have been designed to be as robust as possible, and they have been extremely well tested, and Medsafe have gone over all the data. If your people are following the instructions correctly, and reporting the results correctly, that is all the business is responsible for. There honestly is no need to burn through your precious and expensive tests to decide if it meets standard. They are hardly doing that in the Emergency Department, so you don't need to either.

Deciding if this person is a covid case, and needs to isolate or not, is not the job of the business. Best leave that to the health system, they have protocols to work to. Your person above is presumably in the medical system in order to have had three PCR tests already, so that is good, and they will presumably let you know if RAT testing is useful from here.

For a RAT to work and produce a positive, you need the person to be pumping out the spike protein at the site where you swab.
If a) there is little spike protein being produced (due to the course of infection or the way the person's immune system is functioning right then) or b) there is little snot to carry the spike protein to the swab to the buffer to the well in the testkit - you may not get a positive result.
This the nature of these tests, and the reason why they will produce false negative tests, and the reason why they have been less useful in NZ's pandemic response due to the low amount of circulating virus in the community until now.
https://www.monocent.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Web-Covid-gradph.png

Edited to add, when you see the package insert saying detects 98.6% of cases, or whatever, this will often be with testing people who have a high viral load, and are infectious, and are symptomatic (ie snotty). You can burn through a lot of tests when you test people without symptoms, as they are more likely to test negative with RATs (but may be positive with PCR). But in saying that, it is the people with high viral load and symptomatic who are most likely to spread it to the rest of your team and these are the ones you find with RATs.

The Vax pass is needed in order to get the RATs to test to go to work, unvaccinated people must stay home if a close contact.

We are going to have the worker upload the result to the My Covid Record and picture of test to line manager.

Being able to work while a close contact is a privilege, it means the worker can get their full wage, so should do what is required is part of their obligations to their employer. That said, presumably you know who is likely to have particular challenges, so only a subset need a special workaround?

Those who are doing RATS when a close contact should be having their breaks alone (in their car?), not with others. There are obligations on the company to be reduce the risks to all by having a close contact on site.

maybe you should leave it a day or so, and tell your people that information is coming and you will have your process finalised as it comes clearer for your situation and geographical area. The answers you want will be there soon, this is a three to six month problem.
If you have a few people out on close contact right now, you will already be dealing with public health for them.
RAT tests are also available to purchase in the next few weeks, if your company has the capacity to buy a few as back up.

Rapid Antigen Test Order Form is here: https://ncts.force.com/ratorder/s/

Our conclusion is that it is quite hard to tell - there has been a whole range of situations in businesses so far and it can be very hard to tell what will happen. The advice changes and the situation can be very different depending on a hundred and one different factors. You never quite know how Public Health are going to see things in terms of the greater risk. I think it also depends on the bigger picture in your geographical area too.

This is the current advice: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-health-advice-public/contact-tracing-covid-19/guidance-workplaces-have-case-covid-19

This table has advice on how the different categories work for contact tracing https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-health-advice-public/contact-tracing-covid-19#typesofcontacts

In the Hawkes Bay last week a small business had to close while the workers isolated and were tested. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-today/news/covid-19-delta-outbreak-auto-repair-business-in-hastings-closed-for-10-days-after-staff-member-tests-positive/XPSTSGNOQMLG6PL4B4UASPH274/