 Welcome. I'm Mark Goodsall, New South Wales Director for the Australian Industry Group and a member of Safe Work Australia. Thank you for joining us today for our live discussion panel on leadership and work health and safety in challenging environments as part of the Australian Strategy Virtual Seminar Series and Safety Month. Firstly, I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet the Ngunnawal people. Acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to this city and this region. There's one vehicle to promote greater awareness of work health and safety initiatives. Safe Work Australia members have decided to run this series. Throughout the month we've heard from a range of speakers from CEOs to union leaders, from regulators to academics, industry representatives and health and safety professionals all sharing their particular perspectives on how to make Australian workplaces safer, healthier and more productive. Without good risk management businesses can't be productive nor can they be sustainable in the long term. Leaders must ensure health and safety is integrated into everyday business risk management. In reality boards decide strategy, strategic directions and dictate the company's values and their priorities. So today we're very privileged to hear from three leading business leaders and directors who all sit as board members on international and Australian organisations. I look forward to hearing how they work with their organisations, their CEOs and their senior management, but proactively manage business risks. Our first panelist is Anne Sherry AO, the CEO of Carnival Australia, the largest cruise ship operator in Australasia and a division of Carnival Corporation. She's also the chair of Safe Work Australia. Anne was the Chief Executive Officer Westpac, New Zealand, CEO of the Bank of Melbourne and Group Executive People and Performance and prior to that she was the first assistant secretary of the Office of Status of Women in Canberra. In addition Anne holds a number of non-executive roles including with the Sydney Airport Corporation, ING Direct Australia, the Maya Family Company Holdings, Proprietary Limited, the Australian Rugby Union and Jawan. Anne is the Chair of Cruise Lines International Southeast Asia and is also a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration and of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. In 2001 Anne was awarded a Satinary Medal by the Australian Government. In 2004 she received an Order of Australia for her contribution to the Australian community and in 2013 an ordinary Doctor of Letters from Macquarie University for her contribution to business and civil society. Our second member of the panel is Diane Smith-Gander. She is the Chairman of Global Services Contractor, Transfield Services, an ASX200 company. She's also Non-Executive Director of Westfarmers, a Commissioner of Tourism WA and has many other roles. Diane's previous and quite diverse roles have included Deputy Chairman of NBN Co, Group Executive Responsible for Business Technology Solutions and Services at Westpac Banking Corporation and Chairman of the Australian Sports Drugs Agency Board in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Diane has recently been acknowledged as one of Australia's 50 most powerful women. Our third panel member today is Penny Bingham-Haw, who is an Independent Director of DEXAS Funds Management Limited and a member of the Risk Committee and People and Remuneration Committee for DEXAS. DEXAS is one of the top 50 Australian companies listed on the ASX. She's also a Non-Executive Director of Blue Scope Steel, a top 100 ASX company with global operations. Blue Scope is a leading international supplier of steel products and solutions for the building and construction industry across the Asia Pacific. Penny is also a Non-Executive Director of Taronga Conservation Society Australia, the Port Authority of NSW and Skeg Stalinghurst School. She was previously a member of the executive team at Leighton's Holdings Limited, an ASX top 50 construction mining and property group. And finally let me introduce today's facilitator, the internationally renowned Professor David Caple, who has over 30 years experience as a Work Health and Safety Consultant. David is adjunct professor at the Centre of Ergonomics and Human Factors at La Trobe University in Melbourne and a senior research fellow from the Federation University Ballarat. He is past president of the International Ergonomics Association and a member of the Human Factors Society USA. As a certified economist in Australia and the USA, David is a fellow of the International Ergonomics Association, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia and the Ergonomics Society in both the UK and in Sweden. David has also been a longstanding member of the advisory board to the Victorian Work Cover Authority. Please join me in welcoming our panelists today. I'll now hand over to David to start today's discussion. Thank you Mark and welcome to everybody in our auditorium today and also to all those who are participating online across Australia and internationally. And as this seminar progresses you're welcome to tweet in your comments and questions on the hashtag virtual WHS link or enjoy the chat facility on the social media as this seminar progresses and afterwards. It's a privilege to be with our panel today. This is I think a first for Australia in many ways. This virtual seminar series has provided an opportunity for people across regional Australia and internationally to hear from some of our leading experts from various perspectives. We've had as Mark indicated seminars on leadership and culture from CEOs and senior managers across government and the private sector. We've also heard from the regulators and the academics. But today we're going to hear from board members. And as we know boards employ the CEOs. The board members drive with the CEO the type of leadership and culture that they would like in the industry that they operate. So it's a real privilege to work with this panel of esteemed board members to just explore what are some of the challenges that they face and how do they play their role as a board member and particularly as chairs of boards in driving that operational delivery through the CEO. And as Mark indicated their primary focus is on that strategic direction of the companies and under the legislation of course they are officers and they have to demonstrate due diligence in doing so. So we're interested to understand what actually do they do as board members in meeting that due diligence and what are the motivations behind doing that. So maybe if we could start with Anne because you've had a long history in various industry sectors with challenging environments. So maybe you could share us a little bit about what some of those challenges are and the role that you play as a board member and chair of those boards. Well I'm obviously on a very diverse set of boards and the challenges I guess the first thing to say is the challenges are very different industry by industry and I think for boards understanding what's happening inside the business is important so that you aren't just