Employment Essentials: What Every Employer Needs to Know About WHS

Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to our webinar today on understanding workplace health and safety. My name is Simon Obi. I'm the head of HR advisory, and I'm here with my colleague, Neith Sokham, who's the HR advisory manager.

So before we get started, just a few housekeeping points. The webinar will be recorded, and you will be sent a copy of the recording.

And, also, you'll be sent a copy of the slides. If you have any questions as you go through, please use the q and a button.

Our colleague, Tim Miller, who's a team leader in the HR advisory team, is online, and he'll be answering questions where he can as we go through. But if there is time at the end, we will try and get through some of those, but there's quite a lot in the presentation, so I'm not sure how much time we'll have. But in any event, we'll we'll keep a record of anything you ask and put together a sort of FAQ document of the most common things that come up. So please do ask away.

Just as a general disclaimer, the information we're providing today is general in nature, and you shouldn't rely on it for your own individual circumstances. If you do require advice, please do get some professional assistance. Now that leads me conveniently on to just talk about the HR advisory service at Employment Hero. This is the part of the business that Neith, Tim, and I work in.

HR advisory at Employment Hero is a subscription service where our clients get access to unlimited HR and employment law advice plus unlimited HR documents, say, contracts, policies, all of that sort of stuff. We do a compliance check when you come on board, and you also, as part of the service, get representation in any employment law claims up to a certain point in the case. It is available either as a stand alone service or as an add on to other Employment Hero products and services. We as as part of that, we can help you understand and guide you through your work health and safety duties.

We have some great work health and safety templates. But as we shall see as we go through the presentation, safety isn't something that you can merely outsource to a third party, and everyone, particularly the kind of leadership in the business needs to be responsible for safety matters. But we can, by all means, partner with you on that and give you some great guidance and assistance in your compliance journey. So a quick agenda of what we're talking about today.

Neith's gonna take us through the health and safety legal framework, a look at discharging work health and safety duties, instant management, and managing physical risks. Then I'll talk a bit about psychosocial hazards, codes of practice, breaching safety duties, trade unions, and a quick look at workers' compensation. So let's jump into it, and I'll hand over to Neith.

Awesome. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Simon, and hello to everyone. Thank you for making the time to attend the webinar.

So without further ado, let's dive straight into it. Right? Because we've got a lot to cover today. Next slide, please, Simon.

Alright. I want to start by diving straight into what your work health and safety legal obligations look like. Before I jump into the nitty gritty of it all, I want to begin by quickly explaining how work health and safety is regulated in Australia. In a nutshell, work health and safety is regulated at a state and territory level, and what that means is each state or territory has its own work health and safety safety laws.

Although this may, I guess, seemingly indicate that there are substantial differences across different jurisdictions, there were many years of effort actually going into harmonizing work health and safety laws across all jurisdictions. And this has resulted, in all states and territories except for Victoria adopting the harmonized or model work health and safety law. What this means is the jurisdictions that have adopted the model law have largely similar regulatory frameworks. The base is the same, but lawmakers in those jurisdictions have added things to the base to make it their own.

Although Victoria does not use the model law, it has also made substantial amendments to its work health and safety legislation over the years, and now it looks pretty similar to the model law. Now that that's out of the way, let's get into the good stuff. Next slide, please.

Thank you.

When we talk about work health and safety law, the foundational concept that you need to be comfortable with is the work health and safety duties. This concept appears in all state and territories, work health and safety statutes. And just to give an example, section nineteen of the New South Wales Work Health and Safety Act sets out the primary duty, and we've included an extract of that provision here on our slide for your reference. Essentially, if you are a person conducting a business or undertaking, which is what the law calls a PCBU.

And also just for clarity, when we talk about person here, we're not just talking about natural persons. We're also talking about legal persons as well, like companies. So if you are a PCBU, you have a broad nondelegable duty to ensure as far as reasonably practicable the health and safety of your workers and anyone else who might be put at risk by your work. And this doesn't just mean your direct employees.

It also extends to people like contractors, subcontractors, volunteers, even customers or visitors to your site. Next slide, please.

Beyond the primary duty, the law also imposes additional duties as well, such as specific obligations on people who manage or control workplaces or those who design, manufacture, or install plant and structures. All of these duties are proactive in nature, meaning that you cannot wait for something to go wrong before you act. You're expected to identify what could go wrong, and we call this risk, and then take steps to eliminate it or prevent it from materializing. While work work health and safety legislation is generally quite clear about who is responsible and what responsibilities they have, it is written in broad terms, and it doesn't always provide specific step by step guidance on how to actually discharge those duties in every scenario that you face.

