 Workplace Health and Safety Queensland is excited to share this short film about managing young workers, the right start. Young workers, particularly those employed in the construction, manufacturing, transport and warehousing, agriculture and labour hire industries, are a priority group that we target in order to achieve our goal of reducing the number of work-related injuries and fatalities in Queensland. This group is a priority because about one in every 100 young workers suffers a serious injury at work in Queensland every year. Each one of those injuries happens to someone who is just starting out in their careers and it has a significant impact on them, their colleagues, families and friends. Over the last few years we've done a lot of work to better understand what makes young people more prone to getting injured at work. What we have learnt is that relying on young workers to speak up when they feel unsafe is not effective. Young people are more likely to avoid asking questions and jump straight into work to try and impress their supervisors and co-workers. So it's these people that can have the biggest influence on a young person's safety at work. This film focuses on the important role that supervisors and managers play in designing work that keeps young workers safe. It follows two young workers throughout their day and highlights the different experiences they have based on the effectiveness of their supervisor. You will also hear insights provided by industry leaders on how they are actively engaging with their young workers to keep them safe today and develop them into future leaders in health and safety. Workers aged between 15 and 24 years make up about 18% of the Queensland workforce. 4,000 young workers suffer a serious injury at work each year. That's an injury that keeps them off work for at least five days and possibly one that will affect their ability to work for the rest of their life. A serious injury affects not just the worker but their colleagues and supervisor, their family and their friends. As a supervisor or manager of a young worker, you have the greatest influence on their attitude to work safety. This means ensuring an appropriate level of supervision relevant to the tasks that they are performing. With a young worker they normally just come out of school so they want to work, they want to earn a bit of money. So they like to come in and shine and impress straight away and to impress you normally think you need to get in there and do flat out work and that sometimes could create a bit of drama. You try and open up dialogue with them around what have they actually experienced in their life. They've just been in school and then they've just joined us. We know we've got to look after them a little bit more. We have a lot of dangers in our industry. They might look dangerous until you start doing stuff like jumping down steps or what not. You've just got to be aware they'll come up to a hole instead of just taking the way down. They think we'll jump down and get it done quick and easy and that's where they find themselves in a bit of strife. Young workers have a unique risk profile. They may not notice when a situation becomes dangerous or they may misjudge the level of risk. They may be less likely to ask questions or raise safety concerns and they model their behaviour off others, whether that behaviour is right or wrong. Effective induction, proper training, regular supervision and support and mentoring is vital for a young worker to adopt the right attitude to safety and develop safe work practices. Let's follow two young workers as they go about their work day to see how the interactions with their supervisors and their experiences can differ. This is Adam. He is 19 and lives with his mum and dad. He's been working as a civil construction trainee for the last three months. His boss Ray values young workers. Ray knows that his business's safety system needs to accommodate Adam's unique risk profile to ensure he is safe at work and is productive for the business. Ray follows the tell me, show me, watch me approach. This is Ryan. He is 21 and he is a first year apprentice Tyler. He has just moved in with his girlfriend Emily. Ryan hopes one day to be his own boss with his own business. Ryan's boss Dan thinks young workers are often a hassle, slow and spend more time checking their phones than focusing on their work. Hey Adam, could you come over here for a minute please mate? I'm just going to get you to do a bit of work on the excavator today. I know you've done unit of competency but using one on site is a different story. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get you to move that pile of dirt on that flat over to here. Do you feel comfortable with that? Wonderful. We'll just start off with a pre-check. So then we'll just jump inside the cab and check all the controls because they can vary from machine to machine. And then together we're just going to go through the safe work method statement. You've probably seen these swims before on other high-risk activities. So we'll still go through just so that you understand the measures we have in place to ensure the safe operation of the excavator. So we'll be doing a few easy navigation tasks. I'll be in constant contact and watching you. Just remember the exclusion zone is marked out. If anything or anyone comes inside that zone, you need to immediately stop. Any questions? I'm ready to go. Nice enthusiasm. What do you need to do? Just be moving the excavator around or lift up the bucket. You'll be in eye contact just in case anything goes wrong. And if anyone enters the exclusion zone, I'll stop. Excellent. Great stuff. You reckon you can handle it? Yeah. Ryan, awesome that you can grace us with your presence from college. Now look, mate, we've got a lot on our plate today. Do you know how to use a tile cut? Yes. All right. What about a grinder? Yeah, yeah, we've done that. All right, good. I need you to head out to the Ute and I want you to get the tile cut on the grinder and I want you to change the blade on the grinder. Then I want you to make a dozen cuts with a 60mm trim and then I want you to cut two with a 90mm waist with a 4-inch grinder. You're going to do that, mate? Yeah. All right, good. Let's get stuck in. No mark around today, mate. We've got a lot on our plate, all right? Yeah. Hey, Joe, good stuff. Are you comfortable with that? Yeah, just stick to the plan and it's all sweet. That's it. That's what they're there for. Yeah, just do everything according to the book, okay? That means following the work plan and swims. In that way, we don't even have any near-miss incidents on this side. Okay, any questions? No, I'm all good. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to get you to do something a little bit more interesting than that. I'm just going to get you to move the materials from here over to the stock pile, okay? But first of all, I'm going to do a demo and I want you to watch that closely. I'm going to ask you to step outside the exclusion zone and just watch me carefully, okay? All right. You're all right, mate. That sounds good. But, yeah, look, we've got a lot in the garden, mate. Hang on a sec, mate. Ryan. Ryan. Mate, where's the guard for the grinder? What's going on with the glass and the earplugs? I thought you knew what you're doing, mate. Yeah, yeah, I do. It's the other guys. They didn't have it on, so I thought I didn't need it. I'm sorry, but, like... Mate, head to the back of the trailer and I want you to get the guard for the grinder and see what these other guys are up to. Okay, just focus on what you have to do. I haven't got time to babysit today, mate. I really need you to get stuck in and get this job done, okay? And then come see me, all right? Yeah. All right. Sorry about that, mate. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's got a few dams for your apprentice. Yeah, no, we'll sort it out. All good. Adam. How'd you wake up training college this week? Oh, yeah, I was okay. You know, the teachers are all right. But actually, it's really good using the simulator first, but I'd rather be doing it real stuff on-site. I'm really glad you're enjoying it. Obviously, you know, you're paying attention because you're picking things up really quickly. Oh, thank you. Hey, speaking of college, I probably should take a look at your training records before you take off, hey? Oh, yeah, that'd actually be pretty good. All right, well, a couple of them, yeah. Sweet. No worries. So, are you playing a band? All right, there you are, mate. Shipping off earlier today. All right, do you want me to just finish this up, then? Mate, a couple of guys are going to finish up the on-suite, so they'll shut up shop, but I want you to finish those cats off, put them in the corner really at the morning. Okay. So, just with this next placement, do you want to feel like... An effective form of inducting a young worker into a particular task can be using the tell-me-show-me-watch-me approach. So that involves providing a verbal and written instruction into performing the task, demonstrating how to perform it safely, and then providing feedback while watching the young worker actually demonstrating the task. With our young workers in terms of how we've managed inductions and characteristics of a supervision, we think about how they learn, their learning styles. These days, it's more around about visual rather than just general written communication. We'll try to use more visual aids, which is, oh, that's in your face rather than some guy reading from the piece of paper. So an induction is really important. It's into a particular task or using a particular piece of equipment, making sure that that work is competent in performing that work. They understand the work that's going on around them, that they're supervised. In terms of supervision, we talk about supervisors being more understanding of how young workers learn and how important it is that they actually have more interactions with the supervisor on a day-to-day basis rather than being left alone. We have to have good conversations with them. We've told you not to use your phone. Are you sure you're all right? You seem a bit distracted. It's just another level of engagement with our workforce. We know that providing mentoring and social support is really important to allow young workers to engage with their work environment socially. We have a mentoring program that we use on a regular basis, which identifies the supervisor taking more action or someone who's been in the industry a long period of time and takes them under their wing and helps them through their career, probably for the first three to six months. You can usually tell when you first meet someone, you know, perceptual, and you can usually judge out whether someone's a strong character or, you know, you're a bit more reserved. You sit down and have your one-to-one with them and watch your experience, and then we start to look at, oh, Dan, you'd probably be better going with that guy. He's a little bit withdrawn and we need to give him that a little bit more support. Whereas you get some youngsters who are very brash, know it all, done it all before, and they need a bit of temper, so we put them with one of our stronger guys who's probably a little bit more outspoken. Their values are different than older people. They've been in the industry a long period of time, so we try and leverage off those values and use them to guide them through the decision-making throughout their career. We also try not to ostracise them and highlight them by wearing different coloured hats, so they are part of the workforce. The supervisors really do to have their one-to-one relationship with them. Proactive initiatives around financial skills, mental health and well-being, physical health and well-being, even literacy, those kind of issues can impact on a young worker's health and safety. While it might not be directly a safety initiative, it has positive safety outcomes by engaging young workers within the work environment. So some of the examples that we've seen where industry is engaged with their young workers around safety has had really positive outcomes. So it's helping to understand some of the documentation and systems that they've got in place and why they're important. It's helping to understand why they do the role that they do that way and the dangers that might be associated with those roles. Through effective induction and training, appropriate supervision and good feedback, and supportive mentoring, young workers will become more aware of how to do the job safely. Engaging with young workers through consultation will also enable them to share their ideas around work health and safety and help to improve the way that safety is managed in your workplace. Unless we get in and support it as an industry the importance of the young workers and their interactions and the value they bring, recognising this, they are a little bit in that risk group of high incidents, so we can actually manage risk no different than any other risk that we see on our sites. The best advice I would give to anybody is keep open communication and keep talking and make them feel part of what we do. There is a lot to be gained from young workers and information and knowledge that they can impart to us to learn as an organisation and as an industry as well. We would like this film to be used at workplaces to start a conversation with supervisors and managers that encourages them to reflect on how they engage with their young workers about health and safety. Show the film at meetings and use it in presentations. Lead a discussion about improving the way your leaders provide inductions, training, supervision, feedback, support and mentoring.