dealing with everything in the abstract or the generic. Getting underneath the skirt almost of the operational style and culture of businesses rather than just saying numbers in generic as well is very important. And I think the challenges really from a board level making sure the right things are talked about at the board the right data comes to the board the right people come to talk to the board as well as getting out from a board environment and really touching it and feeling it. So I think you know those things are easy to say but you've got to make time you've got to know the right questions to ask and you've got to do it sector by sector so an airport is obviously very different to a bank and understanding the nuance of where risk and health and safety issues sit in an airport environment is quite different to in a banking environment even though there are lots of jobs that also are common and I think that's you know that's really at the core I think of the challenge for a director. Denise? Diane. That's okay David. Well I have exactly the same dynamic that Anne's talked about with great diversity in breadth and the companies that I'm involved with but if we look at Transfield you know we have almost 20,000 people in our workforce and we do everything from driving Sydney ferries and Adelaide buses to sweeping the floors in the schools in New South Wales all the way through to doing shutdowns and turnarounds in oil and gas processing plants where if something goes wrong something's likely to blow up. We're also in really diverse geographies so we're in capital cities we're in remote communities we're in regional areas things that are very remote you know including islands like Manus and Nauru where we do work for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection so the notion of going well these are your top three risks doesn't sit really well with me as the chair of the board and of course we do have a list and we translate that list then into a set of mandatory safety rules which we think are the things that really are likely to cause big problems and so these are things like working at heights energy isolation working in confined spaces but interestingly the biggest issue for us is the number of millions of kilometres of you know that we drive every year in small vehicles and so how you as a board ensure that you've got the right mandatory safety rules that the consequences of breaking those are appropriate but that the volume of where most of the incidents are likely to occur which is windscreen time for our people are actually managed appropriately. Thanks Diane, Heddy? Yeah look I think I'm building the same thing being involved in very sort of diverse businesses and I think you know again just running through the companies you know with Blue Scope you think about the very high-risk facilities it operates so you're dealing with molten iron making at 700 degrees C in blast furnaces you've got steel mills where you've got sheet metal rolling through at a very fast speed and then you've got big heavy coils that you need to handle and get on trucks etc quite different to a dexter's property group which is really office-based workplaces where it slips trips and falls with some issues similar to Transfield in the sort of building construction sector where they do manage development of industrial properties and so working at heights and working with electricity etc but I think the big issue and it goes back to what Anne's saying it's about understanding what's happening in these businesses where the risks are and whilst you might think where the Blue Scope and a steel maker at the high-risk facilities where the accidents happen in actual fact it's very hard to ignore the safety issues when you've got molten steel in front of you but when you're working in an environment an office-type environment you don't think about a lot of those sort of risks that happen and often the worst statistics are manual strains slips and trips and another organization I'm involved with Taronga that works with wild animals I looked at their safety statistics and said oh is this all because you're working with elephants and tigers and you know quite a different sort of safety environment and in actual fact when you look through the statistics it's manual handling you know so it's the other issue of sort of severity versus volume I think is something that board members have to get their mind around so it seems that with all your different board positions you're seeing such a diverse cross-section of Australia's workforce in a whole range of static and dynamic working environments but Diane just in terms of your journey yourself you know why is it and what is it that's motivated you to be so passionate as a leader in this space well growing up as a small child my father was a boilermaker he was apprentice at 15 and my earliest memories of my father are of my father's hands he had the strongest hands of anyone I'd ever seen and not only that he could fix anything so you know as a child my dad was this huge you know figure in my life he worked very hard studying at the kitchen table to get a trades teaching qualification and in the late 60s he was teaching apprentices I guess all of them boys and it was a time when young men rebelled by having long hair and they hold it up in hair nets when they were you know doing their practical work and of course that wasn't something they like to do and one day one young man's hair came out of the hair net and he was in great danger of being completely scalped and dad took action to save that young man's scalp but at the same time was injured with a drill bit that went through his hand and and so he came home with his hand completely bandaged up and in some sort of unknowing childish way I wondered whether my dad was the dad I'd had before and I really saw the impact of that and it was something I sort of shelved for a very long time and Anne and I worked together at Westpac you know and there in branches it was again you know paper cuts manual handling you know picking up coin in the wrong way of course you know the issues of customer service you know people can harass you inappropriately and and if you're very unlucky someone will come and try to hold you up and so I sort of shelved all of that because it wasn't in that environment but then of course I've come to Transfield where a lot of the type of work is what my dad did and the penny sort of dropped and it was that that gave me the impetus to really start thinking more deeply about what it was that I could personally do to make sure that Transfield's aspiration of zero harm and everyone coming home from work safely was something that weak of me. I mean it's wonderful to see the passion that you all give in your role you've all had a journey along this way but Penny just in terms of sustaining that passion and influence over the the CEO and the company that you're overseeing what do you see some of the messages are there on what board members do or should be doing in that space? Well I think one of the first things you mentioned in your introduction that directors are responsible for appointing a CEO and I think it's actually very incumbent on