 Good afternoon. I'm Dr Peter Miller from Safe Work Australia. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting today, the Nungawal people. I acknowledge and respect their continuing contribution to the life of this city and our region. I'd like to thank our studio audience for joining us today and our online audience who are joining us too. For today's exciting discussion on driving good work, the role of the accidental design professional. We know that the poor design of buildings, plant and the way we work is behind many of a workplace deaths, injuries and illnesses. And importantly, these are preventable. We know that the most effective and durable means of creating a safe working and healthy working environment is to eliminate these hazards before they ever enter the workplace, design them out. In fact, this is a legal obligation across every state, territory and a commonwealth in Australia. Yet it is not common enough. Recently, the conference board, a global independent research, industry research association, reported that the single greatest reason that US workers had grown unhappy and disengaged in their job was because their organisations designed their work so poorly. I'm sure this is not an uncommon complaint in Australian workplaces. Now Safe Work Australian members recognise the need to continue to encourage the traditional focus on the better design of buildings and of workplace equipment, but also to urge people to eliminate hazards and risks through the better design of work, work processes and work systems. Recently, Safe Work Australian members released a handbook on 10 principles to achieve good work through a more effective design process. They outlined why good work design is important to people and to businesses, what needs to be considered during that process and how it can most effectively be achieved. Professor Parker's interesting seminar yesterday particularly focused on how good work design can eliminate or minimise psychosocial hazards in the design process. But before I go any further, I should say a little bit about what we mean when we talk about good work and why we're interested in the role of the design professional. Good work is healthy and safe work where the hazards and risks are eliminated or minimised and where the work design optimises human performance, job satisfaction and productivity. In addition to preventing harm, good work can improve the health and wellbeing of workers and improve the businesses' financial performance, through example, through higher productivity resulting from better worker motivation and engagement. A broad range of people actually design work, whether they're consciously aware they are or not. The CEO designs whether it makes decisions about whether to downsize. Strategic management teams design work where they decide the business priorities and allocate companies and organisations resources to make these happen. The human resource personnel, the information technology consultant, our financial advisers, even the person designing the office fit out. All their decisions will directly or indirectly change how work is actually done. Today we'll hear three quite different perspectives from our work and health and safety professionals today and our strategic chain agent. How this can and should influence the design of work, workplaces and systems of work. Our first panelist is Peter Holmes, head of Network Design Planning at the National Australia Bank. Peter's a thought leader around the design of innovative solutions that transform our digital and physical spaces that are used both by customers and the bankers. Peter has partnered with organisations such as LendLease, IBM and Telstra to transform their spaces to improve customer and employee experiences. Our second panelist, Jeff Hurst. Jeff is the president of the Risk Engineering Society, a fellow of Engineers Australia, an associate lecturer at the Victorian Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and a member of the Safety Institute of Australia and a director and founder of a consulting company, engineer OH&S Proprietary Limited. I'm also delighted that today we've got an old colleague of mine, Barbara McPhee. Barbara is a professional agonist and a specialist occupational health physiotherapist with over 38 years experience in occupational health and safety. She is a past president, fellow and professional member of the Ergonomic Society of Australia and a past board member of the International Commission on Occupational Health. She was awarded an Order of Australia for significant service to physiotherapy as a practitioner and an occupational health expert and is an author. She was appointed as an independent expert member to the New South Wales Mines Safety Advisory Council in 2006. And last but not least, let me introduce today's facilitator, David Caple, who has over 30 years experience as a work health and safety consultant. David's an adjunct professor at the Centre for Ergonomics and Human Factors at La Trobe University in Melbourne and a senior research fellow at the Federation University Ballarat. He's a past president of the International Ergonomics Association and a member of the Human Factors Society of the USA. As a certified agonist in Australia and in the United States, David's a fellow at the International Ergonomic Society in Australia and also in the UK and Sweden. And David has been a longstanding and respected member of the advisory board of the Victorian regulator. I'm now, with great pleasure, hand over to David to facilitate what I'm sure is going to be an engaging discussion. Thanks, David. Thank you, Peter. And thank you to everybody who's joined us here today and also to the audience that are viewing online. And this is an interactive panel with our three presenters and it provides an opportunity for those that are online to tweet in any comments or questions as we proceed. So just use the live wall or the virtual WHS hashtag and join in our discussions as we explore this topic as introduced by Peter. This topic is part of the broad action areas in the current Australian work health and safety strategy which is looking at how do we look at safety in design and today's focus is safety in designing good work but also organisations such as the government and how they embrace good work in designing what it is that our public sector staff do. So I think it would be interesting to maybe ask Peter, as Peter with an A explained, Peter has been involved in a major project with the National Australia Bank and looking at the retail experience for both staff and customers. So Peter, maybe tell us a little bit about the design impetus for this and just very briefly walk us through the journey and what some