For that level of practical detail, we need to look towards work health and safety regulations, which supplement the main legislation and the various codes of practice published by the regulator, like Safe Work in New South Wales or WorkSafe in Victoria. We'll be touching on how the rules from those regulations and codes of practice help bridge the gap between the law and your day to day risk management a little bit later on in the webinar. Now that we've looked at the legislative landscape, I want to start pulling back the curtain on what the law actually requires you to do on a day to day basis.

And if you've ever looked at work health and safety legislation, you would have seen it's full of, you know, complex legal terms like risk identification, engineering controls, substitution controls. But when you strip all of that away, there are essentially three broad ideas that employers need to be across.

Next slide, please.

So these are the three ideas that I'm talking about. So we've got risk elimination here, we've got risk minimization, and we also have specific duties. Let's start with the first one, which is the idea of risk elimination.

The first and most important duty is the requirement to eliminate risks to health and safety, and this is the overarching goal of the entire work health and safety framework. In legal terms, the law says that you must eliminate the risk as far as reasonably practicable. And what that means practically speaking is that the first question that you should always ask when you identify a workplace hazard is, can we get rid of this hazard entirely?

For example, you have a noisy piece of machinery that's risking the hearing health of your team. So the absolute best solution and your primary duty here is to see if you can remove that machine altogether.

If you have a trip hazard on a warehouse floor, the goal is to remove that hazard entirely and not just put a caution sign next to it. Elimination is essentially the gold standard because if the risk is gone, the danger is gone. Work health and safety laws expect you to aim for elimination first before you even think about other options like training or protective gear.

Of course, we all know that in a real business, you can't eliminate every single risk. You can't eliminate the risk of a fall if your business is involved in roofing, just as you can't eliminate the risk of electricity if you are an electrical contractor. And this is where the second part of your duty or the second idea comes in, which is minimizing risks as far as reasonably practicable. If you can't get rid of a risk, you have to dial it down as much as possible. And to do this, the law points us towards something called the hierarchy of controls. This is essentially a fancy way of saying that there is a ranking system for safety measures.

Every state and territory has a different way of framing this hierarchy in their respective work health and safety regulation, but the general idea is you start with high level fixes, like substitution controls. Controls. So for example, if you run a cleaning business and you use chemicals to clean, you might consider replacing a toxic chemical with a nontoxic chemical or engineering controls, like putting in place a physical guard on a saw.

You only rely on lower level fixes, like administrative controls, so things like policies, rule rules, procedures, or personal protective equipment or PPE as a last resort. There are lower level fixes.

The phrase reasonably practicable is a concept that pops up from time to time again when it comes to work health and safety, and it's really important a really important concept to be across. It's a bit of a balancing act. It requires you to weigh up how likely the harm is to happen, how serious that harm could be, and what you actually know about the risk, specifically how to deal with that risk. That concept also allows you to consider the availability and suitability of fixes and, of course, the cost of those fixes as well.

But when it comes to cost, I just wanna be clear that it's not a carte blanche that allows employers to get away with not implementing a necessary safety measure. The issue of cost is typically only relevant to the question of reasonable practicability when the cost of putting in place a particular safety measure is grossly disproportionate to the risk. And what I'm trying to say in simple terms is you cannot skip a five hundred dollar guard for a machine that could cost someone their finger just because it is too expensive.

Moving on to the third and final idea, it's important to understand that while work health and safety legislation gives us these big broad duties, the regulations are where things get specific. The act tells you what to achieve, but the regulations often tell you how to do it for certain high risk activities. These regulations prescribe additional specific duties for things like manual handling, working at heights, or dealing with hazardous chemicals. To put it simply, while the act says keep people safe, the regulations might say, if you have people working at a height of more than two meters, you must provide specific fault protection.

So the takeaway for you is that you shouldn't just stop at caring about the general duty. You need to understand which specific regulations apply to your industry and your line of work. These are the nonnegotiables where the law has essentially already decided what is reasonably practicable for you, and failing to meet these specific standards is often where businesses get into the most trouble during a work health and health and safety inspection. Next slide, please.

Building on those three broad ideas, let's now talk about the actual how to.

Discharging your work health and safety duties isn't a one off event. It's an active ongoing process. And since we won't have time to go through the regulations in all states and territories in this webinar today, what I'll do is, in this segment, is draw upon Queensland Queensland's work health and safety regulations to illustrate the approach that you are required to follow, bearing in mind that other states and territories adopt a very similar approach.