the board to ensure that when they do appoint a CEO that their values are aligned with the boards and having safety as a core value is a very important one and you can't manufacture that I think you really that's a starting point is to make sure that it is deeply embedded in the CEO and the executive team but then it goes back to that thing of I think to some degree of walking the talk of getting out there and seeing what the culture is like on the shop floor it's all very well reading through statistics and asking questions in the board meeting but I think when you actually go out into the into the workplace and into the field you get a very good sense of whether what the CEO is saying at the board is actually translating into the workplace and then it does follow through you know also obviously into you know the systems and processes and reporting and I wouldn't want to underestimate the importance of that because you do actually find some interesting things that come out if you get the right information if you don't get the right information you don't see things that you perhaps would otherwise but there's no doubt that you know safety is about people and having the right safety culture is fundamental and you get a much better understanding that when you're actually out talking to the people on the shop floor and making sure that what the CEO is saying in the boardroom actually translates right through to the people on the graph so and in that area of metrics and the fact that you do get lots of reports you get lots of graphs and lots of data and there's the cliche that if you can't measure it you can't manage it but how do you see the useful data what are the inputs to a board that does give them that perception of what really is going on I look there's a couple of things that first I wouldn't mind picking up a point that Penny just made which is at the end of the day all of us are involved in businesses that employ good people and people shouldn't have as a consequence of working for us injuries that are preventable so I think there's a you know the core of all of this while we talk about the the sort of high-end piece of it and you know Diane's story about her father is a case in point it's actually about people preventing people being hurt if that's and we all share that as a responsibility how do you get underneath the metrics is a really good question I mean I I'm really strong on metrics I think if you don't measure it then nobody thinks it's that important inside businesses boards send really important messages into businesses about what they want to see and I think the challenge with health and safety metrics is you know we've got some standard measures that we'd all use that are relative lost term sorry lost time injury rates and so on but that doesn't tell you enough it tells you whether you're good relative to others it sort of gives you a general metric so I'm not just you know saying it's not worthy but I think there's there's much better ways of bringing it to life and if I give you example that's actually my day job not one of my boards but we started when we started to think about slips trips and falls on ships so I you know manage moving engineering which has its own challenges we actually started to hotspot locations and so the LTIF wasn't too bad and we're talking about customers as well as employees as well and when we hotspot at it we actually found there were three or four really hot locations and we would not have picked that up if we'd just looked at the general data and as a result of that you can hone in on fixing so then it causes you to dig a bit bit further saying why there and I mean it wouldn't surprise anybody to know but one of those spots on the ships is near where the pool water where people step out of swimming pools and so it's wet and the surface we had near there got slippery because it was wet so we thought well we got that surface why don't we fix the surface and as a result of that you actually take a hotspot out of it stops being a hotspot and in in lots of the businesses now that I'm involved in from a governance point of view that same sort of dynamic of let's look at the data let's look at what that tells us let's look at the categories but where is where do we need to dig further and find or map or do something slightly different that actually leads us to fixing it not just saying well we want that to go down it's we want those numbers to go down but how are you going to do it and what's the mechanism so I think metrics at a number of levels are really important there's the macro data are we better or worse than everybody else but that still means we've got problems what are the categories and then what sits underneath each of those categories that allows you to start to find solutions and I think Diane you've talked about that burrowing down in some of your projects so and this is really interesting that as board members you it's not just the data it's getting down and actually understanding a bit deeper if you've got any examples of where you've been involved in something spot on when she says that you need to understand that the topics that you are interested in as a board are going to completely fascinate your management team and particularly the CEO that goes through to the sort of questions that you ask and also the way that you ask those questions because you can set some rabbits running in the organization and give some signals that you don't intend to give if you're not very nuanced about the way you go through that exercise of asking questions but I think one of the most important set of questions to ask so the sort that you ask when you're actually out in the field and I remember going out to an nbn work site and asking the supervisor of a work crew that were doing a job where they had to open up pits and pipes and then determine whether they needed to expose more of that to perhaps fix breaches in the pipes and so forth and they had to rely on you know dial before you dig statistics information that was on drawings that they were getting from a couple of partner organizations and so I you know of course was thinking that what they would be telling me was their biggest issue was around the potential for striking a gas main or something of that order but what I was actually told was that because the processes way back in the design shop which was remote to the site were not good they were constantly having to check and every time I have to check I have to send my team to sit under a tree and the team goes sit under a tree and they get on to their social media on their devices and then when we finally have the idea of what it is we're going to do next I've got to get their attention back again so the stop start nature of work that was created by poor design and partnering processes back at head office was the biggest risk and if I had not asked the question in a very open ended way I never would have got that answer yes it's a great example actually because it it goes to the power of getting out and about which we've all talked about because you can ask general questions and get general answers and it doesn't really tell you enough but if you ask the right question