of the outcomes were. No problem. Thanks, David. Look, I think the impetus for us is really driven from the customer and I guess what we're seeing is the only real constant now is change and the way that our customers want to interact with us as a bank and with their money is just continually changing and one of the big drives that has probably been digital and particularly with the internet banking and mobile and online which has really meant the role of the branch has changed quite significantly and quite quickly over the last couple of years and so we're really forced to sit back and listen and go what do our customers want and how do we respond to that and therefore what does that mean in terms of how we design work practices going forward and so it's a very exciting opportunity to really think about how we transform that experience for customers and when you think about how do you approach that, traditionally we've probably always designed it from the bank's perspective and what we've done is step back and say let's understand first and foremost what our customers want and what's important for them and then equally make sure that we engage very broadly across the organisation with not only our frontline people who are working in those environments every day but also our specialist areas, say health and safety, security, understand what's important for brand, marketing how that links back to the organisational strategy and really all of those areas are involved in shaping how we design that space for customers moving forward so it's been a very exciting journey to be able to approach how we've designed the space quite differently than we probably have for the last 150 years so I think that's what's been really exciting for us and that's a very iterative process so we really approach that from the point of view of understanding what's happening today so really researching what are customers doing, saying how are they interacting with us, what are our people doing and that gives us a baseline to understand what's the current state and then as we move into really shaping the design really making sure that it's quite iterative and everybody's involved in that so we have our customers come in and actually help us design what the space may look like, we have our people come in and do that and then we use really great sort of prototyping approaches to test, learn as we go, evolve that design and then put a solution out to market and understand have we achieved the goals of the organisation and also for our customers and our people as well so it's been a very interesting sort of journey We might explore some of the details of how that journey unfolded a bit later but Jeff I mean you're an engineer but also a very experienced safety professional which possibly by accident you tell us a little bit about that but Peter alluded to a lot of stakeholders involved and I suppose as a safety professional how do you work in that partnership process to achieve a holistic outcome Certainly Peter and David, the challenge is to identify all the stakeholders that you need in the workplace that are in the workplace that need to be involved with the project or change that you're talking about and then not only just speaking with them or consulting with them as the terminology is but actually engaging with them and collaborating with them to find the problem with them, determine what the problems might be it might be more than one problem and then collaborate with them to actually solve that problem together and it's that involvement that they have with you as the professional on the scene that helps them understand what needs to happen and then also contribute to what actually needs to happen as well It's a real challenge to do that but the way to do it is to make sure that you get down from the high seats in the organisation and actually watch what your people really do and just like this is Peter sort of saying in the NAB Okay, so Barbara, we seem to be learning that watching what people do and understanding the user experience is fundamental to what a safety professional's role is in good design So being a certified professional agonist and maybe reflecting on your many years working in the mining industry here in Australia and internationally, do you want to comment a little bit about those areas of input that you have in design from an ergonomics perspective? Yes, it's very interesting because as originally a physiotherapist and then an agonist when I first went into the mining industry I was terrified because I thought I'm not a design engineer I'm not a designer, I'm not an engineer, I'm just somebody who's looking after people's health at work and my future boss at that stage said we've got enough engineers, we want you to identify problems and work with the engineers and work with the workers most particularly to sort the problems out Now that then was actually harder than doing the design job in many cases because the design job is actually quite straightforward, you don't have to deal with people Dealing with people, all the range of people, right from your managers, right down to the, in my case, face workers Cole face workers, is quite an art and trying to get the two groups together or three groups together because you've often got managers and supervisors in the middle who have a entirely different view but one of the things that I always do and insist on when I'm scoping a job is to say let's sit down and have a chat find out exactly what people are asking us to do, really important because they may have one idea, you're going in with a completely different idea and you come out with a third idea which is probably closer to what they want So the talking I think is very important and if people are not prepared to spend time talking and exploring a particular line or a particular issue then you may not necessarily succeed Up front you've got to know that So I suppose in the good design principles we talk about the planning stage and understanding what it is we're actually there to design and what are the assumptions, what are the measures of success that we want this design to have and addressing those health and safety principles as part of that journey and setting it out up front quite clearly these are what we see as our outcomes this is what we want, this is what we think is reasonable to achieve and I work with small and medium sized businesses often and I think they're quite different bunch of people and they're struggling with lots of issues with health and safety just like the big guys are but they find it more difficult, they don't have the human resources and they certainly don't have the financial resources and they have to actually be quite clever and the