WH&S Planning – Why you need to do it

In previous articles I have written about the need to integrate WH&S in business operations and thinking big about safety when the organisation is small.  In order to achieve a specified goal it makes sense that you have a plan.  The value of planning is well-recognized and strategic plans, business plans, succession plans, and marketing plans are every day talking points. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for workplace health and safety planning which seems to be regularly overlooked in its importance.

Many businesses try to improve their workplace health and safety performance by diving in and throwing a lot of documentation and systems around and hoping for the best.  Probably the thought process is that this approach is better than doing nothing, but this is not a sustainable, effective or cost effective way of improving workplace health and safety for the long term.

Every organisation has to start somewhere with safety and commonly the policies, procedures, forms and processes start being developed in order to tick the box on compliance before moving on to ‘the more important stuff’ such as safety culture.

The difficulty with this approach is that these systems,-policies and procedures and the like start shaping your organisation’s safety culture as soon as they are (or are not as the case may be) implemented.  What can result from this approach is a hodge-podge of duplication, conflicting and or confusing processes with little perceived value and a highly inefficient use of resources.

Carefully considering and documenting your desired goals for your organization in terms of workplace health and safety, and developing a WH&S plan allows your business to move beyond a vague ideal of improvement towards tangible, measurable outcome-based targets.  This in turn facilitates the sensible allocation of resources and clever timing of WH&S projects to integrate with broader business operations and targets.

WH&S plans also assist an organisation to more clearly understand and communicate workplace health and safety responsibilities and accountabilities to managers and employees which in turn supports the workplace health and safety culture more successfully than the failing around in a boat without an oar approach!

At HR Business Direction we are able to assist you in the planning, developing and implementing WH&S programs that work.  Contact us here.

Christina Willcox MHSc; PostGradDip OHS; BBus(HRM)
Workplace Health & Safety Specialist
christina.willcox@hrbd.com.au
07 3890 2066
www.hrbd.com.au