you unearth stuff that probably even inside the organization people have made assumptions rather than ask the direct question as well it's a fresh set of eyes isn't it just going out there and I think also when you're involved in different industries and organizations things you've learned in different industries you spend a lot of time in the construction industry and you go into a manufacturing environment it's different but there are things that you've learned that you suddenly think why are they doing it that way there is another way that you can look at it and I think you know safety is not a competitive issue I think it is very much something where we should all be sharing as much information as possible of that we just see we've got a couple of tweets coming on our virtual hashtag so what metrics do you report in annual reports this is from Henry so thank you Henry for your tweet just because I think it's it is a very good indicator of how much you think about that and we've got Triffer in our total recordable injury frequency rate and it's on not the first page which describes our business but it's on the second page in the top right hand corner but we go through business by business and then do break down into further numbers and I also think you know you look at the cover of the Transfield Annual Report and that's clearly a circumstance where you've got a bunch of guys leaving a job they're all in their PPE and so forth and we have a great deal of care to make sure that that picture is giving the right flavour in terms of the way that people regard safety within Transfield do one of you want to talk about your annual reports rather than specific I mean I think probably most annual reports don't have safety on page two so congratulations on that I think most annual reports virtual annual reports now would have safely reported and they're actually quite strong guidelines on the content of annual reports but wearing my safe work chair hat I think one of the things we've been talking about is partnering with the organizations that give guidance on annual reports about the quality of the reporting because I think you can never stand still in this space nor any other and I think you know if someone's doing a better job or has taken it to another level there's the opportunity to start to put that into reporting guidelines as well and start thinking about how we bring it more to life you know what is it that people who read annual reports want to see and know about businesses that would give them confidence that we're worth investing in because you know the audience for an annual report is very different to the audience for say an in-house employee report so getting the messaging and the data right for your audiences I think is a continuing challenge and one we need to keep looking at I was just going to say also I know it's more than annual reports I mean annual reports have been getting slimmed down and you know there are not many people who do glossy annual reports anymore so I think well of course it's very environmentally friendly sorry didn't mean to be offensive that you know and I think as Ann said we all report lost time injury frequency rates and medically treated injury frequency rates etc which you know some people understand what all that means do we benchmark it against our industry or other companies and then there are all those sort of conversations around all the other sort of lead indicators that that we look at and I know certainly in some of the businesses I'm involved with you know we have a range of different lead indicators that we do in different businesses because different businesses within the overall scope of operations have different issues they're looking at I mean sadly one of the things that came out of a fatality in a steel mill in China was the complacency of someone that had worked handling big heavy hot rolled coil for years and years and years and looking at all of that one of the things that came out of it was the importance of getting the plant manager to walk around the facility first thing in the morning because it happened first thing in the morning maybe half asleep I don't know being complacent about something that they've done for the last 10 20 years but some of those things so now we actually measure in some of those plans is time that plant managers spend on the shop floor as a lead indicator I mean there's a theme already emerging that walk the talk is a real issue for managers and board members to actually know the stories understand the risks not just the data of what went wrong but the emerging systems of work that are happening in the nature of the business that you're running Diane just in terms of the investors and the sort of interest that they have and and to see your business as part of an ethical supply chain how do you engage with them about the the ethical side of what you do and and how that can be supported by the board well it's certainly my experience that as Anne said proxy advisors and others in sustainability groups are very interested in what it is that boards are doing around the topic of safety and it's a really good question to consider how far do you extend that barrier you know of your or your boundary I should say of your organization so if you think about the Westfarmers businesses we do a huge amount of direct sourcing particularly out of Asia and everyone will have seen and been saddened by tragedies that have occurred in some of those apparel factories in a particularly Rana Plaza a couple of years ago and it's just not good enough to say well our boundary finishes at the edge of our store or at our distribution center because even if you want to define it that way your customers are not going to define it that way your shareholders are not going to define it that way and the court of public opinion will certainly mark you down and in any case it's just not the right thing to do and so you know Westfarmers businesses were amongst the first to sign the fire and safety accords in Bangladesh and we've been amongst the first to publish full lists of the factories that we work with so when that came out we by the way didn't have any work done in the Rana Plaza and the issue there was a factory put in a building that really shouldn't have been that wasn't rated and shouldn't have been used as a factory but having an oversight which in Westfarmers happens at the Audit Committee where we have an ethical sourcing report that comes to the board a couple of times a year and each and every one of our factories and there are more than 4,000 of them is rated as to its compliance but it's a very interesting question because if you were to say well Bangladesh just doesn't have the right approaches and regulatory frameworks we should just exit that but there are 20 million people in that country that rely on that industry many of them women for which there is no other potential work and so I really think it's our responsibility to go that one step further and to try to have some impact and change the conditions there and I think that is happening so I'm very comfortable that we extend our boundary way past the door of the target store of the loading dock at