Like virtually all surveys, the value of the responses relies heavily on the quality of the survey questions. It can be too easy to ask questions designed largely to get the desired response, rather than finding out anything meaningful about wellbeing. If the questions are designed by someone who is knowledgeable and skilled with elements such as the choice of words and framing of the question, it might be possible to get sensible answers that genuinely provide meaningful insights. But if management doesn't have clarity about what wellbeing looks like in their organisation or what they want their culture and employee engagement to look like, it's unlikely that managers would even know what questions to ask.

"But we have ALWAYS done it this way!" (Translation: It's all I know and I can't be bothered trying to think of something better / safer.)

Elimination is always the preferred option for managing risk!

When I worked for a major chemical company in USA, we were required to test all safety showers and eyewash fountains every Monday morning between 8am - 8:10am. These checks ensured we could verify that the alarms connected to the emergency equipment were working, as well as verifying that showers and eyewash fountains would be activated as intended, had sufficient flow, and didn't have any rust or other particulate matter in the water, thus enabling us to proactively identify any issues and notify the maintenance team if safety equipment needed work.

In an ideal world, people would be volunteering for the right reasons and feeling rewarded by being able to make a tangible difference. I don't think it actually helps the cause much to think we have to keep dangling extrinsic motivators to get people to participate. As others have said already in this thread, creating the right culture will achieve engagement and participation, and recognition is most effective when it is genuine and personal - like just say thank you and mean it!

At one workplace I know of, they had Friday 'happy hour' drinks in the cafeteria, with drinks available from the fridge. One of the measures the management team took was to offer to pay for a taxi home if the employee had too much to drink, but then it was up to the employee to make their own way back the next day to pick up their vehicle. They also had cards for Dial a Driver if an employee wanted someone to drive them home.

Each workplace should also evaluate its own culture and how people are likely to behave. In a positive work culture, I would expect to see a degree of moderation, with managers leading the way and setting an example. If employees have a sense of 'scarcity', it's possible that once the drinks fridge is unlocked, they will try to drink (or take) as many drinks as possible, to feel they get their share. That's more likely in a culture where managers begrudge employees anything extra and they don't feel cared for.

Too many times the emphasis is solely on passing the audit, rather than on implementing and ensuring good practice - especially where there are financial implications. This is a key reason why the AEP / WSMP scheme failed to deliver on better injury reduction outcomes. Also too much focus on documents as 'proof' without closely examining regular daily practice and culture.

I've just started working with a large organisation that is using Smartsheet and Power BI to manage its HSW activities - really powerful and efficiently linked to support extensive weekly management reports that keep HSW performance on the senior leadership team's radar. It's a bit to get my head around in a short period of time, but so well set up and integrated with many other business functions.

Do you mean work-related online abuse or during personal use?

I just wonder about the potential long-term impact of implementing incentives for trying to get people to adopt desired safety behaviours. Ultimately, we aim for people to operate from an internal locus of control, including internalised understanding and commitment, rather than based on external locus of control. Once you create an expectation of being rewarded for those behaviours, have we created a dependency? Are you going to have to give rewards for every single action you want? What will happen when / if the reward is no longer available to them? Will rewards need to keep increasing in order to gain the interest? And what would differentiate a bribe from a reward?? I'm genuinely interested to hear what others think.

I remember one of my own trainers advising us to be very careful with setting up any kind of rewards programme - he mentioned a book called something like Punish With Rewards - might be worth doing some further research.

I've come across Bill Sims, his book and his recognition and rewards programme many years ago, and I even facilitated his visit to NZ. Although the core psychology behind his programme makes sense, it might also be useful to remember that his main frame of reference is an American workplace culture and economy, we also should be mindful of the long-term outlook, not just a 'quick fix' reward of short duration.

I have previously been an accredited facilitator for the NZ Certificate of Applied Leadership, and the programme included some interesting sections about motivation and recognition and rewards. Did you know that the most effective form of recognition costs nothing yet is most often passed over by managers?

