 Hi, I'm Kali Emory, Group Manager of the Workplace Relations Implementation and Safety Group in the Department of Employment. I'm also the Commonwealth member on the Safe Work Australia members board. Thank you for joining us today for a presentation by Professor Dennis Els as part of the virtual seminar series on the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy. Firstly, I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, the Ngunnawal people. I acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region. I am delighted to introduce Professor Dennis Els as today's presenter. Dennis was formerly Dean of Engineering and Science and Pro Vice-Chancellor responsible for organisational development and change at the University of Ballarat. He was the Chair of the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission from 1996 to 2002, a predecessor of Safe Work Australia. As the NOSH Chair, he was instrumental in the development of the National OHS Strategy 2002 to 2012, which is the precursor of the current Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2012 to 2022. Dennis' contribution to Work Health and Safety is truly inspirational. He developed the first Australian standard for OHS management systems and improved the quality of auditing processes and performance measures. Since 2006, Dennis has combined his academic position with a strong business focus as the Group General Manager Sustainability, Safety and Health at Brookfield Multiplex Australasia. His role consists not only of increasing the focus on safety across Brookfield Multiplex, but also representing the company as a board member of the Cooperative Research Centre for Low-Carbon Living based at the University of New South Wales. Please join me in welcoming Professor Dennis Els. Thank you, Colin. Thank you very much and it's a great honour to be able to reflect on the progress that we've made as a community. The opportunity is quite rare that you get asked to sort of do this reflection on the past, the present and look into the future and then highlight some challenges and where the opportunities may lay. And in doing that preparation, it was really quite rewarding to see the progress that has been made by us as a community and that's a vast number of people putting their efforts over a long period of time to improving the health, the safety of people at work. Now, I think probably what I should just say that is that I've looked at the data and of course the data is not necessarily very good for working out what we've achieved in the health area. It's much stronger in trauma and in the area of fatalities. I think we've probably in the last 30 years reduced the fatality rate by around about 70% in this country and that's about as good as I've seen elsewhere in the world. I think the German Beruf Gnossenschaft over 30 years got about the same reduction and that was from the 60s through to the 90s and that was a period in which they had this wonderful combination of focus on health and safety but also productivity and that all done within industry sectors and it was a lovely model that their structure enabled them to use. But we may have achieved a lot but there's still much to do. I mean if we look at the moment we've probably got a couple of hundred traumatic fatalities per year in this country. We've probably got about three times that number, 600 new mesothelioma cases per year and we've probably got ten times the number of traumatic fatalities that are occurring as work related fatalities due to occupational cancers, respiratory disease and other matters that we would put down as occupational disease. So there is a huge amount of work still to be done and I think it's really important that the successes that we may have had in targeting trauma are reflected upon and then applied to the real challenge ahead which is in the occupational disease arena. So a lot of people have contributed to where we are today and they've contributed over many, many years. I mean if we look at the, nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong. If we just look at a sort of timeline for me, I don't actually go back to 1830s to reflect but for me the industrial revolution and then in the wake of that starting to have inspectors with a few people riding around on horseback paid for the hay but other than that it was a calling amongst those people to do good work and those early factory inspectors in the United Kingdom, the work going on in Germany and in the United States are very, very important work and in those days there are also a lot of sort of interest in health matters and I wonder why we've not made as much progress in health as I think we have in fatalities and I think part of it are the difficulties of measurement and as a physicist myself, I got into occupational health and safety via physics and an interest in noise and occupational deafness. So for me the sort of grand old man of occupational disease is Thomas Bar, a Glasgow ear surgeon. I married to a wonderful Gleswegian woman and so I can imagine how he may have sounded it but he in those days he couldn't go out and as I was able to access specialised equipment for measuring hearing and noise so he had to improvise and the improvisation was to use his pocket watch and he would just use a pocket watch and a yard stick wait till the person could say that they could hear the ticking of the watch out came the yard stick and measure the inches of hearing. So he had three groups of workers so it's early epidemiology and he had letter carriers, iron moulders, foundrymen, they would be called in those days and most of them were men, boiler makers, in actual fact it's interesting I don't think the language was as sexist then because the jobs were all going to men so you didn't have to specify you see letter carriers it's not postmen, iron moulders it's interesting I think anyway but now the letter carriers that's not 5,674 inches of hearing for one postman that's distributed across two years and a hundred people so you're talking of what was that about 28 inches away or 70 centimetres by the time you get down to the iron moulders you're down to about 16 inches rather or about 40 centimetres and by the time you get