Next slide.

The first step is conducting a risk assessment. And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense because you cannot eliminate or minimize a risk unless you know what the risk is first. This involves identifying reasonably foreseeable hazards as well as determining how severe they actually are. So what you're looking at here is the likelihood of an incident and the degree of harm that could result. You don't necessarily need a complex assessment for every single task, but it is a requirement when there is uncertainty about hazard or when different hazards are interacting with one another.

A critical part of discharging this duty is consultation. You must consult with your workers during the risk assessment process. They are your eyes and your ears on the ground, and their input is absolutely vital for a robust assessment process.

Consultation is a very, very important piece of the puzzle, and it deserves a whole segment of its own, and we'll revisit it in a little bit more detail later on.

Next slide.

Once you've assessed the risk, the next step is to start thinking about putting in place controls to address the risk. As mentioned above, this is the part where you need to follow the hierarchy of control. You cannot simply jump to the easiest or cheapest fix. You must work your way down from the most effective, which is elimination, to the least effective, which is PPE.

Consider the common risk of heavy manual lifting in a warehouse. Instead of simply providing back braces, which is a form of PPE, and it is the lowest level of control, you need to first try to eliminate the risk by, for example, negotiating with your supplier for deliveries to be made on wheel trolleys, for instance. If that's not possible, then you move on to engineering controls, like perhaps installing a hydraulic lift table to remove physical strain on your staff's backs.

And finally, you support this by implementing administrative controls through documented safe work procedures and staff training. Discharging this duty means more than just deciding on a control. You actually have to ensure that it's working in real life. And this involves providing the necessary resources, providing information, training, and instruction with respect to the controls that you're seeking to implement. A safety measure is only implemented compliantly if your staff actually understand how to use it, and they are properly supervised to ensure they're using it properly.

The final step is the review of control measures, and safety in the workplace is never a set and forget. You have an obligation to review your controls to ensure they remain effective.

The Queensland Work Health and Safety Regulation, for example, specifies several trigger points for review. So you must review your controls if an incident occurs or if a new hazard is identified or if consultation with your workers suggests that it's actually needed or if there is a significant change in the workplace that could give rise to new work health and safety risks. If a work health and safety inspector ever decides to conduct an audit of your work health and safety management system, they will want to see that your risk management is a living process and not just a document that is gathering dust in a drawer.

Next slide.

We've talked about the what and the how of safety duties, but there is one specific obligation that often catches employers out because it's not about sort of the tangible equipment or physical hazards. It's more about people. As I alluded to earlier, PCBUs have a legal duty to consult with their workers. And just by way of example, under section forty seven of the Tasmanian Work Health and Safety Act, a PCBU must, as far as reasonably practicable, consult with workers who are or are likely to be directly affected by a health and safety matter.

Consultation isn't just a nice to have or a courtesy. It's a mandatory legal requirement, and I want you to remember that. So what does consultation look like? What do we actually need to do?

The answer is there are four key steps to it. So the first one being sharing relevant information with your workers. The second one is giving them a reasonable opportunity to express their views. The third is taking those views into account and genuinely into account before any decision is made.

And then fourth, finally, advising them of the outcome of the consultation process.

Next slide.

And now that we understand how to consult and what it involves, when do we actually need to consult? The law has an answer for that as well. It's pretty clear cut. We've included a list of those specific trigger points for when consultation is required by law. But to cut a long story short, you must consult when you are identifying hazards, making decisions about how to eliminate or minimize risks, or proposing any changes that may affect the health and safety of your team. This is about drawing upon ground level knowledge of your staff to make better and more practical safety decisions.

A common situation I see in my practice as to where this duty becomes critical is when you are implementing or updating a drug and alcohol policy, particularly if it includes, like, random or targeted drug testing.

You might feel that as a business owner, you have the right to simply mandate testing to ensure a safe workplace. However, work health and safety laws are very clear about the need to consult with your workers before implementing such a policy. And you might ask, well, why do we need to do it?

It's an HR policy. Right? It's got nothing to do with work health and safety. And the answer to that is it's because implementing a drug and alcohol policy is essentially a type of safety control that minimizes the risk to staff's health and safety. It's an administrative control.

Consultation is not only a legal requirement, but it's also your opportunity to explain the rationale for for your policy. It allows your workers to raise legitimate concerns about things like privacy or the accuracy of testing methods and the consequences of a positive result.