greatest joy you can have is when somebody says ah, you know the light bulb goes on and you think yes! Got you! So Peter, Barbara's talked about the small and medium sized workplaces but you're talking about an international banking company and I suppose the question with design and the vision do you see it as a top down driven model or a bottom up model or somewhere in between where does good design outcomes actually get the vision and the drive? Absolutely, I think David it's both in that it's important to actually make sure you understand at the coal face how people are working and what they're doing and I think it's very important to start there but I think equally the role that leaders play and senior leaders in the organisation is equally really important so it needs to be both and I think there's often this kind of who's in the middle and I think on reflection from myself over the last few years I think increasingly that is the customer and so it's not about middle management or those sort of supervisors it's actually about how do you put the customer in the middle of that and actually rally people around that to understand what it is the organisation's goals are what our people want to do, what our customers actually want to bring that together so I think it's not either or I think it's an and you need a sort of catalyst in the middle to bring that together. Jeff do you want to comment on that? I certainly see that having worked across a number of sectors of industry in my working life I've seen organisations like Peter's talking about where they're ready for that sort of approach with their workers where I've also seen sort of decades behind where the management's are still struggling with how they work with their workers and the workers are still out in the grass and the only time they talk is when they're out in the grass it just doesn't work that way so the challenge is for management to actually speak with their workers in a collaborative way and if you're used to fighting with them then it's pretty hard to have that conversation so the supervisors tend to find themselves in the middle the middle management people are one working with their workers to try and help them do their jobs better on a daily basis but at the same time they're trying to defend this position that management are keeping pointing to we need to change this, we need to change this, we need to change this and they just can't do all that change and still do it safely in the workplace so the supervisors are trying to be listened trying to gain the audience of management above them but at the same time they're trying to also gain the audience of the people below them and the good supervisors will work with their people by listening to them and then they're respected of their people so they can actually be expected to be listened to as well it seems that following the theme of this session about we are all design professionals in our own way but sometimes by accident we didn't think that we were but we are Barbara maybe just explore this a bit more about how you see that top down driver for design change or the bottom up or the role of the middle manager as Jeff's talking about I think in heavy industry and I'll talk about heavy industry rather than just mining because I think this goes across the board you get as many of you probably are aware a very blokey culture and you get very very good technical people but their people skills are not great and it's how do you work around that how do you get, well for instance how do I walk in coal to a mind managers office and say you need me, right okay why do I need you and I've got to explain and I've got to suddenly read his mind as to say right what is in his mind what does he think he needs and I sort of give him that but then sometimes I try to give him just a little bit more which might be you know fewer injuries which is the big thing in heavy industry generally downtime huge costs with huge machinery and lost time injuries things that go on forever because the work is so hard that people have to be super fit to come back to do it that's what something, it is a real problem so what we're saying is and I think the thing that we've got now and it's something that I just suddenly thought of having older workers is actually quite useful because older workers you have to design for older workers you have to think about what they can and can't do what they're good at which is what an agonimist does organisationally, socially how do they tick so as the mining industry has got an increasing age but very very valuable staff and workers who know a lot about mining they don't particularly want to lose them they don't want to lose them, they don't damage them if they want to keep them they have to design work now if you're designing work for older people it's probably much less harmful to the younger people they tend to be a little bit gung-ho anyway and will ruin their careers probably before their 30 sometime so I suppose there's a theme there that who are we designing for both from a physical, a cognitive an organisation or perspective and that's all part of the mix and in a customer focus business like yours Peter you're making assumptions about who is the design there for both from your staff and also from your customer base now we have a question that's come through by the tweet and we'll have a look at this and I just welcome people in the audience here if they would like to ask a question just indicate as we're going so this one is from Ronan can the panelist comment on 24-7 industries and first responders are there specific things we should be considering when we are designing their work maybe Jeff do you want to make a comment about this emergency response often in many instances here and their work design from a physical, a cognitive perspective thank you David it's nice to speak on this one first having worked in 24-7 industries in manufacturing which are of course putting people under pressure every minute of every day because they're all about trying to keep their production going production line stops all hell breaks loose in those sorts of industries so it's likewise I've also looked after emergency responders usually volunteer sense in manufacturing where you've got dangerous chemicals etc so you have to respond to fires and that sort of thing and the challenge is always and it's not unlike aeroplanes or anything else where you're pretty much coasting along and everything's going hunky-dory because most of the time things go right everybody needs to be able to respond in a rational way rather than an impulsive way where they can actually go terribly wrong with a major disaster because then actions are taken that are wrong then