the distribution centre and it's interesting a lot of the literature is linking this corporate social responsibility debate to good health and safety and I'm just interested whether and whether you'd like to comment on that relationship between that being a good corporate citizen and linking that to health and safety outcomes for your own look I think it's part of it you know good being a good corporate citizen now is really proxy for thinking about not just the quality of what you're doing in your own business but your impact on the world around you and whether it's that's your supply chain whether it's customers whether it's your environmental footprint it's it's really we've gone past the idea that you could just talk about your business as though you operated in a bubble and everything else somehow was extraneous and health and safety is a critical piece of that I mean clearly your employees are one of your most critical stakeholders but also extending it through your supply chain and I mean it's a it's much more challenging in a business context it's nice and if you could wrap yourself in a bubble it would be very neat and that's the way it used to be done but it's just not possible now and I think as more of us are involved in businesses as well that are global extending that reach outside even the context of an Australian environment you know we're health and safety and being a good corporate citizen is a broader topic of conversation but all of us are involved in Asia in countries where having a job is the most critical thing for lots of people let alone worrying about you know all the things that we talk we're talking about now actually doing that in a way that improves our in a sense improves the relationships we have and improves the work life for people who are part of our supply chain without killing it and I think that's an evolving that's an evolving issue for all of us and but seeing it understanding it being clear about what we you know what is required whether that's insurance you know there's a lot of stuff you can put in place that actually step changes that quite quickly but I think it does make our businesses more complex but I mean potentially the extension of Australian businesses into lots of developing countries is a good thing for those countries because it will force change more quickly and and yet it will still will still be able to leverage a skill base that perhaps we don't have sure is as easily available to us here so I think I think it's a given you know being a good corporate citizen these days is not a nice to do or a theoretical notion it's deeply embedded in all of the conversations we would have in our businesses and we might define it slightly differently you know the depending on your industry it probably has a slightly different feel but at the end of the day all of us have to do it yeah look it's all about good business isn't that really I think most of the organizations I've been involved with have had quite broad geographical spreads and worked in all sorts of countries and you know whether it's you say it's within your workforce where there's all sorts of issues when you've got different regulatory environments and different cultural attitudes to safety and reporting and that sort of thing you need to work with that but increasingly we're outsourcing labour in all shapes and forms as Australian companies and we undoubtedly not only have an obligation but I think it is to our our benefit of our business downstream that we end up with suppliers who can work in the in a safe way in a productive way that that we want them to because you know and part of that might be about pre-qualifying you know contractors or suppliers but helping them to actually meet the standards that you want increasingly is important and I think the board does have a very strong obligation to make sure that management is is doing that and the only way you can do that apart from talking about around the boardroom table is going out and talking to people. Okay good and now we have another tweet so this one is from WorkSafe ACT how do you keep the response by the business to safety questions pursued by the board constructive rather than protective it's an interesting question yeah it's a very good question and I think one of the things that strikes to that is the topic we talked about before about how you actually ask the questions one of the things we haven't talked about yet is the issue of cost you know and what a safety systems cost and is that appropriate and that's a question I'd never ask because my great view is that safe work is productive work which is likely to be less costly work and the cost of incidents we know just escalates on and on but if you think about being asked about safety in a way that asked too quickly about the costs that are involved I don't mind the question of are we investing enough in our safety systems you know going down down that route it's a very good one but you could see if you ask the cost question in the wrong way you would immediately get the business running around trying to think about how they could take cost out of the work that they're doing around the safety of the organisation rather than asking the question about how the total cost of the system is impacted by improving safety outcomes which is the right question for board to ask Penny sometimes the other way to ask that is about I think simplification of systems because what can happen sometimes and where cost cannot come in used to sort of administration and I think there's always that difficult balance between compliance and culture and so I think part of the questions you can ask is are our systems and our procedures simple enough that people understand them and that they work because if they get too complicated and then can be sort of onerous from a cost perspective sometimes they don't work anyway because people are too busy filling out forms and what I call doing the tick and flick of just making sure that they filled out the forms rather than actually getting out and doing the right thing so it's been interesting in this series of seminars there's been two from the Netherlands from Patrick Hudson who's published a lot of work in this area and he talks about the ladder and of people moving towards the sort of culture you're describing and one of the things that Mark McCabe spoke about in a previous seminar here was that some organisations when they this protective mode is that they produce all of these documentation systems and it's if you like it's at their defence to say well we have the policies we have the procedures we do all of this where the debate was well that's lovely but let's look at the practice of what actually do you do and I gather around that what you're saying is unless you get out there and convince yourself that this is what we do those systems are there for the benefit of those who develop them and use them for what they're there and I think companies have you know there's lots of good intention in businesses with the development of systems and processes and procedures all of which are really important but if no one reads anything and if on the job no one actually refers to them then you