Before we move on from the topic of consultation, I just wanna spend a couple of minutes speaking about the role of health and safety representatives, otherwise known as HSRs. If your organization has HSRs, any consultation within the workplace about work health and safety matters must involve them. Next slide, please, Simon.

So what are HSRs? Who are they?

In a nutshell, they are essentially work health and safety representatives within your workplace, and they represent the people that belong to their specific designated work group. In broad terms, the purpose of HSRs is to essentially bridge the gap between staff and employer when it comes to work health and safety matters. So if, let's say, there's a safety concern about a specific piece of machinery and an employee might feel a bit afraid to raise that with their manager, an HSR can step in and be the voice for that employee.

With this big responsibility, HSRs are empowered by work health and safety laws to do a variety of things relating to work health and safety. And we've set out a list of those things on the slide here for your reference. But an interesting one that I want to specifically point out is that they have the power to issue provisional improvement notices, otherwise known as PINs.

HSRs have the power to issue PINs when there's a contravention or likely contravention of a work health and safety law, and they've consulted with the employer about it, but the issue remains unresolved. What PINs do is they put employers on notice about a contravention or a likely contravention of work health and safety laws and then require them to actually rectify it by doing a specific thing within a specific amount of time.

When a PIN is issued, an employer must generally comply with it subject to a narrow set of exceptions.

Noncompliance may result in significant penalties and or further investigation by the regulator, which could potentially lead to criminal prosecution. So that's it about consultation and HSRs. Let's now move on to the next segment of the webinar, which is about incident management.

Now that we understand how to discharge the proactive aspects of our work health and safety obligations, including the obligation to consult, let's now turn our attention to sort of the more reactive aspects, which are all about incident management.

Work health and safety laws are typically quite prescriptive about what needs to be done immediately following a workplace incident. And failing to handle this correctly doesn't just put your workers at risk, but it actually exposes your business to significant legal penalties.

There are two critical duties that you need to understand. The first one is the mandatory reporting of notifiable incidents and your duty to preserve incident sites.

Under work health and safety legislation of every state and territory, there is an obligation to notify relevant work health and safety regulator immediately after becoming aware that a notifiable incident has occurred. The law is very, very strict here. When I say immediately, I mean the fastest possible means, which is usually a phone call to the regulator or in writing. So what exactly is a notifiable incident? By way of example, again, under section thirty five of the Western Australian Work Health and Safety legislation, there are three categories. So the first is the death of a person. The second is a serious injury or serious illness, and that generally means any injury that requires immediate treatment as an inpatient in the hospital.

The third category is a dangerous incident or what we often call near misses, where someone could have been seriously hurt, but they weren't. And this includes things like a crane collapsing, a gas leak, or a floor collapsing.

And if you are ever in doubt, the safest path is to always notify.

The second and often most overlooked duty is the duty to preserve the incident site. Once a notifiable incident has occurred, you must ensure as far as reasonably practicable that the site is not disturbed until a work health and safety inspector arrives or directs otherwise. When I talk about site here, it's not just the floor or the immediate location where where the incident took place. I'm also talking about anything that is associated with the site, so things like plant, substance, or structure.

There are some very important exceptions to this rule. You can disturb an incident site if it is necessary to assist an injured person or to move a deceased person or to make the site safe to prevent further injury or to assist in a police investigation.

Outside of those exceptions, you must tape off the area and ensure that no one touches anything. If you need to move something to make the area safe, try to take photos or a video of the scene first so that you have a record of the original state. Disturbing a site without a valid reason or an inspector's permission is a serious offense and can lead to heavy fines for your business.

Next slide.

So now that we have a pretty complete picture as to how you deal with work health and safety risks and incidents as well, let's hone in on that a little bit more and look at how we apply this framework to the management of common physical risks within the workplace. So first up, let's take a look at sprains and strains.

If we look at the most recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, sprains and strains being a subset of musculoskeletal disorders are consistently among the top of the list for work related injuries in Australia. And what these statistics indicate is sprains and strains are quite a widespread work health and safety risk.

And in most cases, sprains and strains arise as a result of engaging in manual handling work. So think of things like lifting things, pushing things, pulling things, etcetera.

Helpfully, though, work health and safety regulations tend to recognize the risks that come with engaging in these manual handling tasks. And in many, of these work health and safety regulations, take, for example, the Tasmanian one, there are specific rules around how those risks are to be managed.