again so how do you design work around that but you need to keep people stimulated while they're sitting in their stationery you need to give them other useful things to do and the way you do that is just like in the other design you involve the people in it you ask them what they do on a daily basis and what they would like to be doing reading magazines or trying to wait for the next alarm to come up So Barbara just in that context of 24-7 which your industry is what Jeff's saying is that not only do you have to keep them physically alert but cognitively alert how do you challenge that in designing work which is 24-7 night shifts, evening shifts early morning shifts Well if you think about an open cut mine where they have large trucks sort of rolling around on a production line essentially those guys and girls have a huge problem now as soon as you start extending shifts and I know this is a really very contentious area but you start extending shifts to 10 or 12 hours at that 10th, 11th and 12th hour I think you have super duper problems particularly on night shift that is the real killer and virtually anybody who does it will tell you now you have to make some kind of choices about whether people do that but one of the things that works well in some firms and some companies is the buddying system so you might work two hours on a scooper or a shovel or a excavator you'd work two hours on a truck you'd work two hours on a bulldozer and the buddy system is look buddy I'm feeling a bit sleepy here and I'm excited and by this job at the moment I'd like to change to doing some dozer work which is often a lot more stimulating but that seems harder to do in practice sometimes than we would like so it's a work organisational solution to a physical cognitive challenging in the work design so I think that's one of the messages out of this that we need to look at work from both a physical, a cognitive and organisational model and I'll come back to you Peter but we've got one more question that's come through on the tweet from Marilyn, please describe some examples of how you have worked with industry associations and work health and safety regulators in good work design so I'll just open that to the panel have any of you been in that situation? Yeah, often it's usually when you get called in to help when the regulator sticks their nose in and that situation is that something's gone horribly wrong and then of course everybody's got a solution because it's obvious what's wrong, no it's not but nevertheless it is obvious to everybody and they've all got a different idea as to what the solution is of course the poor worker is the one that then ends up having to live with that solution in the workplace so I want to make sure as I often find myself the intermediary between the external bodies and the workplace itself and then of course management to try and make sure that the solution that comes up is in fact acceptable to the workers because otherwise it doesn't get used or it ends up hurting people in other ways so the challenge there is to engage the external party with the workers on the front line get them working together on it so that they actually have the problem of dealing with the workers who have other ideas and then encouraging the external party to take on the ideas of the workers and integrating that into the solution so it becomes a very innovative role to become the accidental designer because you've got to be innovative not only in the solution itself but more in how the two parties work together to come up with that solution in collaboration rather than oh this is the solution because somebody else has done it. So it seems that communication skills of all of your professions is fundamental to be successful in this process. Peter do you want to say something to Marilyn's question about dealing with the regulator or industry associations at the international level? I mean I think we probably have less samples of hopefully having to deal directly with the regulators but I think we're a very heavily regulated industry and so I think where we see this playing out in good design is making sure that we bring in our risk partners and our management assurance functions from the start to say well actually if we change the way this works done where will be the implications in terms of industry legislation and then we have to make a decision around the design work around that still achieves the legislation or do we need to start to work with those regulators to try and lobby and change the way that things are written. So we talk a lot about things like the check act which was written in 1994 and how things are done today and how people use checks is quite different. I thought about long before mobile and internet banking and so if we want to change the way customers actually deposit checks and how we process them we have to also work with the regulators to change some of the legislation that sits behind that. And that raises the question about metrics and how do you measure good design from whatever perspective the customer, the staff the regulator I suppose each has their own interpretation of what success looks like but just sticking with your industry for the moment what are the sort of measures that you would use to define good design of work. Thanks David. I think the key thing is probably gringing the measures up front so we're very clear before we actually change the design or put into practice we understand what success looks like and to take a more holistic view of that I think in the past it's probably always been financial or health and safety sometimes which is important but we're also looking at what's employee engagement what's employee enablement how do we drive customer advocacy so the non-traditional sort of success measures and really having a balanced view of what does success look like across all of those metrics not just the normal one you expect a bank to see which is you probably return on equity or financial it's much much more than that so we take a very balanced view of it but I think what's important is agreeing it up front and being able to measure that and understand have you achieved success or not. Barbara do you want to comment about metrics that you observed? Yes well one of the things that industry and workplaces do not wait for is a research project so you can forget your valid research findings but there are many ways I think of actually achieving a modicum of success in measuring success or not the problem is that when you're not measuring success when you're measuring failure you know people get a bit unhappy but you know you've got to keep them going but there's before and after photographs I mean that's an old one before and after