know it's good work that hasn't been that effective and maybe it is too complex and maybe it's too theoretical or whatever it is so you only know that when you go out and have a look I think the other thing is whenever things go wrong in in any of the businesses I'm involved in doing a really good analysis of what happened often uncovers a sort of systemic things that that maybe you don't see or you know to the question that was asked that people have been a bit too protective they've given you the data and it looks good and the processes and procedures look good but in fact if something when things go wrong you find out you know Penny gave the story people don't go around and actually check that things are all right or it happens with maybe the group of people you think are the most informed and best skilled but they've been doing the same job for such a long time that they've just zoned out and the alert things they should be alert to you know have just dropped down their pecking order or you know there's a whole lot of different explanations in that and so I think two things one is touching it feeling it actually asking questions I think helps people feel as though it's valued and therefore you don't have to be protective but secondly when things go wrong I actually also like to ask the question about what was the total cost of that so let's not just focus on that issue and it didn't it wasn't really that bad it's what happened to our workers comp premiums what happened to this what you know you start to what were the real costs and then you start to then ask the question have we spent enough and that shut and then you unlock a bit more you know well maybe if we did it this way there's some practices procedures yeah they're good but nobody reads them because they're you know they're this and they keep sending us updates and everyone's forgotten to put them in the folder or the you know but you know that's going on so it helps you unpick it a bit more and hopefully encourage discourage people being protective or you know but covering and much more open to well maybe we could do it a different way Diane you've talked about the equipping the board themselves to be more competent in this space and the relationship they have with the CEO and the health and safety professional do you want to tell us a little bit about how you see that relationship working well I think you know a lot of the legislation lays out a roadmap for the things you are supposed to do and as Anna said if you just march down that and give it service it's not going to be particularly useful but if you really deploy a system like that I think it can be incredibly helpful so we try to make sure that you know once a year we do the training that demonstrates that we have looked at the safety system and we've had the conversation about it but it's not a 20-minute session so we can tick the box and we have the real question of you know our aspiration is for zero harm do we actually believe it as a board that that's possible to achieve and where are the various parts of our business in being able to move towards that journey for zero harm to be something that will happen as a result of the way we run the business rather than just being a lucky chance that you know we you know dodged a bullet over the last period of time and I think that's the way that you know as a board you really do demonstrate that you're not just ticking a compliance box and you're asking the sorts of questions that Anne you know has teed up around getting all the way down to the bottom of are we investing enough in safety and Penny do you want to comment about look I mean I think the conversations around safety the board level it's like any conversations around risk it really comes back to the environment around the board table where there's a feeling of I suppose mutual trust with with management and also that in fact directors are there wanting to help if you like we're not there to try and find fault in the system but to try and understand what's going on and perhaps from having a broader experience in other industries offering some suggestions and I think even in organizations like blue scope that have a phenomenal record on safety you know at a global level a lot of it's about complacency and how you refresh it and what a ways that you can refresh the messages about safety you know we've got down to this very low level of lost time injury rates how do we keep it there you know as you say can you actually get to zero and if you can't how do you still keep it at that level because if you if you do become complacent it just starts kicking up again sure and so in some ways the it gets and it become an even harder task when you're good at it is how do you keep being good at it yes well let's explore that a bit further but we have another tweet so this one's from Richard have you ever felt that your focus on WHS makes you less competitive than other businesses No I shouldn't make you more competitive I mean transport is a contractor so the things that Penny talked about before in terms of outsourcing and the customer's requirement for safety metrics you know if we aren't able to demonstrate a certain level of competence we're not going to be a valid bidder so that's sort of step number one for us in in being competitive as a business but the the costs of non-safe practices you know are just so much greater than the cost of an appropriate safety system and I think one area where there's still a great deal of work to be done in Australia is around designing safety in to processes and we certainly found that at NBN you know there was lots of information that you could get around you know hazard management and so forth but not as much information around how do you design your processes and practices in a way that makes them very safe but the more we dug down into it the more it was reminding me of work I had done in my very early consulting careers in total quality management where you're designing quality into systems it really is exactly the same thing and I know well that a quality system always costs less to operate than one which isn't fit for purpose so that link between productivity and safety for me is just intuitive and natural and so I think a safe business is always going to be more competitive and I agree with them sorry I think that issue of productivity is really important as well and it goes to the point I made earlier about if you don't if you don't understand the cost of not doing it well then you'll think that doing it cheaply you know is not a bad thing at a point in time but it's not true workplaces that are safer much more productive and and having continuity of and healthy work a work healthy workforce is much more productive but the other point in that is that the value of reputation in business is very significant and you know I've worked in businesses where that's had to be built or rebuilt and you only have to be in that situation once to understand how important the value of reputation is so the idea that somehow you're uncompetitive because you're safer is only might be true at a point in time if you're looking at a slither of one second in a day but let me tell you