First, we need to understand the kind of manual tasks that these rules seek to regulate. The regulations tend to cover manual handling work that are hazardous in nature. So the next question that we ask is how do the those regulations define hazardous manual handling work?

The term hazardous manual handling work is broadly defined as a task that involves repetitive or sustained force, high or sudden force, repetitive movement, sustained or awkward postures, or exposure to vibration.

A great example that I can think of of that is a retail assistant who repeatedly reaches for items or stacking shelves.

To the structure due your duty here with respect to risks associated with hazardous manual handling, you must have regard to a range of matters when it comes to doing your risk assessment and controls implementation. Some examples of those matters include duration and frequency of task, that is design of the work area, and the layout of the workspace, just to name a few.

Second, we need to see if there's any good practical guidance that we can use to help us manage those risks. And a really useful tool that you might consider using is the hazardous manual tasks code of practice.

This code is essentially a very practical compliance handbook, and not only does it provide guidance on exactly how to conduct risk assessments and how to control risks and how to review controls, it also provides really, really useful tools like worksheets, risk assess risk assessment methods and matrices, process flows, and suggestions on what controls you can potentially use to fulfill each of those key three obligations I alluded to earlier.

Although it's generally not a legal requirement to follow a code of practice, but this is starting to change, and Simon will talk about this more in more detail a little bit later, there are substantial benefits in following codes of practice if they are available for the risk that you are dealing with, especially from a liability management standpoint.

Next slide, please, Simon.

Moving on from physical strain to biological health, let's now switch gears a little bit and talk about infection management. Every winter season, risks like the flu and COVID become a major work health and safety issue for every business. While there are no longer specific COVID mandates in the way that we saw a few years ago, your primary duty under work health and safe safety laws remains exactly the same. You must eliminate or minimize the risk of illness as far as is reasonably practicable. When it comes to the management of infections as it pertains to things like cold, flu, and COVID, there are a few things that you need to consider as part of your risk assessment and control implementation.

The first consideration is, do you have basic facilities within your workplace that staff can use to minimize the risk of infections?

So in the context of infection control, this would mean ensuring that your workplace has proper ventilation, hand washing stations, and access to things like soap or hand sanitizers.

The second consideration is, in addition to those face basic facilities, do you have a framework for dealing with the risk of infections? If not, it might be a good idea to have something in place like an infection control program.

The third consideration is, have you had a recent look at the physical environment of your workplace? Is your air conditioning system pulling in fresh air? Have you increased the cleaning frequency of high touch surfaces like door handles and kitchen taps? These are all reasonably practicable steps that a WorkSafe inspector would expect to see if your workplace becomes the center of an outbreak.

In our experience, we often see that infection management is a little bit of a blind spot for many businesses, and we think that it is likely due to a lack of clear guidance around how to manage infection related risks. Unless you run a hospital or a lab, there isn't a ton of concrete guidance around how to manage infections in, say, an office environment or a TelCare environment. But this is all about to change with SafeWork Australia's introduction of the draft code on biological hazards. Next slide, please, Simon.

I want to now take an opportunity to plot to flag something quite important that is currently on the horizon. And the one that the the the change that I'm talking about here is SafeWork Australia has recently released a draft model code of practice for managing the risks of biological hazards at work. This is a significant shift in how we think about safety, especially with respect to those sort of data those minor infections that I spoke about earlier. Historically, biological hazards were something that we only worried about in, high risk places like hospitals, labs, and sewage works. But this new draft of code, this new draft code changes that.

It recognizes that biological hazards, which include viruses, bacteria, fungi, even dust, can be found in all industries and workplaces.

If this code is approved and adopted in your state or territory, it will set a much higher bar for documentation and risk management for regular businesses like retail, construction, and education.

The draft code naturally places a huge emphasis on following the hierarchy of control. It suggests that instead of just relying on sort of simple things like, you know, putting up hand washing signs, businesses are strongly urged to look at engineering controls, like installing high quality HEPA filters or high or isolation controls, like temporarily preventing access to an area where an exposure is likely, such as using barriers and childcare settings to limit access to an area where, let's say, a child may have vomited in.

While this code is still yet to be finalized, it's not a bad idea to start taking infection management seriously, and this will obviously require a shift in mindset. Consider reviewing all your policies and procedures relating to biological risks now if you have them in place, But always remember, though, that it's not enough to just have policies. You need to go further than that and assess whether you have appropriate controls to deal with those risks. That's it for me regarding physical hazards. I'll now hand it over to Simon to discuss psychological hazards, which is a little bit of a hot topic at the moment.