into the boiler makers you're practically squashing it into some of their ears it is about three and a half inches away on average sort of nine centimetres. Now back in those days they had ear plugs they had disposable ear plugs they had this new material called plasticine that they mixed up with cotton wool and made themselves disposable ear plugs but one they didn't have was real controls of an engineering type or controls at source it was all down to the individual. The as I say the letter carriers were probably all men but the factory inspectors were also all men and over here it was the same by about 1893 the first female inspector in the UK was appointed. South Australia of course always the lead in innovation by 1894 had appointed our first female inspector Augusta Zado and she was an advocate for women she set up the first women's trade union over in Adelaide and really did a vast amount of work on the clothing trade and the sweatshops and she died about 1896 while preparing a report on the early factory tax. She's still commemorated by South Australia's Augusta Zado scholarship which is sort of introduced on her centenary of her appointment I think and for anyone that is wishing to apply it has an interesting sort of requirement that is for individuals who have contributed to women's health and safety so a very very powerful advocate and I think the trade unions have over the years you know had a very important role to play as advocates of this subject of health and safety. Now these early pioneers they were quite quick to recognize that you really wanted to find a control that was sort of upstream and was was going to be technical in nature rather than just trying to rely on on people to change what they do and the earliest example I've got is in the work of Sir Thomas Legge who was the first medical inspector of factories back in 1897 in the UK and much later back in the 1930s so he was probably giving the equivalent of this lecture you know as they they give you the opportunity to speak on these issues before you fall off the perch you know and and anyway he's he came out with a number of axioms and it's it's it's really interesting I think to see what he was wanting to to tell people about. The first one was unless and until the employer has done everything and everything means a good deal the workman can do next to nothing to protect himself although he is naturally willing enough to do his share so it sort of shows that it's it's both need to be playing their part secondly if you can bring an influence to bear external to the workman that is one over which he can exercise no control you'll be successful and if you cannot or do not you will never be wholly successful and so there was this push to go upstream and engineer out problems and you then had in you know that got expressed in a number of different ways by the the 1930s it was within occupational hygiene it was called a hierarchy of control um and we tended to use that term and it's it's embedded in our legislation today now it's it's I think this is really important because it's it's a lasting legacy of that sort of period of focus on the technical part I've now got and now realize that of course this system of a red dot is really a method of measuring how nervous you are when you're speaking it's a lovely it's a lovely system right so now so the idea is that if you are um controlling things by eliminating substituting isolating or engineering out then you've got more effective and more robust controls if you're relying on administrative controls or personal protection then you're less robust and you're going to need more supervision in order to make sure that that works I mean it's fairly obvious but it's central to much of what we do and you know there's paper published last year by Michael Bem who who actually attributes Australia's national strategy and it's involved its focus on safety and design as changing the US in their approach to health and safety because he says he could get no interest whatsoever in safety and design in the US until we became so open about its importance at a sort of a government level now Michael last year published a paper in which he looked at what was it something like 250 investigations of incidents across about seven organizations and what he found was that if we were to go and look at the administrative and personal protection area down this end then the recommendations of 80 percent 80 percent of the investigations had focused on that as where to control of these 250 or I think it was 247 preliminary but anyway of these incidents there were only 20 percent where the focus was up here now that's a challenge for us I think a real challenge as we go forward and you know that technical emphasis or focus has been followed by a focus I think given quite a push forward through the 19 sort of 50s after the sort of second world war and the involvement of a lot of engineers getting involved in engineering problems out of the workplace and doing the right thing in that sense I think the the engineers started to focus on the human factor and I think they started to see people as a problem and you've got to engineer around those people I mean it's a good concept in one sense I think and it reflects what Thomas Lager had been saying about taking the control away from the individual but I think there's also a bit of a problem I mean the I ran a department one time a school of engineers and I remember the the joke at the time was you know how do you how do you detect a a people-centered sort of engineer and and the the answer was well he's the engineer that looks at your feet rather than his own feet when you say hello to him now there's there's a tendency for engineers to be quite sort of compliance minded and focused on the the the engineering um I one stage tried to change the nature of engineering and then we found research that really showed that many engineers have chosen to be engineers at very very early ages you know so in fact you can't really do it change the nature of engineering after they joined engineering because you've already got a uh self-selected population but anyway in in this period of human factors research it's all about error how