2018 award videos

Kerryn Piggot:

My husband, Bradley, and I own and operate Christmas Creek Cattle Company, which is a beef breeding and finishing operation. Our property's about 20 thousand hectors, dissected by the canal and highway. Crossing the cattle across the highway was a huge risk to our business. Unpredictable livestock, our employees, who ride horses or hogs, the potential to have an accident on the highway, was huge. We identified that there was an existing culvert running under the highway that would be suitable to cross cattle through.

We just needed then to modify our infrastructure to suit that culvert, so fencing and holding paddocks were then erected around the culvert to allow safe passage under the highway.

It was very important to Bradley and I that the team was engaged in the decision making. We identified the problem, and we carried out the work as a team, as well. The process was not simple, we just thought we could put a fence to the culvert, but there were several avenues we had to approach. The department of transport, for road corridor permit, it was also a stock route, so we had to have special gates in place for traveling stock, and also through the central Holland's regional council, because they're our local, government body, which maintains the road in this area.

Now, life is a whole lot safer, it's a whole lot simpler, and one person can do the job of three to four people, happily and safely, and not feel under threat each time you cross cattle from one side of the property to the other. We have a safety culture here within Christmas Creek Cattle Company, that we pride ourselves upon. We believe the safety of our employees is paramount, and everybody should be able to go home to their families after a day at work.

Laurel Johnson:

Simonds Home builds residential properties all over Australia. We build approximately two and a half thousand home a year. We have about seven or eight hundred employees. It's a flexible workforce and we probably have about a thousand subcontractors working for us, as well. When I first started, contractor management was a huge issue. We had different teams doing different things so it was really important to us that we were able to give the contractors clear guidance and expectations and make them feel like they were part of our team as well. We found an off the shelf product called LinkSafe and we worked very closely with the developer to make it very user friendly for the residential sector.

It's an online portal where trades who are wanting to work for Simonds can register. Once they're accepted, they can induct their staff and they have a line of sight on whose license has expired, whose insurances have expired, and it prompts them to be able to keep all that information up to date. We also developed a QR code for incident and hazard reporting that appears on our site signs and in all our offices. Anyone can come up, scan the code, and make an instant report. That goes directly to me and we like to call them back personally. If a small subcontractor gets a call from the head of health and safety team, the personal touch is what we're really proud of.

Simonds upper management were aware there was a gap and when we came up with this solution, they were very enthusiastic about taking it on. We worked really hard with them, but also with their staff and subcontractors to make it work. They were all stakeholders in the process and we wanted them to have buy in and we wanted them to be heard when we were doing the development. Queensland Home Builders Safety Alliance is a networking group of some of the major home builders in Queensland. We're really proud to be part of that group. We're all competitors in the industry, but we like to network and share ideas because it makes our industry better.

I love my job. I love the fact that we've gone from a culture where everybody expects they have to fill out a bit of paper because there's been an incident or a hazard to the personal touch where they can ring and they can talk it through with us, and they know who we are, and we become part of their work force as much as ours. I find that incredibly rewarding.

Andrew Elf:

Mitchell Services is a ASX listed company. We've got over 350 employees. It doesn't matter what company you are, it should be operating safely but certainly at Mitchell Services it's all about our people. I think we've come a long way as a team and as business over the last five or so years, and over that time our incident severity has reduced, our incident occurrence has reduced, and it's a credit to Josh and his team.

Josh Bryan:

The end of year is usually a high risk time of year, and that's where everyone focuses on everything that went wrong throughout the year. We actually turned that on its head and focused on what are the things that we did right.

6,000 shifts where we had no injuries at all, compared to the five that we did. So we've learned from those five injuries, but what about the 6,000 times where everything went right?

A Home Stretch program consists of a number of areas. It started with leaders going out in the field and introducing the concepts of safety differently, and encouraging the workforce to tell us about how you deal with variability. We changed our pre-shift meetings so that we would talk about, okay, what changed yesterday and how did you deal with it? Another thing was the Our People, Our Solutions initiative where we encourage the workforce to come up with ideas to make their workplace better and then we created crew chats, which was about humanizing our workforce. That we're all from different backgrounds and that we're a growing business. So we've got employees scattered all around Australia and they've all got different personalities, but the one thing that brings us together is that we all work for Mitchell Services.

Safety can be measured in the absence of something or it can be the presence of something. For us our injury frequency rate dropped by 60%. The rate of injuries or the amount of injuries dropped by 40%, but our focus was more on let's learn from our workforce and let's make this a better place to work and a safer place to work.

Andrew Elf:

The most important thing for me with the initiative is that everybody got to go home safely. That's the most important thing to me, is to see my family and I want everyone that works for us, regardless of what they're doing, to do the same.

Josh Bryan:

I've actually been able to make a change to the people that work for Mitchell Services, and actually apply concepts that are very different to traditional safety and we've been able to make them work.

