Questions to ask yourself and your leaders
When it comes to workplace health, safety and wellbeing starting from scratch can be overwhelming. There is a lot to think about and prioritise. Most importantly, getting it right for the particular organisation in question is crucial. You may be starting over if you are a safety professional joining a new organisation, if your organisation is expanding into a new area or if you are part of a new organisation.
Here are a few things to consider when starting from scratch or restructuring. Consider these questions on your own, and then sit down with your organisational leaders and work through the questions together. This will give you your leader’s perspectives, and more of an in depth understanding about where the organisation is at in regards to health, safety and wellbeing.
Questions to consider include:
- What type of safety culture do we want?
- What do you want to stand for in relation to Safety and Wellbeing?
- What will we commit to in relation to safety and wellbeing?
- Does the organisation have a WHS framework?
- Is there a health, safety and wellbeing vision, if not, what would should it to look like?
- How can we engage and align the executive on the desired vision?
- How do we ensure we comply with WHS legislation?
- What is our WHS risk profile?
- Do officers (leaders) of the organisation understand their due diligence and personal obligations e.g. understanding the organisational risk profile and controls that are in place including incidents reported and resources allocated?
- What type of WHS Management System do we need to meet initial and ongoing legislative requirements?
- Who needs to be involved? Who should we have in the room to talk about our WHS culture, mission and responsibility? E.g. officers, board members, executives and decision makers.
- Are our workers compensation requirements fully understood?
- Do we have adequate resources to support our WHS vision and commitments?
- How do we create a process to check the impact we are having?
If you’d like more advice about how to ensure your organisation is meeting its WHS legislative requirements or how to look at and work on your organisational safety culture, we have some great tools and advice – get in touch!
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