do you stop error wonderful work being done wonderful work being done by people like James reason with a model the swiss cheese model in which you have defences in depth and layers of defences and you try to make sure that the the little holes in the swiss cheese don't all line up and such that there's a sort of accident trajectory that runs through all those defences um it also deals with the the challenges of the sort of not just direct pathways of causation but also latent pathways where perhaps the failure to do something on behalf of uh uh somewhere in the system uh means that the defences are not there when you want them so there's lots of really important work done there and I remember one experiment which really is is quite thought-provoking that was done by the psychology department at Harvard University and it's actually it's it's really important to the point where we sometimes at Brookfield multiplex use it with new groups of young cadets to give them a sense of how they should not rely on human beings being able to recognize uh the growth of circumstances and problems it's many of you will have I'm sure seen this before but it's a the experiment is is something which for instance we would have a group of say I'm the one I can remember would be a group of 28 new cadets they've come fresh to your industry they're really keen to be successful you're briefing them the first time they're going to be working with senior managers and getting to know the business and working with each other and they're really really trying to impress one another and you play them a video produced by Harvard which is two groups of three people one dressed in white one dressed in black and there each team has a ball and they're passing the ball between the their respective team members and bouncing it on the floor and you get the people a difficult challenge and that is that you want them to count the number of air passes and floor passes bounces that occur whilst the video is playing and these two teams are just sort of passing this ball around a net a basketball net behind them and at the end of the little experiment you ask them uh you know how many air passes how many bounce passes some of them get it right phenomenally accurately but then you see a bit of unease in the group because the example that you see in in my memory is out of the 28 there were only I think it was two that were showing unease and with great temerity one puts the hand up and says well it but but the gorilla and the other sort of 26 turn around say what gorilla and in the midst of this video it turns out it's a woman in a gorilla suit has walked in front of the camera and is waving her arms like this you you cannot believe that people could have missed it and that uh well in nature of fact we I remember this particular circumstance because we had another cause of their entries about a year later and we redid it but I couldn't make it to the first day of the program so we did it on the last day of the program they now all knew each other they all were comfortable being in the presence of senior managers and each other and probably given it was a Friday morning that had some drinks the Thursday night so they were very very comfortable and about half of them saw the gorilla so it's a good way of getting across to young people that some of your best and most focused workers might be the ones that are going to miss things and that video has been was used in part of BHP by one of my master's students increasing the near miss reporting because you changed a near miss from being something that silly people are involved with to a gorilla moment and the low that language was used within the site I've had a gorilla moment and the reporting went went up so psychology has a lot to offer us um but around the um probably the 1980s as was mentioned in the introduction I you know I probably have to own up to having been involved in helping to set up you know the the Australian standard on management systems and you know to many senses I think we it has helped us to go into a little bit of a a side branch and and move a bit slowly with a great focus on paperwork and bureaucracy doesn't have to be that way but I think it it has probably been a bit that way so it was meant to be all focused on continuous improvement it was the era of you know improving productivity and quality anyone that was alive then like I was you you probably have been to events where you felt you were in a Billy Graham sort of revivalist movement and you're going to be asked to come up to the front and affirm your belief in quality at any moment you know there's this huge interest in quality and people started to put quality that plan do check act thing together the whole idea was that you had lots of focus on continuous improvement that wheel in the middle and minimal but enough of a chock of assurance to make sure that gains in performance that you'd achieved didn't just slip away but I think what we have delivered to our community is that image which is a huge chock of paperwork and hardly any time left over to get on with talking to people and continuously improving our systems so you know I think you know we have problems in this country we have safe work method statement still that a 28 pages long the concept of a safe work methods statement started as something which was one page and had three columns and got you to think about what and plan what you were going to do understand what the risks were and what the control should be and focus on them with that hierarchy of control in mind to get controls that were robust and I suppose I'm suggesting that there then came a sort of realization that it's not one or the other of any of these it's really the integration of them all and trying to get the right mix and that means it I mean it's a bit like I remember my my mother at one stage sort of I was crying about how I was quite a good cook at the time and then she said to me test of whether you're a good cook is on a Friday evening and there's nothing that you've bought but there are scraps in the in the fridge and you can make a beautiful meal that's the test of a good cook and I think that's the test of a good health and safety