videos are quite good too you can go and ask people it's surprising what they'll tell you one on one and sometimes you wish you hadn't but I think one of the things that I have experienced is that no one solution will be the total solution you'll always have somebody with a gripe at one end one somebody will say oh everything's wrong with it somebody else will say it's fantastic probably the person who thought it up in the first place and there'll be a whole lot of people in the middle who will give you constructive criticism about what's wrong with it and what you need to do about it and that's where you can almost let them go as long as you've got the prior approval and everybody's agreed that that's the process that you'll take okay so Jeff put your engineering hat on as well as your safety professional a lot of those impacted by design of work are external to the workplace like contractors or clients that might be there on the work site do you want to make a comment about how we embrace them in our holistic concept of good work design yeah it's a difficult space because we've got a long history in our organisations in Australia when you've got a problem with a consultant or a contractor to design it and fix it or to do it and move it so with that that sort of approach we're used to doing that all the time to bring them in so here's the problem to fix that to actually engage that contractor with the workforce is something that's not really considered if you're going to design a new plant you say okay here's the spec here's the scope go for it and then they design it and they bring it in the operators are going to try and work out how to run it or the assembly workers are going to work out how to assemble whatever it might be so the challenge for organisations is to have in their systems and procedures and policies etc to bring in those contractors outside give them the time and the resources to spend time with your workers so they actually can go through the proper design process and understanding what really gets done what the workers really like so they've got a better chance of designing something with them that is a solution rather than a new problem okay good before we go back to some more engineering questions we've got another tweet from Jonathan what's the best way for young work designers to get hands on experience and to develop expertise in safe work design maybe Peter I know you're recruiting at the moment how do you mentor and coach and support young designers to have this holistic appreciation of work design that's a good question and I think there's no substitute I think for just getting hands on experience and I think we're talking around the accidental design I think everybody's involved in design and so I think as a young designer you need to sort of recognise that you can play quite a pivotal role in shaping up how good work practices are designed irrespective of the role you're in today the experience is probably hands on is important the other one I think is immersing yourself in actually the work so I think how to get better as a designer is probably to actually understand how people work so we work with a lot of design partners and we encourage them to spend time on the ground actually either experiencing what a customer would experience or seeing how people actually do the job so I think young designers how they get more experience spend some time actually understanding how people work how people work itself Barbara do you want to elaborate at all about you've mentored many young designers or accidental designers in no agonimists and physiotherapists I think if you've got a passion for it I had parents who were always pointing out problems of design they were both left handed so they had a left handed eye and we were all right handed as kids so we learned to left handed but if you've got problems with design there's certain people who will question whether or not it can be done a better way and other people who won't it's a mindset and once you get somebody who's really interested and keen it really doesn't matter where they've come from they just bring their skills their particular skills to that job and it's our job then to mentor them make sure they know their professional limitations most certainly and get some extra education probably ergonomics lots of stuff on ergonomics around now I think it's more to do with the personality of the person and the wish to make things better I think it's a curiosity and I think you want someone who's curious that's what makes good designers they want to understand more what makes people tick and how things work so I think curiosity that's a really good that's an interesting concept of designers as being an iterative process asking questions digging deeper talking to the workers as you've said Jeff but as an engineer often you don't have that opportunity you get given a scope of work and the job that you're designing might be in another part of the country and that scope will influence your concept of the product that you're producing for your client what are our opportunities I suppose to enable you to do a more holistic job in dealing with that arms length you're an engineer just design it for us it is a real problem for the engineer when they're not given the opportunity of visiting the workplace on the previous topic I must say that I've got three designers in the family and to that end of course they're all young and once I was young too so the opportunity to develop yourself to develop yourself in the design space is to actually have a go at it and use your design skills and that's listening the more you listen when you're young the more you learn to become a better designer so in this case where you're talking about doing things remotely and just getting a scope of work in front of you it's typical what you spend most of your time doing as a young engineer is being given something in isolation they want to keep you away from too much danger keep your hands off stuff I remember one day I turned up to one of my cooling towers in the manufacturing there was a concrete block in there 18 inches thick and a meter and a half square and we all thought where did this concrete block come from it was one of our young engineers he designed this whole system and he started installing it before he told us about it and I'm sure he learned a lot from that experience and we did too, we needed to get the doors locked not so much around the cooling towers but keep him locked in his office so you've got to do lots of listening not too much action when you are and then you gain your respect for the communication exercise that the more you listen the more right you've got to be listened to for a young engineer