Thanks, Niece. Okay. So I'm going to start off by talking about psychosocial hazards. And as Niece said, this is a a really hot topic, and and you probably heard the term psychological or psychosocial hazards in the work health and safety context.

And what exactly does that mean? There's still a bit of confusion about it. And I think the way to think about psychosocial hazards are they are hazards in the workplace that can cause psychological damage. So what we're really usually talking about is anything in the workplace or in a work process that can cause workers' stress.

And then stress, obviously, has an impact on mental health. Stress can cause anxiety, depression, PTSD, but, also, it can impact physical health. People who are very stressed that might come out in a skin condition. They might have problems breathing.

It might cause issues with fatigue, etcetera.

And the legislation really over the recent times has started putting a lot more emphasis on addressing mental health risks as well as physical health risks. But and everything that Neith has talked about so far about duties of providing a safe workplace, that applies equally to, you know, a workplace being physically safe and mentally health mentally safe. So some of the common psychosocial hazards which are prevalent in workplaces today, and there's a fairly sort of well trodden list now that's referred to in in codes of practice practice and regulations, etcetera. The common ones are on the screen, things like high job demands, low job control, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organizational change management, so when there's a change in the business but it's not carried out very well, inadequate reward and recognition, poor organizational justice, so businesses not addressing poor performance or or misconduct properly, traumatic events or material that workers are exposed to, remote or isolated work, poor physical environments, whether they're too hot, too noisy, whatever, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment, including sexual harassment, and conflict or poor workplace relations and interactions.

And as I said, the approach to managing psychosocial hazards and risks is really, for the most part, the same as addressing physical safety risks. So as a quick summary of of the process that you're supposed to follow, number one, assess what risks are in place. Number two, put in appropriate controls, ideally to eliminate the risk entirely, but if not to reduce it, you need to review those control measures, and workers need to be consulted throughout that process.

And I think a lot of businesses are used to following a risk assessment approach for physical risks, but not so much with mental health risks and and psychosocial risks and hazards. But it's it's very important to do both. So, for example, say you have a a job or or a work process where it has always been done in the office, but going forward, workers are gonna be doing that from home. You will probably know that you need to assess for physical risks. Does the worker's home station, workstation, is that set up proper properly so they don't get back pain?

Are there you know, is it free from slip and trip hazards? But you also need in your risk assessment to think about things like, well, what does remote working mean in terms of physic mental sort of isolation and and and how that can impact someone's mental health? Are they gonna be taking adequate breaks? Is there a risk of burnout? All that sort of stuff needs to be part of your risk assessment too. And I'll take you through a kind of worked example in a moment for dealing with psychosocial hazards, which I think will will bring out a few of those points.

Before I do that, just to be aware of a couple of recent developments in the law affecting psychosocial health hazards. So in December, just gone, Victoria introduced some new regulations dealing with psychosocial health, these operate in a very similar way to the approach to assessing risks and dealing with risks that Neith Neith indicated a moment ago, but it is slightly more nuanced in in the way that it expresses things. So what regulations say is that where you're dealing with a psychosocial hazard, you can only use the control measure of providing information, instruction, or training where it is not reasonably practicable to use any of the following control measures. Those are those that have changes to management of work, systems of work, work design, changes to the plant or equipment used, or changes to the physical workplace environment.

And where a combination of risks controls are used, information instruction or training must not be the predominant control. In other words, it is really confirming that where you were dealing with a psycho social risk assessment, your main focus needs to be looking at making changes to the way that work is performed or is managed or changes to the physical environment, and you can only use instruction information and training sort of as as a last resort and where it's not possible to use the other controls. And if you're using a mixture of controls, those controls to do with managing work or the way work is performed or the physical environment have to take preference over things like just providing employees with training or instructions. So having a workplace policy, for example, that that really must be your last resort, and and that will be brought out in the example I'm gonna show you in a second.

The other recent development to the law, which is makes things a little bit more nuanced, is the requirement in Victoria and Queensland to have a written sexual harassment prevention plan in place. In Queensland, that comes from amendments to the work health and safety regulation. And in Victoria, it is a standard set by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission in order to comply with the positive duty to eliminate sexual harassment in Victoria. Now a written sexual harassment prevention plan is different to a sexual harassment policy, which is something which you should have in place as well.

A sexual harassment policy will usually detail, well, this is what sexual harassment is. This is what it isn't. We don't tolerate sexual harassment in our workplace. And if you have a complaint to make, these are this is the way you can raise a complaint, and this is how we'll we'll deal with the complaint.