person you know a good health and safety person advising organizations is not one that brings in new products from the supermarket they're the person that looks in the fridge sees the scraps that are there from previous attempts to improve the performance of the organization but then can weave them together in one blend them in magnificent ways produce to produce a meal that will improve the performance of that organization and I think that so with with respect to my mother her words guide me still and I think with integration that's what we're about we're about recognizing that you do need the suitable organization and management systems you need the well-designed physical environment you need the competent knowledgeable workers and you need fit for purpose equipment being brought in and suitable rules and procedures and those all go together and I would just like to acknowledge David Boris I think is appearing in another one of these sort of virtual sort of seminar series for the authorship of many of the ideas of bringing that together it's also instrumental in our thinking as we started to realize that really with human beings adaption takes place and I think that we're now on the in a time period when we ought to be admitting more to the fact that human beings constantly adapt if they didn't adapt nothing would actually work it would they need to be adaptable they've been designed that way by that great big designer in the sky so so I would argue that there's the what is coming is bit of a shift and I think the shift is from the human being as a problem to the human being as a wonderful part of the solution in complex systems but the only way we're going to get the benefit out of that is to communicate with people in a far more honest manner about the reality of working lives and workplaces and stop making out that everything is perfect out there and it all works to a wonderful system everything out there is a first approximation and you know when once the battle begins all the plans are out then we get reality again so in fact it's life is constantly replanning constantly changing and the human beings are our sort of biggest opportunity there so adaption I'm suggesting is inevitable and that means that you get perhaps that adaption can take place and there's probably a boundary beyond which you get a bit worried when people are adapting because they may now go to the point where you're not comfortable that those adaptions are taking place and very easily you can get a shift between the work as you are imagining it's being performed and the way the work is really being performed and you get this drift occurring and it happens over time and it happens for the very best of reasons because people are trying to perform and they're trying to perform well now as we do this I think that you know really what the challenge is going to be for us to surface where adaption is taking place and I can assure you it's happening everywhere right but surface that adaption and then have the conversations to find out which bits of adaption you want to actually learn from because it improves performance and which bits of adaption you want to find ways of damping down because it's a bit risky and that means that we're really in the in the realm and acknowledgements to David Burris again something he's produced this year which has really come down to I think admit that the sort of conversations that take place are the very lifeblood of health and safety in our workplaces and you know so and storytelling really is the the the sort of food on which we we we grow the organization we we are elastic or as he tends to be now calling sort of plastic as you start to shift but what you're trying to do all the time is surface this drift that may occur into failure which in most of our organizations we have no processes for picking up that drift no processes and and out of this I think what we've got is a a shift which is demonstrated in the the workings of uh hit the wrong button whole nagle you know and it's quite instructive when he starts to demonstrate it in an image like this you know that's that in fact failure is occurring very infrequently and successes they are all most of the time so why are we only learning from the failures why aren't we learning from the successes and then applying that that all of that opportunity into uh reducing the the failures and there are a couple of books that I would like to mention because I think they really are a worthwhile read as we start to look to the future and one of them is the book by whole nagle which is moving from protective safety to productive safety and argues for a reframing so instead of in safety one thinking of as fewer things as possible going wrong we start to think of as many things as possible going right in the way that we manage we become much more proactive and much greater focus on anticipation of developments and events in our explanation of accidents we we recognize that these things are going on all the time um the the the adaption is there pretty constantly so let's face up to it and understand it and in terms of human error shifting from that problem the the view which I suggest was early in that human factors sort of focus of uh the human as a liability um to now human seen as a resource for getting system flexibility and resilience where resilience here is you know very much a system sense of resilience not what sometimes is being talked of in individual people being resilient this is about a system being resilient and the the role of performance variability instead of being harmful um and we should stop it and constrain it what what we move to is a view in which we're saying that uh it's inevitable but it's also most of the time useful so we should uh monitor it and and manage it and uh Olnagel tends to present this as a little sort of continuous loop with the focus on the work not as imagined but what's actually being done out there um let's focus on what variability is occurring let's look at success and failure and learn and improve and and in that I think it's a challenge is that we should be applying that not just to trauma but to occupational disease factors so for me that's that's the historical