Siobhan Grace:

Scentre Group is the owner and operator of Westfield in Australia and New Zealand. In 2015, a work, health and safety steering committee and a working group was formed to introduce a trial health and wellbeing program on the North Lakes project. That included a quit smoking program, skin checks, and MATES in Construction. We're really proud now that has evolved into general health checks and also a five-day working week. During the initial stages of this project, the Coomera project, the project team reviewed where we could improve. Our staff needed a better work-life balance, and when reviewing our past performances and where we could improve, we decided to implement a five-day work week. The staff love it. In this industry, it is common for workers to work six days a week. What that does is allow them to have quality time with their family, so when they come back to work, they're happier, healthier and safer.

Donny Carroll:

It's really made us stand out, I believe, as an employer of choice. I could challenge anybody, go and have a chat to one of our staff. They're happy where they're at. They feel cared for. They feel valued and that they have a voice. There's no titles, everybody has a voice. I have to say, the GM, the general manager, he was the driving force. He's the one that said, "Let's do this." It's a policy now, our new projects, once they commence, within three months a health and wellbeing committee must be established. Most important part of my job is people. The people out here, the people in the office, the people we work with, it's them, making sure they're safe, making sure they're comfortable.

Siobhan Grace:

I love the health and wellbeing aspect of my role. I enjoy helping people. There has been a real shift in our safety culture since launching the people protecting people statement, because what it really did is shifted the focus of compliance to people.

Donny Carroll:

Look, I'm very proud of this initiative, and I'm proud of the way the business has embraced it, and the difference it's making to people's lives.

Timothy Gallagher:

Kelly Services is a labor hiring and recruitment agency specializing in scientific, industrial, trades, government and commercial. Kelly Services Australia internally have approximately 230 permanent employees and across the temp workforce in Queensland, roughly about 500.

Prior to 2016, there was a workplace, health and safety management system in place in the business. We just thought it needed updating and required a bit more embedding into the company. So that required us to develop a new system from the ground up mirroring off the 4801 standard, accompanying that, we developed a digital alarm platform to implement this across the company.

The digital systems is just an advancement and it makes it easier to use for the company so people at all levels have the requisite information at a click of the button and also provides the leadership team with the statistical data that comes along with the way we track safety and rehabilitation return to work in the company.

One of the things we're really proud of is the relationships we've built with our preferred medical suppliers within the southeast Queensland area. Working with the same Doctors that understand our organization and the type of work our candidates perform has enabled us to achieve better return to work timeframes and a better relationship management, not only with the physicians but with work cover as well.

As of 2017 we've seen a 50% reduction in compensable injuries and the rehabilitation timeframes that were attached to them. So while we had and increase in some LTRs the severity of the those LTRs were significantly reduced and overall cost the company significantly less money.

As with most safety initiatives, top down management support is integral, I was lucky enough with Kelly Services to have full support with the proposal I put forward. So in like 2016 we put together a proposal and presented that to the executive leadership team who are reporting 100% in support of it throughout the whole initiative.

I love being able to help people in rehabilitation return to work in safety. One of the valuable things is the candidates actually acknowledging that Kelly cares for them and that we're here to support them through that rehabilitation process. So that care that we provide the workers shows that Kelly is committed to the rehabilitation return to work process and making sure that not only their needs are taken care of but the organization is taken care of and our clients needs are taken care of as well.

Speaker1:

The Mater is a hospital and healthcare service, but we also provide education and medical research within the Mater group.

In 2011, it was identified that the Mater return to work rates were poor. We did not support workers to recover in the workplace, and consequently, our premiums were fairly hefty. So, we decided to implement a process to improve the return to work rates within the Mater.

We implemented a pilot process at Mater Private, which had a separate premium at the time. The process involved early incident reporting and having our workers assessed at the Mater Private emergency department for their capacity to work, and there was an expectation from higher legal management that suitable duties would be provided in the work area.

What was implemented was immediate reporting, so there was a lot of education to managers and to staff around letting somebody know if you've hurt yourself. From a rehabilitation advisor perspective, our team were involved right from the get-to. We would advise immediately if someone had been to the Mater Private emergency, and we would go across to the work area, sit with the manager and the worker, and determine the suitable duties they could do, write a plan, get the buy-in from all parties, sign it off, and get it underway.

We're now six years later. The process has moved from being a pilot to being organization- wide. Prior to the pilot being implemented, our stay at work rates were 25 percent for injured workers. Now, our stay at work rates are up around 80 percent for injured workers remaining at work after an injury, and what we're seeing is that our claims are shorter, and they're less severe, and so 98 percent of our workers will return to their pre-injury jobs.

Work is so much more than just going in and doing your tasks. Work is a social connection for a person. It gives you a sense of value, and you're adding value to other people, as well.

What I find rewarding about coming to work is helping people recover at work, get better from their injuries, and return to their normal jobs.