top of page

Management obligations and due diligence

Managers have always had a central role to play in promoting and driving safety in the workplace. This is recognised not just in a safety management context, but also in a legal context. Managers have always faced much more significant sanctions for breaching safety and health obligations in their capacity as a manger, than in their capacity as an employee.

Our programmes explain in clear, easy to understand language, important legal and safety management concepts.

Ensuring that managers understand their legal responsibilities not only helps to protect them as individuals, but also contributes to the overall effectiveness of an organisation's safety and health management systems.

Employee obligations for health & safety

Individual responsibility as an employee or worker is one of the foundation stones of safety management and safety legislation. The phrase "everyone is responsible for safety" is more than an aspirational catch cry of safety behaviour; it represents the legal reality in Australia.

Employees can be, and are, regularly prosecuted for breaches of safety and health legislation.

Using case studies and discussions, our workshops give employees the information that they need to understand their obligations for safety and health.

Supervisor obligations for health & safety

Supervisors are critical to effective health and safety management, and the function of "supervision" is central to health and safety legislation.

 

This program looks at supervisor obligations under Australian health and safety legislation. It examines how key legal principles are applied in practice and reviews cases where supervisors have been prosecuted and convicted for breaches of health and safety legislation.

Contractor safety management

Health and safety legislation across Australia creates a relationship between principals and contractors with associated rights and responsibilities for safety and health.

Recent high profile cases in Australia have highlighted the need for both principals and contractors to understand their respective rights and responsibilities, but they have also demonstrated that the boundaries of those rights and responsibilities can be hard to determine.

Ensuring that rights and responsibilities between principals and contractors is clearly understood not only helps to manage the legal relationship between the parties, but also contributes to the overall effectiveness of an organisation's safety and health management systems.

This program is designed to help parties in a contracting relationship understand their obligations for health and safety and provides clear guidance on developing effective contracting strategies in contractor management processes which aligned legal, contractual and safety requirements.

Writing better incident investigations

Incident investigations play a critical role in helping managers and organisations to understand whether the health and safety risks in a business are being effectively controlled.

In 2011 Greg Smith, reviewed over 200 incident investigations in a 10 month period looking to understand any common trends or patterns that might help improve “management line of sight”. The investigations were from a range of different businesses and industries, and were created using different formal and informal incident investigation methodologies.

 

The findings from the review have been incorporated into our training program, which will help any organisation improve the quality, clarity and usefulness of its incident investigations, regardless of what incident investigation process or methodology is used.

Disciplinary action for safety breaches

Managing breaches of safety procedures in a workplace requires a careful balance between learning from the incident and holding people accountable.

In recent years, disciplinary action around work health and safety breaches have resulted in unfair dismissal claims, allegations of bullying and harassment and stress related compensation claims.

In this program, we explore disciplinary action in the context of safety breaches and how best to manage the competing interests.

Please reload

bottom of page