sort of past present and I think where the future's going to take us um when I come to challenges I think there's this when I started writing the the challenges down most of them turned into opportunities anyway so I ended up with really only one that I could only see as a challenge and not could turn it around into an opportunity so I'll go to really one uh strong image and I think myth that is pervading our society not not in Australia particularly it's around the world in the the western world anyway um and it's an image that it's a real demonstration of how if you can think of a a diagrammatic form it can take on a whole life of its own and this is the safety pyramid um and a former colleague Andrew Hale wrote a lovely paper about it oh 20 years ago I suppose in which he used the not in the title but to use in the text the the words the the myth of the safety pyramid and this myth goes the following way and that is that if if you focus on the first aid injuries and you'll reduce lost time injuries if you focus on the lost time injuries then you'll eventually reduce the fatalities now that's a total misrepresentation of what the early researchers were doing all they were doing was saying we've been out there and we don't get anywhere near as many fatals as we get lost time injuries and we get an awful lot more first aid injuries they didn't make any causal links between them but when once you put these things in a triangle or a pyramid other people do make the links and much of our community in Australia is still so haven't I know it's much moment in our global industries it's the same it's this focus on lost time injury rates now there is so much evidence about to say that that's not what they should be doing because there aren't causal links there if they want to express something in a triangle and people often do then at least express something that if you you might get the right story out of and and that might be this one which is okay why don't we learn from every near miss that relates to our critical risks and that might stop some fatals and plenty of papers as mentioned there but just consider the importance of what this diagram is doing you know if you take the very very important work that Andrew Hopkins has done over many years now taking disaster reports and commissions of inquiry that everyone wants to just put on the shelf and forget and pulling them out and telling them and taking the learning from that and forcing it back into our community it's a wonderful thing that he has done Andrew Hopkins and you just go back through his disaster reports and how many of them have these sets of circumstances in which people have been convincing themselves that they have got risk under control and they go out rewarding people for getting risk under control and where they're that because they haven't got many sets of data that they can use to give them a sense of fatality risk they're using this minor injury risk and studies that where you know if you take countries that have probably are more invasive than we are in terms of insisting on data collection you know if you take a country like Finland I'll always think that Scandinavian countries almost sort of put a barcode on your body when you're born so that they can keep the data well and but there are some great benefits from it so here runs of data on fatality rate in the construction industry in in Finland over I think it was 15 years and look at the count what looks counter-intuitive to start with that the counter-intuitive that when you've got the let's get it right the lowest fatality rate you seem to have the highest reported injury rate and you can go in all other sorts of places to get similar confirmation of that yeah a little bit later than this data from the airlines industry came out and showed that the the the same is true in terms of reporting rates for different airlines all the correlation coefficient shown in table one I'm reading for flight safety report are negative which means that carriers with higher rates of non-fatal accidents incidents had lower mortality risks furthermore the correlation shown become increasingly negative as the events become more severe if you look at the the in the United States and you look across the quite recent paper wherever it is 2013 that states with low non-fatal injury rates have the high high fatality rates and vice versa how weird well it's because of reporting I think but I don't know if we look at reporting a study of a sort of closed system where you had all the you had both what people were reporting as companies and you had what the actual was because you were running the insurance records as well so you can actually look at what the real data were so and they what they did was to classify the I think it was around about a hundred subcontracting companies in terms of whether they would be perceived as having a good safety culture or a poor safety culture and surprise surprise they had exactly the same injury rates now I don't find that surprising because if the poor safety culture company was saying it had very high injury rates it wouldn't get any work so of course it's going that but it may be that that's what was coming through to them directly shouldn't be unfair but if you now look at what was unreported even the good safety one there was about an equivalent number of cases that went unreported but you had five times that unreported in the poor safety culture so most of these measures are more about reporting than anything else so beware the safety pyramid and I think it's a challenge which I would encourage you all to accept to go out and champion to get rid of the use of lost time injury rates in the the way in which you assess organizations and make decisions on subcontractors or decisions in the supply chain and so on you know otherwise we are promulgating this lie so let's turn to opportunities and I think you know first one is there's an opportunity I think for leaders to be focused more on critical risks help them to move away from lost time injuries and put their focus up there on permanent incapacity you know sort of class one class two type injuries and fatalities but bear in mind the elephant in the room you know we're