that's the way to go and likewise for a good engineer to actually go and do a job in a remote location well you really got to get off your backside and go and talk to these people whether it be visiting them or otherwise and somebody who left out of this conversation a little bit is the union representatives and the health and safety representatives if you can't talk directly with the workers at least you can speak with those people having been given time they'll make time to come and speak with you about the problem in the workplace and that at least gives you some inkling as to what's really going on in the workplace not necessarily by what they say but sometimes by what they don't say so yes do a good design you've really got to engage with the workplace irrespective and it sounds like again the successes in the planning and the briefing and the scope and understanding of the issues and then they can use their technical skills to implement the solution and using the right person for the right job too I know the standards are saying that or guidance material are saying that we need to use the right people and I know in engineers Australia we really struggle with professional engineers engineering associates and engineering technologists and they've all got their role to play as part of the engineering team but in the workplace sometimes you'll get a tradesman in and say here's the problem solved for us and the tradesmen won't be registered in any way and we'll try and do the job because that's what he's used to doing and he's brought and come up with a solution and I've seen it time and time again where a purchasing person will buy in a mixing tank for instance and the mixing tank will be there in the workplace for quite some time and then somebody will say there's no guarding on this okay, well he's guarding well hell, the operator says hell I don't want to be a guarding I've got to get into this tank to clean it out occasionally think well we really need some guarding on it so the technologist who installed it did the right thing by installing it and they have added value to actually the safety of the operation and then later on you get a professional engineering that's usually me solving the problem and the cost of putting the guarding etc on that tank is more than the cost of the tank in the first place so it's a refitting of retilling if there's a problem just I suppose to avoid that Peter I understand that you do quite a bit of time in prototyping mocking up how does that process work? I think as I said we do sort of research on what's happening in the current environment and then as we start to shape up concepts we have a very good process to be able to bring people in and actually be part of designing the physical space so we'll often do that out of cardboard boxes in very low cost ways but actually allow customers and our people and even senior leaders to be able to come in and move stuff around and sort of go well how would you do that and similarly we do quite a lot of research around that so we will send people in sight unseen and actually see how they perform a transaction or what the experience will be like for them so we do a lot of research around filming you know sort of pre-questioning, post-questioning actually recording what people say how they feel and we do all of that in a very low cost kind of prototype way before we actually go into design and that's really allowed us to get a much better outcome from the start so we don't have to re-engineer or retool down the track so I think you can't spend enough time in that prototyping to actually get a better solution in the end That's excellent Barbara or Jeff have you seen something similar in that testing pre-testing evaluating the concept before construction It really gets people going it really gets them involved even if it's in cardboard it's been putting sort of things together in a configuration to see whether the configuration works that to my mind is probably one of the best ways to test an idea and to get everybody on the same page and I've seen it in machinery design as well where I've gone into a workshop and the mechanical engineering charge had set up three different configurations of roof bolting controls for underground mining and one group it's night shift like one lot day shift like the other lot and the afternoon shift like the other lot so they then had to have a conference between the three shifts and they found out that they worked completely differently and that was a fascinating they were so excited when they got to the solution it was wonderful and I couldn't even if you mock it up as a mock-up but you get that involvement you find that that's the key and then you've got to hold them back and keep them on the right track but that participative design process is so rich in allowing us to observe and them to tell the stories about how they do it differently and why before you start in the prototype stage people will volunteer information to you but they'll tell you what they think they'll tell you what they think you want to know even though you're being very open with them you want to know and so when you actually start prototyping it's actually when you get to see the real way they do the work because when you're around they'll do it the right way because they know how to do it the right way but it's very inefficient doing that way if you think about walking down the street why don't we crash into each other it's because we make adjustments in everything we do unconsciously so in the workplace these guys are making adjustments all the time and they do it that often this particular way that they forget about the real world they do it their way but then when they start thinking about and doing it in front of you they'll think oh no I'm supposed to do it this way and I artificially do it the right way so when you get down to the prototyping stage often it will reveal the real method of work and then you can start really defining the problem and solving the right one so I suppose the principles that are behind this is that if it's good for health and safety it's generally good for the business model the productivity, the quality and the morale I mean there's lots of spin-offs if we do it well we've got one more question and while we take that if there's anybody in the studio who'd like to ask a question thanks we'll do that next so this is from Kate can the panellists talk a little bit about complex workplaces with multiple hazards how do design work well in more complex situations so would anybody like to have a go at that one? I must say the paper industry in the chemical industry are probably some of the most complex workplaces I've worked in the Ford Motor Company was