the moment that something goes wrong and you've got reputational impact and all of us as directors are absolutely thinking about that all the time then you just know you made a bad call so I don't think there's debate about less safe workplaces or less safe organizations somehow being cost competitive or better you can't talk about that anymore it's just not the way it works because I think they're less productive and you've got much more risk around reputation do you want to add in the comment that you've made previously about agility into this space and what do you mean by that well I think you know in all businesses in the 21st century you've got much faster competitive pressure you've got much faster disintermediation happening you've got much more impact of technology you know we're operating in very complex environments and I think agility is a core competence now in successful business and that's being able to anticipate change react to it know what's coming down the the pike really and health and safety is a core part of that you know it's the idea that you could be you know completely focused on technology innovation in your business but not actually thinking that much about your health and safety systems is a complete contradiction I think our total business environments require us to be constantly looking at what we can do better to be thinking about how we take good ideas from other places let's not just look at our own individual lines of business let's look at what's happening across a broad set of businesses and that's one of the great values of in fact having directors who bring insight from other sectors who are working across sectors at the same point in time I think it helps with that business agility and you know one of the great advantages and I think the most successful businesses as we look forward will be businesses who master agility and that's across the full span of their operation okay now we have another tweet and then we're going to invite the audience to ask a question as well so this one's from Todd how do you transition words into action love the commitment of the directors doesn't always mean that action with other competing priorities Penny do you want to make a comment about how do we transition these words into action well I think we've talked a lot today about that anyway but I do think it comes down to priority and we were sort of talking amongst ourselves earlier about it depends where safety sits in the whole conversation around the boardroom I mean when our chief executive starts the board conversation in his CEO report with talking about safety first before he gets on to the financials then you know that it is a priority and it's not just words it's action so I think there's you know there is a whole range of ways that you can do that where it sits in the agenda whether you have a dedicated safety committee you know who's on that safety committee there are so many ways that you can do it and we've I mean we've really been hammering the point I think today about getting out in the field as well and I think as directors you also need to walk the talk yourself so that people can see that it actually means something to the directors and I like telling the story about walking on stairs that when you join blue scope the big rule is you do not talk on stairs and you hold on to the handrail and I always remember our chairman telling me he was quite embarrassed when he first joined the company and he was out in the field talking to someone on the stairs and a blue collar worker came up said excuse me mate no talking on the stairs to the chairman of the company and that just shows that safety is working it doesn't matter whether you're the chairman of the company or who you are it's about about what you're doing and I think we all have an obligation to you know not talk on our mobile phones when we're working around work sites or we're in the car um you know not to speed when we're driving you know all those things I think our actions speak louder than words and small things matter small things matter and uh and that because that sends signals out into organization so the more directors and senior management as well uh do the right things and uh I went I first joined the port of Sydney airport uh like you know many pedestrians at the airport crossing against the light seems to be um quite common and in fact it's one of the areas where there's a lot of injuries and so you know my first day I could feel myself standing thinking okay this is not what I do anymore you know because it was and I mean even that that's a sort of quite challenging thing personally because I I and you know in my own day-to-day environment uh when I'm on work sites I would never do it and suddenly I've realized that actually is now my work site environment that I've just been using as a customer before so I don't cross against the lights and I say to other people you know stop so they all think I'm as mad as a meet accident hey but I know people people watch after the signals and what you do yourself so I think there's something about you know it's not just walking the talk it's doing it as well this is a really interesting dynamic because you just talked about the work site versus the non-work site and I think we really know that we've moved into real felt leadership of safety when it just happens all the time that's right um so we had a um safety forum at our north Sydney headquarters in transfer and the CFO gave the talk and he talked about you sort of know if you go to change the light bulb and instead of standing on the kitchen chair you actually go and get a proper ladder and you ask someone else in the family to spot for you whilst you change the light bulb but you might think well that's going to be a bit ridiculous but that had an impact on me and I have a piece of grass in the back of my yard that's about as big as the stage that we're sitting on and because you clearly wouldn't get a motor mower for that I've got a pushing mower that I bought at Bunnings so I get out there and I push my pushing mower every Sunday morning it takes about eight minutes a week but since listening to Vince talk about standing on the ladder I now push my pushing mower with a pair of gloves some safety glasses and some slip-on steel caps um and my manicure is in much better shape but it's enough the right thing to be doing that's exactly right so yes I think it is incorporating it yes and in fact I've had some people working on uh as part of a renovation on the house so I'm now out there in the morning saying goggles you know and again they they're going who is this woman like who cares and I'm like well not at my place you know that's so I do think it is incorporating it into everything you do okay let's just take a question uh this lady here just like to introduce yourself please um Belinda Cassin from the Commonwealth Department of Health um we've talked a lot today about industry sectors where things blow up and crash um and obviously those sorts of safety issues are really visible can we talk a little bit about how boards get visibility on invisible things like psychosocial hazards what sort of things what sort of conversations