talking fatalities here probably people's minds are going to trauma fatalities but how about all the occupational disease that's up there that's the big one so we need to make sure that our learning from traumatic fatalities where it's a bit more obvious is really honed and sharpened so that we can apply it with great gusto into occupational disease and one of the ways that certainly you I must pay tribute to my colleagues on the executive board of Brookfield multiplex I mean they've they've accepted having an idiot academic present with them for the last eight years in there all their decision-making in relation to the board so it's not just health and safety is about everything we do because we have a strong belief that the health and safety flows from the decisions that you make as a business and so I'm there through all of that lot and they have taken on board these things seriously and then taken on board the old adage of what interests my boss absolutely fascinates me so that unless they're prepared to put time and effort into something and cascade it through the organization by virtue of the conversations they have and the interest they show then nothing new is introduced we don't introduce things off the supermarket shelf down around the business if it's important we'll buy into it and cascade it through the organization and for instance the first one of those was probably safety and design which I'll come to in a moment but the the second one was really getting this push to learn about the variation that's taking place and learn about the significant potential incidents that are out there but you know in in the old world in the safety one world probably you know the the strong culture of a project would be tested by does any bad news leak from this project you know it's how tight is this team in holding in bad news and the cultural change required by the senior management is to demonstrate a different world in which a complaint is a gift there's learning in this and that in actual fact we want to hear bad news and we we want to hear bad news to the point where we are prepared to come to the board table and share our problems and take the other members of the board through significant near misses that that that we ought to learn from and then cascade that as a as a as a culture through the organization and so when you do that you can get remarkable changes in the amount of information that flows up and your challenge is not now to really get hold of the information it's to run the systems that can live up to the invite you've given to people to tell us about things that are going on out there and that is an organizational challenge because you need to be able to triage that and focus on that which has the most learning in it and then transfer it around the whole organization that's not an easy thing to do but i i we we all have to face up to it and do it and so that's just the the growth of those things and it's interesting that you see challenges for people in this because of course um you know if you're part of a large group then you start to raise concerns in the larger group because suddenly it could look as though you've got lots of significant problems out there but really all you're demonstrating is that you are more open perhaps than the rest of the group or the norm and that that requires strong leadership to be able to take that message and take it to your parent and and fight to change their view of these things as well and and change the industry and i i've been pleased to see the way that the organization that i've had a chance to sort of spend a lot of time with has been up to that challenge so um we're still on opportunities the big one the big big opportunity that i see is actually going upstream and i would characterize this in in sort of saying that we we have tended to look at um health and safety just where the the daily work is being done but the the work may be being done there but it has been planned and organized often somewhere else and it is in that planning on an organization often upstream from where the work is being done that is your biggest opportunity to have an impact on trauma risk and occupational disease and i liken this to there was there was an old sort of joke about the the person comes out of the pub and sees someone under a lamppost scrappling around looking for a coin and i've shows how old the the the little anecdote is because it was a sovereign that they were looking for and so another person gets down to help them then a few more people come out of the pub and they they they're all scrambling around looking for the coin and then last one comes out of the pub and this is probably not enough room for them to get down there and they ask the question so where did you drop it and the first person says well i dropped it over there but the light's much better here and i think that is what we've done or in danger of doing in health and safety we put a lot of effort into the area that where the work is being done but we really need to go upstream and why don't you do go upstream you get some very positive outcomes you actually this is going back in brookfield multiplex 256 of our past sort of projects and you realize that when once you start working upstream that's the area where you can get maximum reduction for lowest cost in terms of the maximum improvement in performance and you know we've got lots of studies going over 30 years in different industries showing that the front-end loading of a project or the setting up of the business makes a huge difference to the performance outcome and it's where you can get the biggest return and this of course fits quite neatly with safety and design if you put buildings up like sort of brookfield multiplex does this one shelly street in in uh in sydney and this it's got this weird external skeletal framework now that that would be originally planned to put that up in sort of in in the air as it were but thinking behind it was well actually should we be changing this should we be going off site much more fabrication off site because bear in mind that the moment you make the decision to move from doing this in a construction area to doing it in a manufacturing you