6.6.1 Role of OHS representatives
Health and safety representatives can assist by:
- Making it easier to bring health and safety problems to the attention of management,
- Coordinating staff feedback on how problems are dealt with and resolved;
- Encouraging individuals who are experienced in key aspects of OH&S to coach or mentor other individuals or teams/ work units;
- Providing resources and capacity for resolving health and safety problems teams or individuals cannot resolve;
- Providing new or younger employees with direct access to representatives to draw upon their 'expertise'; and
- Using their legal and workplace power that enables them to fix safety problems or to report failures to conform to standards or to rectify non-compliance reports.
Information about the outcomes of participation and consultation must be considered part of the formal OH&S system. As much as any other safety information, data and feedback from informal and consultative processes must be captured and processed formally. In many cases it has been shown that where serious accidents occurred informal and staff feedback had already given plenty of warning of the likely hazard or danger. Unfortunately senior management had not been aware of the problem. Ignorance of the problem in the face of widespread workplace consultation that shows a history of the problems not being addressed, is no defence against legislative and legal responsibilities!
This suggests that participative consultation may uncover issues that not only have to be reported, but done so in a way that decision makers can access and understand. Once actioned, management then needs to follow the same rules and ensure that personnel can access and understand how the matter has been addressed. The concept of access and understanding has to span not only the workplace language but also specialist knowledge that may be involved, ie. engineering, electro-technology, chemistry, physiology, and such like.
Access and knowledge sharing can be facilitated through such methods as:
- OH&S newsletters.
- Intranet note boards and reporting mechanisms.
- Suggestion boxes.
- Physical, on site suggestion and response boards (i.e. note boards, whiteboards, electronic boards, etc. that publish suggestions and responses).
- OH&S team or committee action plans.
- Regular workplace team meetings and report back sessions by OH&S representatives or managers.
- Building safety issues into 360 degree or performance feedback sessions and processes (as an example see http://www.profiles-r-us.com/samples/Safety180sample.pdf ).
- Focus on and report the timeliness of the response to suggestions (often time to respond is taken as an indication of interest and preparedness to accept feedback).
- Making space in major OH&S reports to identify where consultative feedback has resulted in actions or prevented major accidents or potential exposure to hazards and diseases.
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