Gordon MacDonald is chief executive of WorkSafe NZ.
The Health and Safety at Work Act comes into effect on 4 April. In broad terms, what are the primary changes that are particularly relevant to small businesses?
I'd say there are three major changes. One is the concept of
businesses cooperating and coordinating their activities where they're both engaged in delivering a piece of work. A clear example of that would be on a construction site where we have, say, joiners from one firm working alongside electricians from another firm. In that case, those two bodies need to get together and discuss how they're jointly going to manage the health and safety of their workers. The law recognises that businesses don't exist within four walls and never interact with others; they have lots of interaction, so it's making sure that health and safety is part of the communication that takes place between them.
The second issue deals with leadership, and the new law places duties on senior officers in companies to exercise due diligence. So if you're a board director or a chief executive you need to have an awareness of the risks that your organisation presents, the key controls that are exercised, and have some means of information coming to you about whether you're on track to deliver on your health and safety obligations so you can take any required action in a governance role.
This will help the business meet its health and safety duties.
The third element is worker engagement and participation in health and safety, and that's something the new law focuses on in a way that's more explicit than it did previously. So it's saying shift your mindset from health and safety being something that's done to workers, to something that's done with workers. They're the eyes and ears in an organisation, so getting them involved in risk identification and hazard mitigation will result in much richer intelligence. If you do that you'll also get much better buy-in to the solutions, because workers will have been part of their creation.
What are some practical steps that small businesses will need to take as a result of these changes?
The issues around leadership and employee engagement are probably easier to deal with in smaller firms. Leaders of small firms are generally a lot closer to what's happening on the ground, and similarly engaging with workers can be easier when everyone can get together in the morning over a cup of tea to talk through the issues you're facing on any day. We're not looking for an over-bureaucratisation of these processes; real engagement comes from having meaningful conversations around 'what are the risks, and how are we tracking and mitigating them?'.