sort of halve the fatality risk if you're taking to account what the risks are for instance this is us data but for steel fixers you're getting a sort of probably five-fold reduction in risk and that means that we can quite dramatically reduce the hours that are on site move it into a factory environment reduce the risk and probably get something of the oil to river 75 fatality risk reduction and bear in mind the elephant in the room is that you can control the exposures of people to the chemicals uh products from welding fuel and whatever so much better when they're in the factory environment so storyline for this really is look we've got a huge opportunity um but we've got to get that conversation going between people and in all of those areas upstream it means lots of people talking to one another and i think you know that old saying you know you've got to walk the talk well i reckon there's you almost got to reverse it and you've got to to sort of talk the walk and the and the fact is that we need people whilst they are walking around doing much more talking and listening to people uh as as about the real conditions and doing this is quite quite consistent with getting higher performance out of our organizations if you look at the sort of studies that have been done on what makes for a high performance workplace they're they're they're very strong and other sessions in this seminar series go into that in much more detail but there there is such a wealth of experience now showing that getting the the sorts of things that we're arguing for here in this more listening version of health and safety is consistent with higher performance the the example i'll use is a study by daryl hull in which they went out and got companies to put forward organ within their organizations workplaces that were good and workplaces that were exceptional and so they then looked at the exceptional workplaces and saw what were the differences between just having a good workplace and a really high performance workplace and they then um this diagram looks a bit like a bubble diagram which shouldn't be shown when in camber but the um that what it's trying to represent is that the further you are or the closer you are into the center is a greater importance explaining more of the variance and so what you find is that good working relationships way above anything else are what produces the exceptional performance in the workplace and yes feeling safe is a is a really important part of that you're a little bit further out but it is still part of that uh importance and having a well-built environment where people have thought about hitting you up to be uh able to do the job well is really important as is learning etc etc i won't go any further with that but just say all of that comes together you know we it means that companies that actually do this are going to outperform the rest and here in australia there was that lovely study which um west bank kindly sort of got their analyst to do which was to take a construct a portfolio of companies with good oh s uh arrangements across all sectors of the all ordinaries and then rerun the data as a back test if you'd had a portfolio of those good oh s performers would you make more money and yep you would so the there is a good association between good oh s arrangements and good financial outcomes i'm not saying one causes the other or whatever but it does mean that there are a lot of people that are now starting to produce reports for investment analysts so that they can actually use the health and safety arrangements of a company as an indicator of how well strategically managed that company is as an indicator of its ability to deal with risk and you know westpac stuff coming forward was even more powerful so i would just like to sort of draw to this together and indicate that you know the strongest message probably is the one that isn't up on the screen because i've emphasised it time and time again is the shift in terms of us being able to do fatality risk well but now apply that to occupational disease and within that i'd say that the the opportunities are let's let's you know we need to understand critical risks and the critical controls that have to be managed for those critical risks we have to understand and articulate how workplace health and safety can actually add value to a business and the particular business understanding this particular business on what does health and safety have to offer because it does and it's just a case of looking hard and being able to articulate it we need to integrate the health and safety with the other business decisions and we need to i think provide a sort of roadmap that aligns with where a business is hoping to go it's really trying to understand strategically where an organisation is going or an enterprise is going and then map the health and safety within that journey and focus on social processes not just paperwork and i think you know all of us get involved in going out into organisations and i most leaders now in organisations do try and get out into workplaces but i think we've got to cascade that through all the organisation and make sure that managers in the middle of the organisation are having the conversations with the people doing the work you know finding out what worked well what did not go according to plan or was difficult or frustrating what could have gone better and what can we do to improve things around here and i think if we take an interest in the the understandings that people in the workplace have and take as much of an understanding as those early players like bar laying an augusta zado dead then we'll be all right and we will make a big difference thank you thank you janice um we have time for a couple of questions so if anyone has a question if they could raise their hand yes down the end here i should just wait for the mic and introduce yourself please uh david say grot australian health and safety services denise i'm interested in your move forward just from uh the management systems approach into adaptation yet what i'm seeing happen is a resurgence of the management systems approach where there is a significantly high level of focus on the paperwork audits