fairly complex as well the challenge with those sorts of complex workplaces is to make sure you get all the players involved and sometimes it might be 14 or 15 people so you can't have them all together at once so a number of sessions a number of work sessions the thing that Barbara was talking about with the shifts it's the same sort of deal getting various work groups on what the problem is first of all defining the problem and then when they've all got agreement about what the problem or problems are then start working on the solutions with them so complex organisations are really no different other than it's a bigger problem or bigger set of problems it's still got to work with people and it's this multi skilled stakeholder group that we're talking about here which is very interesting so let's time for a couple of questions so the first question if you could just introduce yourself sorry who put their hand up here we go just stand up and introduce yourself and your question thanks David Angus McDonald and my questions for all the panellists how can design professionals best help small businesses okay small businesses Barbara you mentioned small businesses earlier do you like to answer Angus's question first of all I think they've got to be able to afford us that becomes a bit of a problem we can't do it for nothing unless it's done through projects through Peter's department or whatever giving out money for small business projects but I think one of the things is that to make it cost effective you really have to be allowing them to do a lot of the lead work which is good in one way because it gets them going on it but they can't afford your time infinite for infinite periods of time but I think one of the things for small business would be the productivity efficiency morale general welfare issues and the fact that you can talk to virtually everybody in the organization is usually a plus they don't work together in small organizations unless they're reasonably compatible the non-compatible ones that get out that leads to a bit of a problem because you can have this decision by consensus and the consensus position is possibly wrong that can be a little bit of a problem where you have to shift the whole lot of them to a new perspective and I think seating is one of those things where you get into an office a small office with two people working there and they all have different ideas of what a good seat is but you have to analyze the work you have to look at the person you have to think how long they're going to be sitting there what other things they're going to do safety cost everything else when you call down and you say right these are our parameters let's go find a seat so it's not wasting time on stuff that isn't important but making sure you home in on the things that for small business are important making a profit number one health number two often I mean being realistic yes because there's the high turnover in the small business sector so let's move on we've got another question here we've got the microphone sorry what you've got the microphone would you like to ask your question and then the microphone here thanks Barbara was already able to provide a couple of examples of issues that required solutions but as design professionals there's some example or something that stands out in your mind that you've been able to do that's really influenced design at various work stages like perhaps in project planning Peter question look I think I think some of it is we have a difference in opinions around I guess what's important and I think in project planning one of the things I think is really helpful in helping design or good design work is to agree guiding principle so actually up front to sort of say what are the guiding principles that we need to adhere to and then as you're working through ideas, solutions, feedback be able to link them back to those principles and go does it meet at those guiding principles and then if they don't then how do we discard that and go back to the drawing board or think about another way of approaching it and we've put lots of great ideas onto the chopping block because it just didn't link back to what was important for our people or our customers and so I think that is helpful in the really early stages of project planning is agreeing those guiding principles and being able to stick back to them where you have divergent views as you're going through project delivery One more question from the studio then we've got another tweet Yes, Steve Young from Viash all of you as panellists have been talking about the role of consultation with stakeholders and coming up with a good agreement as to what the best solution is I'm sure all of us couldn't agree more with you all but I think we also all know that when it comes to the CEO's favourite project or lack thereof all of a sudden these great design ideas tend to sort of just fade away now I was doing some research with the company last year and I discussed this with them when you've decided what the best solution is because they were pointing these things out to me I said how do you actually make them happen and they said we hand it over to our seekers and I'd never heard that term before except I looked around I couldn't see Judith Durham anywhere but I they said no SEC safety and environmental change agents and that sounds like a pretty fuzzy wuzzy sort of term but what it was it was a very authoritative role that people had given someone and in fact divisional managers had to answer those people with respect of this major change when it came to safety or environment the panel's thoughts on that kind of way to push things through okay good question interesting do you want to comment I'd say it's all part of the journey and it depends on where an organisation is on whether it's where they're really collaborative with their people or whether they're very autocratic it's somewhere along the way in between it is a solution for those sorts of organisations and often you find as a health and safety professional that you're somewhere in that space of trying to act as that advocate for the employees but at the same time take a project that's been made a mess of because it's been done in isolation not with the workers involved and you're trying to then make massage the workers so that the job is actually then going to be done with warts and all so Barbara have you got any seekers in the mining industry we call them champions okay and you get somebody in there who's influential who's respected they might be the floor cleaner or the bathroom you know bathroom attendant but they are well thought of they think things through they're respected they can talk to the boss and they can talk to