As organisations and employees around the world celebrate World Day for Safety and Health at Work (28 April 2015), it's timely to ask our OHS Advisors their thoughts about the importance of developing a safety culture and injury prevention and to reflect on how far we've come.

Jay Markland

Across all divisions of Chandler Macleod safety is a common theme that unites us. Ensuring that our people go home safe is good business practice and (very) good for the individual workers. Within Managed Services (AHS) our operations and area managers demonstrate a good understating of their accountability and responsibilities for safety. There is an increasing number of frontline team members demonstrating proactive safety behaviour for themselves and their colleagues. My favourite example is overhearing a worker complain that it took longer to find the right PPE to do the job than to actually do the job. The quick response from the safety-focused colleague "well you obviously underestimated the time required to do the job....safely!" Our journey continues to ensure all team members have safety in the forefront of their mind whether at home or at work.

Shane Johnson

Over the last few years the safety culture at Chandler Macleod has become so much more than just a goal for the business to achieve. Today when I visit a CMG office the staff and workers have completely taken on our motto "Safety is our Priority" and we have all become safety leaders. The CMG safety culture and safety leadership is something you can see in peoples actions, hear in their conversations and read in their messages. I believe many large organisations we deal with would be envious of what we have.

Renee Portelli

For me, I feel that safety comes from the individual. You can have a 100% proof administration system but the safety behaviour and culture lie in the hands of the individual. Too many companies are focused on having all the systems in place to avoid injury and company / personal fines and sadly individual thoughts and behaviour get missed. We need to continue to focus on how we can make an impact on the individual, and get them to take ownership of their behaviour. Talking about what is important in their life and how they would feel if that was taken away due to an injury. Focusing on family, hobbies, children, sports etc. helps employees realise how much their life would change if there were unable to do these activities. Workplace processes and procedures may seem like a 'painful' experience at the time but long term, if they were injured; how would they feel if they lost their loved ones or were unable to pick up their children or enjoy the sport they love.

Rosie Toeta

The safety culture within Chandler Macleod has moved forward in leaps and bounds in the last five years underpinned by the commitment of our Executive Leadership Team to become personally involved and accountable for the safety of our workers. It's more then a legislative requirement; the leaders I have worked with over the last four years have shown an unusual kindness and concern not relative to the transient nature of labour hire.

Site visits, monitoring of serious incidents and injuries and supporting the hard decision to repudiate or disengage with a client whose safety culture was not in line with our values; this is the kind of leadership that engenders change! Our leadership actively participates and provides the supportive space that breeds confidence, and creativity in finding solutions to some very difficult compliancy issues. This evolution of change has filtered across the business leading to a greater improvement of our safety systems and processes, which is evident in the increased number of our workers returning home safely every day. Exactly what safety is all about!

Carolyn Ford

The biggest 'battle' in safety is culture, and driving home the message that safety should be a 24/7 mindset, not a 'working hours only' thought process. At Chandler Macleod we have worked exceptionally hard at generating cultural change and helping people to develop their 'risk perception'. It is this cultural change, both with internal and external employees that has helped us to reach the high safety achievements and standards that we have. We do not rest here however, life is constantly moving and changing, as are our employees, so we will always be driving home the safety message, teaching, mentoring, guiding people in the right direction, which will help us to maintain and even better our safety record and ultimately keep our people safe.

Jamie Mallinder

"A safety culture is a special case of such a culture, one in which safety has a special place in the concerns of those who work for the organisation. In one sense safety always has a place in an organisation's culture, which can then be referred to as the safety culture, but it is only past a certain stage of development that an organisation can be said to take safety sufficiently seriously to be labelled as a safety culture." - Patrick Hudson. In my opinion, this quote is the perfect definition of a safety culture and the best example of what I witness every day at work.

Daniel Lo

From a SE Asia perspective, we are able to excel in OHS, because Chandler Macleod has taken active steps to create a workforce that believes in our corporate values, has the right attitudes for the job, are competent in what they are doing and exhibit the right set of safe behaviours. Our safety achievements support similar findings from a pilot study conducted in SE Asia (Singapore), where companies taking an integrated OHS approach compared to those without had employees who were: 4.4 times more likely to be proud to work for the company, 7.4 times more likely to be satisfied with their current job, and 1.7 times more likely to report work-life balance. More than 50% of these companies also saw the value of OHS. Therefore, investing in OHS makes business sense.


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