That is very important to have in place, as I said, but there is also a requirement to have a sexual harassment prevention plan, which is basically a a risk assessment document where you would assess the risks of sexual harassment occurring in your workplace and put in place effective controls to manage those risks.

It it is best practice to have those sorts of things in place in all states and territories, but in Queensland and Victoria, the the law is is, you know, absolutely clear on the requirements there.

Okay. So I'm now gonna look at a bit of a worked example of approaching psychosocial hazards, and this is taken from some information on the safe work Australia website, and there's a link to that on the screen where where you can look at it in a bit more detail. But in essence, it is a hypothetical situation where a retail business is looking to address psychosocial hazards. It's not sure how it should start on on what risks are involved in the workplace.

So what it decides to do is to carry out a survey to of all staff to identify psychosocial risks. This is something that is is very easy to do. If you are struggling to think of, well, where do I begin with this sort of stuff, it'd be very easy to send out a survey asking staff about these kinds of hazards on the on the screen, whether they're experiencing them and asking for commentary about that. So the business does that.

It sends out a survey, and the results of the survey are pretty clear. They show that staff are feeling at risk from aggressive customers. They sometimes get verbal threats and occasional physical violence that is having a a impact on their stress levels and their mental health. This often stems from customers being agitated because of long wait times in the store and unclear return policies when they're trying to return something, and that that leads to agitation and aggression.

So once that risk has been identified through the survey, the leadership of the business meets with managers to gain further insights. And following this, they come up with a risk assessment plan where they propose several controls to eliminate and reduce the risks.

So these are grouped on the screen under three headings, changes to work systems and processes, changes to physical work environment and facilities, and lastly, training and information.

So some of the things that the business identifies is to put on extra staff in busy periods to make sure that queues are kept down to avoid delays and frustration.

Refund processes are changed to clearly communicate policies to customers and to provide more flexibility for managers with the refunds and to make sure that only staff trained in refund the refund rules are are dealing with them, and work process and and sales scripts are reviewed to ensure workers feel empowered to remove themselves from situations which may be headed towards harassment or abuse. So those are all changes to do with how work is carried out to address the risks. Secondly, there are changes to the physical environment workplace environment. I won't go through all of them, but they're stuff like making sure there are adequate visible security cameras and alarm systems, making sure there are security personnel in the store where where needed and there are physical barriers between the customers and the employees and having clear signage about the business not tolerating and threatening behavior, etcetera.

And then lastly, under the heading of training and information, the business gives staff updated training in customer service and cost conflict resolution and deescalating conflict situations. Store managers are trained on psychosocial risk management, and written policies are implemented to address workplace harassment, bullying, and violence.

Now you will see from that that, really, the the primary control measures and and a big part of them are all about looking at the way that work is performed and how that can be changed to address psychosocial risks and then looking at changes to the physical work environment to reduced psychosocial risks and hazards. And then it's only lastly that we look at giving training to staff and providing recent policies. And I think there's a a temptation, you know, often when we're talking about mental health initiatives and, you know, sexual harassment, those sorts of risks that businesses immediately think of, well, we we need a policy in place, and we need to make staff sure staff are adequately trained in that policy.

But it's really important, particularly in Victoria following those new regulations, that you are looking at changes to the way work is performed, changes to the physical environment as your as your primary method of addressing psychosocial risks before just looking at training and information to staff. So, hopefully, that brings home some of those points. Okay. I wanna now move on to a couple of kind of more quick fire topics, if you like.

So the first is looking at the role of codes of practice in our safety sphere. So as Neef said, you know, you you start off really with the the legislation, the acts of parliament. Beneath that, there are regulations. And then further down, there are codes of practice.

So there are codes of practice in all the different states and territories which cover a huge, huge range of topics. A lot of stuff is about physical health risks, working in confined spaces, working at heights, dealing with asbestos, all of that kind of stuff.

But there are also ones that focus on psychosocial risks and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Codes of practice are not generally binding legislation themselves, but courts and tribunals will look to the codes of practice and and whether they have been adhered to to assess whether an employer has complied with its work health and safety duties. It's therefore very important that they are followed.

In Victoria, it is slightly different where the law operates there. So if a code is complied with, the employer is taken to have complied with its work health and safety duties in that area. So compliance with the code sort of acts as a a defense from liability.

And in New South Wales, due to changes that occurred in October last year, employers must comply with the code of practice unless they can show they have taken equivalent or stronger measures to comply with duties. So really important that you are aware of the codes of practice that apply to your business and your industry and that you are across the details of what they say.