compliance rather than the focus on the um the actual identification and management of hazards and risks in workplace more so and i'd be interested in your comments on the challenge that that presents in actually making the move forward but i think it is a big challenge because if we have a society that we've managed to lull into a sense of comfort that having all these paperwork systems is making big difference um and i'm not trying to imply that it hasn't been important i'm sure it has but it's the ability to now simplify to reduce the amount of them it it's now the hard work starts because you've actually got to make the hard decisions as to how you can make this more effective which things are you prepared not to have a lot of rules about how do you resist the temptation to respond to an incident by adding to the administrative arrangements around that job when in fact you really know the job will get done the way the job was done before but you can walk away feeling comfortable that well i've tried now that's it's i think it's harder this area of accepting that there is uh adaption and the safety too is actually harder but i think we'll find that people in workplaces will be surprised that we're talking about reality again thank you um another question yes hello Dennis mc puterson uh Dennis just a question about how we can share our successes and our failures better across industries and within industries and who should be driving those sorts of processes the um that almost sounds like a Dorothy Dix i've spent years trying to get um a process whereby there is a sharing of the innovations between organizations um and i i think that i'm i'm almost coming to the point now of realizing that perhaps things you don't it's it's more what happens within an organization than seeing something come from outside i think i'm uh now having worked for the last eight years in one organization trying to effect change i have lesser belief that codifying and producing good ideas amongst people that are already have very busy will actually get picked up and use and so i put much more effort now into teasing out the the few from the many and then putting a lot more effort into how do we get the conversations to take place around these learnings and i think that's been a shift in me over the last eight years whereas you know before i thought if we could just capture all these good ideas obviously people will pick them up and use them it's nowhere near as easy as that thank you um i think we have a question over here yes windy elford um i'm a futurist and agonist my question is about wellness to illness as a continuum and if it's context defined so if you're looking for zero harm we're going to have a problem um i guess shifting people towards understanding that if you're not sick how well are you and how can we put the resources in whenever we're trying to close um the system um through um i guess missing injury when promoting wellness is actually quite an expensive thing as well there's a lot of gains to be made and zero harm i think is going to be something that we'll have to be realistic about yes i think what the words you use there zero harm is something we have to be realistic about is really important because i think they are laudable as the aims are and i think you know there are proponents that will have uh able to articulate the strength of it i i i find that um there is a challenge of of people not believing that that fits with the reality of the lives they see on a daily basis you know and um i remember there was work done by dump fee and state looking across many australian organizations and they came to the conclusion that health and safety was often used as the litmus test by people in the organization as whether the mouthings of senior people about you know people are our biggest assets or whatever whether it was real or not because they could see what one of my being delivered on a daily basis compared to what i'm hearing and i think that that's that's one of the issues with zero harm that you're often expressing a view about it but what people are seeing on the daily basis may be a bit of a dissonance there i think it's it's more important that we we focus on sort of very serious harm because i think that resonates more with people and i think the other party a question in terms of how do you have an impact on some of those other wellness issues i would not underestimate how important being heard is in terms of wellness and just listening honestly to people about the real work they do and valuing them as specialists in whatever it is they do they're always specialists in some small part of the business processes and ought to be recognized for that and i i think we we we often miss a huge opportunity to increase the wellness of an organization and certainly in the brookfield multiplex organization our we run opinion surveys every couple of years and i've inserted a whole range of questions in there which relate to whether people feel that they're being listened to and if they have issues can they rely on someone acting on them because if if they can't but i don't think we're living up to some of the value statements that we make terrific well thank you very much Dennis for that interesting and challenging presentation i was particularly fascinated by your discussions about the different ages in health and safety and the advances that have been made i think it's really important that we look back at the technical and scientific developments and the human factors and management systems which have contributed to improvements in health and safety but i think you've also reminded us that we need to engage with the adaptive age and that is how we tackle health and safety issues in the workplace and we must always increasingly constantly involve to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world but importantly you have talked about the importance of communication i think that's always a good thing to remember so to all of you out there don't forget that you can view this and other videos that showcase the latest work health and safety thinking research and innovations during the virtual seminar series on the Safe Work Australia website thank you