Research showed that the most valued form of recognition is a personal and sincere thanks for a job well done! This was also rated among the top three of what mattered most to employees - managers somehow valued it most highly for themselves but assumed employees thought money was most important (Money IS important, but it only ranked 5th - the first three included sincere thanks for a job well done, help with personal problems (i.e., flexibility to accommodate personal issues like a sick child or a school meeting, etc), and having a say in decisions that affected their work - all of these are about caring for people and building trust).

The long-term sustainable solution is to develop effective leadership and management skills, and build a culture of trust and connection. To quote a well-known shampoo advertisement, "It won't happen overnight, but it WILL happen." It starts from the expectations set by leaders, and is built day-by-day through consistent standards and behaviours.

Check out https://www.ecoportal.com/

The Health Promotion Calendar / NZ Public Health Calendar (https://toiteora.govt.nz/publications-and-resources/calendar-of-events/) is published every year and provides excellent opportunities to leverage worldwide and nationwide events. The calendar also includes links to relevant websites where you can easily get more information and often resources like posters, flyers, etc. You can pick and choose which initiatives fit best with your own demographic.

Too many times businesses focused on "passing the audit" in order to get the discount, rather than actually making their workplaces safer or actually practicing safety management - largely aided and abetted by some (not all) auditors who focused more on the documents rather than actual practice and culture. I have personally watched organisations pour hours and hours of work into assembling documents for an audit - more effort than was put into daily safety practices. I hate to say it, but I have also observed documents being "found" specifically to satisfy an audit requirement.

I also observed managers who assumed if the business had previously been accredited to secondary that they should expect to progress to tertiary level accreditation the next time - very little engagement or understanding from senior managers, just wanting to increase financial benefits.

It helps to remember the aims behind the audit criteria framework. Although ACC's framework was based on AS/NZS4801, ACC's objective was based on its role as the insurer, which is somewhat different from safety management or genuinely looking out for people and their wellbeing. I am aware of one incident where a contractor incident during an ACC audit (!!) elicited a comment from the auditor that they had noticed the safety issue, which prompted the manager to ask why the auditor had not reported the hazard. The auditor replied that they were not allowed to say anything - ACC would consider that to be crossing the line from auditing into consulting! The manager challenged this position, especially against the regulatory responsibility for workers to report hazards. The manager followed up and challenged ACC, which maintained its position. What kind of message does that send if an auditor is exempt from informing others of hazards they have identified?!??

I agree with @MattD2 - the overall experience was that accreditation was not matched by safer workplaces or improved safety performance. I would even say that the financial incentives (external motivators) often resulted in unsound management practices and possibly even distracted managers from the real work (internal motivation) of keeping people safe.

thank you

That's my point Steve - keeping people safe (i.e., the proverbial cotton wool) vs teaching them how to assess risk and make good decisions to minimise their own risks. In so many ways, adopting an approach that requires a group of people to do all the thinking for another group of people is not actively developing the skills required for individuals to genuinely understand risk and take an active role in their own experience - it's actually resulting in people who are trained to be KEPT safe, with important elements of risk management entirely out of their awareness. Meanwhile, managers and H&S practitioners are charged with the near-impossible duty to protect these people from their own unsafe decisions!

What's the impact of emphasising requirements for employers to keep people safe vs teaching people how to keep themselves safe? Why aren't we including risk management principles and critical thinking in the education system from the earliest days if we are serious about reducing the number of workplace fatalities and injuries??

Having worked at Ports of Auckland myself in the past, I know from my own experience that there are many more factors than meets the eye when looking at workplace conditions from the outside.

In the first of the two recent fatalities, the worker was employed by a stevedoring company contracted by the shipping lines, which lease land at the port site. Ports of Auckland is one of many stakeholders on the site, and attempts to engage with all stakeholders were not always well supported.