the workers and the champion is usually the person that you focus on in terms of solutions and include them so that they know exactly what they might have to promote and then they then do the talking but I guess ours is probably a little bit more personal and from that point of view it's much easier to use somebody like that and Peter you mentioned earlier that in banking you've got change management is a big journey for your customers who've got their passbook or their checkbook as much as it is for the bank itself great I think we always look at project kind of spends and change management is almost what gets tacked on at the end so you sort of go to this budget and we'll find a little bit for change management and I think similar to bringing people like workplace health and safety people up front having change management in there from day one is equally really important and we talk a lot about you know you need some heroes along the way so very similar to a seeker you need the people who can kind of be the voice of the front line or the voice of the customer that can really say this is great and here's what's important because it always sounds much better coming from a peer or someone from a position of respect than just a top down kind of authoritative mandate if you like yeah correct so I think you know all different titles but there's probably people that play those roles in effecting change in the organization but I would sort of add to it I think what's important is you know you always have sort of senior executives who have great idea is I think being able to link it back to the organization's goals and strategies and then being really clear about the guiding principles again helps to influence even people at senior levels to say it's a very good idea but you know your strategy is this and you've talked about you want to achieve this for customers in fact you know here's where this idea isn't going to quite deliver to that and so I think being able to use some of those principles can help you influence up as much as down Thanks for that question we have another one come through from the tweet from Meredith what effect does safety culture have on work design for example if there is no safety culture and it seems as a hassle or something that doesn't apply to the workers how would you make it work that's an interesting question thank you Meredith for that one Well I sort of see it the other way around not so much how does safety culture have an effect on work design but how work design affects safety culture if you actually take the time to listen to your workers about the problems that they've got this is how I got into health and safety I actually did a good job of working with my workers in the boiler house when I was a supervisor I wasn't a safety person I was an engineering supervisor and I listened to what the problems were and they kept coming to me with problems because I helped them actually resolve the issues the way they figured they should be and we improved the operation of the boiler house no end it became a very efficient part of the business rather than a real black hole as it used to be when I started there so what actually happened was the culture of the organisation was no longer let's get the information away from the bosses let's tell the bosses what's going on because they'll do something about it so if you then involve them in the solution redesign of the workplace the culture changes they're not only motivated to speak to you about problems but they actually find problems in the workplace that they solve themselves because you've encouraged them to become innovative within the bounds of what's allowed and they'll tell you what they've done and they'll pat them on the back and say it's great so it changes the culture of the workplace as safety itself can as well involving workers Barbara did you want to comment over here this is another role for the champion who can say things as they see it you can have very poisonous health and safety cultures and I think a lot of small businesses are still in that area I think we've got a lot of work to do there they'll go by the rules but if you've got somebody who's respected and will stand up for what looks like woozy stuff you're far more likely to succeed but if you haven't got a manager or a CEO who's in a position of authority on-site and ready to hammer it you won't Okay, Peter did you want to comment? I think it's more broader than that I think it's actually about what's the organization's culture and what's their purpose so we're very much about you need to do the right thing and respect for people and I think when you think then about health and safety that's just a given so it's no longer an extra task or something else that everyone needs to do it's just part of the way we do things here you need to embed it into the broader organizational culture rather than just trying to make it a function or something that just happens by a team over there it's got to be ingrained in everything that the organization does and that's how I think we can achieve that I'm sorry but we're just about out of time so I might just ask each of you just to reflect on the discussions this afternoon and maybe just highlight one thing that you feel our audience should think about to ensure sustainable good work design in Australian workplaces Jeff? Yeah well I guess being a small to medium-sized business myself working with small businesses to large businesses I would offer some free advice that is to collaborate with your workers if you can't afford the design people to do the job properly then you've got to you've just got it all wrong the challenge is to involve your workers externally and what you pay for is what you get and you'll actually end up saving more money than you're spending on good design giving your workers the time to be involved is the best asset you've got Okay good Barbara Well I think from my perspective I think we should all consider ourselves designers and influences every single individual and if we feel powerless to do that then a lot probably won't change Okay Peter? I would just say I think it's pretty similar theme is engage early and engage broadly and make sure you bring in the right expertise and guidance and advice along the journey Excellent so that draws our session to a close and I'd like to thank our online audience to continue staying online for the next half an hour because our panel members will be able to continue to converse over Tweet for the next 30 minutes and I'd also like to thank our studio audience for coming along this afternoon and for your questions and I'd like you to join me and thank our panellists for a very interesting conversation so thank you very much