are you having at your board levels about these sorts of um safety factors in the workplace okay I would like to comment about the invisible risks like the psychosocial ones yeah no I'm happy to do that because obviously West Farmers as Australia's largest product sector employer you know has a couple of hundred thousand people um and a hundred thousand of them working in the coals business most of them with direct customer contact and we have convenience stores and liquor stores um we have hotels and these are can often be targets of some sort of violence be it theft or people that are you know under the influence of a recreational drug or alcohol um and so for us it's not actually invisible and I think this is one of the powers of boards and diversity because the fact that I see that in the West Farmers environment makes me ask the question at Transfield where we are of course very worried about things that drop from heights and things that blow up about well you know what is the mental health of the workforce like and how are we doing around the support systems that we provide people you know when times may be tough you know and um you know I am constantly surprised that the Australian economy isn't more resilient than it actually is and so I think there is a lot of uncertainty and concern for people I've worked these days about the security of tenure of their job and so forth I think it's very important that you manage those things as well um so for me it's that very visible stuff at West Farmers that helps me manage the stuff that's less visible in other places I think the issues of things like sorry of um issues like bullying as well are well discussed in boardrooms now too I mean those those sorts of um hazards you know and behaviors that once you know well that's just poor management or that's something or that's workers not getting on I think has much more visibility and conversation so there's a whole stretch of issues that I think most of us are dealing with even though we've talked about the big bang things I wouldn't read that as that we're not focusing on the broader set of issues whether it's mental health or drug and alcohol abuse or bullying and the impacts of that in workplace I think all of that is live we're going to have to go to our last questions we're running out of time and apologies to those who've been tweeting if you want to keep tweeting uh we'll try to make sure that there's a response provided back to you um there's two questions I want to ask you all before we finish one of them relates to this concept of strategic due due diligence hard to say um but for a board member due diligence is inherent in your role and of course your strategic organization so it's really looking at how do you um seek your compliance with this strategic due diligence model and in that context what do you see as some of the future challenges for Australia because collectively you cover such a broad cross section of industry in Australia that we in the work health and safety profession if you could call it that need to be thinking about in the next steps forward um so that we learn from you those things that you may not have had a chance to speak about up until this point um so Diane do you want to start and just maybe wrap up what you would like to cover off with those areas well in terms of strategic due diligence I think we've talked about um you know understanding the culture around your board and that being a very big indicator of whether you're going to be able to get to a more strategic approach to the diligence that's necessary to have a good safety system we've talked about the cost factor I think a lot of it is about whether you're getting a real feeling that the business is working to design safety in rather than just make a system that's compliant and ticks the regulatory boxes um so if you're having interesting conversations about as Penny talked about the compartmentalization of work and outsourcing and so forth and you're being agile enough to respond to that you know you're being strategic you know if you're having really good conversations about you know gen x gen y gen whatever's coming next you know and their attachment to devices and this sort of fractionalization of attention that individuals have then you know you're being strategic about your due diligence yeah okay Penny yeah look I think um Diane's right on the money there I mean it is about having good conversations about the traditional stuff like dreams and injuries but it's looking at you know when you go into new businesses new new areas of work of what are the sort of safety challenges going to be there I think you know are important and getting safety managers to talk to people um you know talk to their competitors I said I don't think I mean safety can be a competitive advantage but it's not a competitive issue we should all as a collective be looking at how we can improve safety and learn from other industries and that sort of thing so but it does come down to I think having good conversations on the strategic due diligence I think I guess in just in addition to that the idea of looking at the changes in our external environment and starting to think about how they will impact our workplaces before they do I think is critical and the point about you know attention on devices is a classic where we know that it's killing people on the roads you know we know that that it is already having big impact and we haven't really we do it too reactively so I think the whole issue of you know strategic health and safety strategic due diligence for organizations is starting to imagine what those things do to workplaces and then what do we need to do to adapt and I think probably one of the big issues still for us is a lot of work structures really haven't changed that much it's very you know our most of our work structures were designed 50 to 100 years ago and were designed for very different environments and I think that's still that's one of the almost undiscussed issues which I think over the next five to ten years we're just going to have to get our heads around because we already have a lot of people working from home for example operating in very different environments we've already got a lot of people working online in different time zones and then we've got the vast bulk of people working sort of eight to six with our structures around them and trying to balance stuff that is causing health mental health issues and a whole lot of other stuff so I just think as I look into the future I still think there's a bigger conversation about the structure of workplaces and work and what that then means for broader health and safety and you know that's maybe a conversation we can have next year good oh well that's probably an appropriate time to wrap up and I'd like you to join me in thanking our panel for a very stimulating conversation and thank you to all those who have been watching online there is a feedback process online if you'd like to complete that afterwards and keep the tweets coming in so thank you to our panelists thank you to our participants in the auditorium and those that are watching online and this draws this seminar to a close