The owner / operator of Wallace Investments (stevedoring company that employed the young man who fell from height and died of his injuries) was particularly uncooperative and combative. Ports of Auckland has no direct authority over the work areas of those 3rd party contractors, only traffic management plans for moving around on the site and any interfaces between 3rd party operators, so most of the responsibility for safe work practices, training, etc falls squarely on those 3rd party operators. Ports of Auckland made reasonable efforts to communicate, collaborate and coordinate work amongst all stakeholders, even before HSWA 2015 spelled it out that way.

In my experience, the third-party stevedoring companies focused more on getting work done quickly and cheaply than on safe work practices.

Meanwhile, other industry sectors such as shipping lines have quite a strong influence on how work is arranged at ports, because shipping lines force ports to work to their schedules. Workers are paid productivity bonuses to encourage teams to meet shipping timeframes and avoid financial penalties. Many port workers blamed port management for their shift patterns and schedules, but these are largely dictated by the shipping lines - port operations just have to fall into line with them or risk losing business to another port that will do their bidding. How do we get shipping lines to play their part in this?

I won't go into detail about it here, but the Maritime Union also has responsibilities and a part to play in making any real and lasting changes in the port industry. The the Maritime Union could and should be doing a lot more to work constructively and collaboratively together with ports and their operations management teams to positively influence port workers to get on board, make better decisions and work more safely - not just delivering platitudes to the TV cameras and seizing yet another opportunity to attack port management.

There is definitely work to be done, and it's going to require the proverbial village to work together to achieve any real change.

Does this tendency to adopt a 'MORE is more" approach perhaps hint at a kind of 'imposter syndrome', with managers feeling less confident about the value they add and less trusting of workers, so they feel the need to fill the void with more and more paperwork as if to justify their existence? Is the core issue a sense of needing to constantly / continuously prove their worth? Are they worried that their managers will think they are not doing enough?

One thing that comes to mind here as well is the significance of the change in mindset required to shift from Safety I to Safety II - i.e., changing from safety practitioners trying to manage everything themselves to LEADING others to enable and support them to take charge of their own safety initiatives and actions. Leading requires a complementary and much more intangible set of skills and perspectives than managing. Many people mistakenly use 'management' and 'leadership' interchangeably, when in fact they are distinctly different and complementary skills.

All too often documentation and management systems are overly complex and bureaucratic. A key root cause of this is that many systems and requirements are a legacy of pre-IT days, when organisations were structured differently, communicated directly, and were influenced by different values world views and priorities.

Organisations have evolved to require less hierarchical structures, and IT tools allow more direct and more immediate communication, however if no one has stood back and objectively reviewed systems from the perspective of intended outcomes, the purpose and priorities of those outcomes, and how best to deliver those outcomes, most systems will retain fundamental inefficiencies "because that is the way we have always done things".

An example that comes to mind is the common requirement for periodic refresher training, with little understanding of key principles of learning and development. Firstly, training is only an input; the key point is for people to be competent, not just 'trained'. When training hasn't been designed to deliver on carefully identified competency criteria (and my observation has been that this is the case more often than not), supported by meaningful and relevant assessment tools, and delivered using effective instructional design methodologies, a lot of resources are consumed perpetuating this illusion.

What if we identified key competency requirements and how to assess them, then just assess periodically to verify ongoing competency? If people remain competent, why waste their time and good will by requiring them to repeat training? A good assessment process would also deliver an inherent review anyway.

If a person isn't able to demonstrate ongoing competency, then you can do a learning needs analysis to determine whether they really don't know what they need to know (which indicates they need training), or whether they know but cannot perform (indicating that they either need more practice or need coaching to develop the confidence required to perform).

Most H&S training also suffers - possibly unconsciously - from too much focus on ensuring people pass the assessment (so the provider can get paid), rather than approaching competency requirements in holistic and sensible ways that draw from sound risk management principles and best practice learning and development methodologies.

And that is just one example!

Another important factor to consider is the impact of low levels of trust on how management systems are structured in many organisations, especially in safety and compliance disciplines, and the tendency of many managers and auditors to rely too much on the paperwork as 'proof' while failing to prioritise genuine human connection and interactions.

Thank you - very helpful. Things seem to be changing quickly all along the way.....