So moving on now to breaching work health and safety duties and what that means.

Each state and territory has a regulator who is responsible for investigating and prosecuting work health and safety breaches. They have wide powers to attend and inspect workplaces, which might be as as a result of a tip-off. Someone might have made a a complaint, but as well as that, they do routine inspections of workplaces.

In the past, that was, you know, really limited to looking at physical health risks. Is is someone wearing is everyone wearing a hard hat on a building site? But more and more, they are are focusing as well on on mental and psychosocial hazards.

Employees and trade unions can't generally bring work health and safety actions themselves unless the regulator has failed to act, Although, of course, there are many other related causes of action that an employee might have if there has been a safety incident or safety isn't being looked after, workers' compensation claims, personal injury claims, claims associated with harassment or discrimination, general protection claims for breaching workplace rights. So making a safety complaint or an inquiry is a workplace right. If someone is adversely treated for having done so, that would be a clear general protections claim. And I think the other point that it's important to note is is the law is set up generally so that businesses can't insure or get indemnification against worth health work health and safety penalties issued by Accord.

And we see that there are kind of providers out there that talk about health and safety insurance. But I think if if you are looking at that, it's really important to understand the small print there because the general position is is if you get a safety penalty, that that falls on your business, and you can't avoid that.

Regulators have three main types of enforcement powers.

And the first is issuing an improvement notice. So this is a requirement to put something right by a particular point in time and is is usually for kind of less serious safety issues.

Following on from that, there is a prohibition notice, which is a notice to immediately stop doing something, which would be where there is a more serious health risk involved. And then lastly, of course, they can take criminal proceedings where employers or individuals are taken to court for breaching work health and safety duties, which can involve significant financial penalties and criminal sanctions. So I've put on this slide the the maximum penalties. It does vary between states and territories a a little, but and this gives you kind of an idea of how serious things can be.

Industrial manslaughter, so where someone is killed because of a safety incident, the the maximum penalty is is over twenty million dollars, and individuals can face twenty years in jail. And then there is a kind of sliding scale of penalties depending on whether the conduct has been negligent and reckless, which has caused death a risk of death or serious injury down to just a simple failure to comply with a health and safety duty. But in in any event, as you will see, the the maximum penalties run into millions of dollars. And for a category one offense, gross negligence or reckless conduct leading to risk of death or serious injury.

Individuals can face jail time of up to ten years. These penalties on the right hand side are for officers of a company, so generally a director or or someone some other owner. There are lesser penalties for anyone breaching a work health and safety duty. So it could be any manager, any employee, but it it will generally be directors or senior figures who are prosecuted where these things arise.

So really important to get these things right.

I'll just now talk briefly about trade unions and work health and safety Aside from the regulators having rights to enter and inspect workplaces, unions have rights to enter a workplace under work health and safety legislation in respect of workers they are able to represent.

If they believe the employer is breaching the Work Health and Safety Act and they want to investigate that, or if they want to inspect documents that relate directly to a suspected contravention, or if they want to consult and advise workers on safety matters. No prior notice is required when they want to investigate a breach. However, at least twenty four hours notice is required to inspect documents or consult workers.

Unions also have a right to enter workplaces without prior notice where they want to assist workers who are elected health and safety representatives to assist the HSUs in ex in exercising their duties. And you'll recall HSRs are did I say HSUs? HSRs are workers who are elected to have a a role in health and safety in in the workplace. So your your own employees who have taken on that role, unions can enter to assist them.

Okay. The one thing to note is there has been a recent change to the law in New South Wales, which extends unions' rights in the safety sector. Unions can commence proceedings for any work health and safety offense if SafeWork New South Wales hasn't prosecuted the incident itself. It used to be that unions couldn't prosecute category three offenses. So the the the least serious offenses, they can now bring actions for any offense whatsoever.

Unions rights of inspection now include a right to take measurements, conduct tests, and take photos and videos relevant to a suspected contravention, whereas it used to be just a right to inspect documents. And these rights may also be exercised in relation to a new suspected contravention that the union official comes across when they are attending the workplace looking at a a different contravention. So they come on board to look at something. They notice something else. They have these rights of inspection in respect to that too. And then lastly, unions can apply to the industrial relations commission for a review of a employer's decision relating to certain safety matters, including training for HSRs, provisional improvement notices, etcetera.

And then another thing which the same legislation brought in, which is really important, is the requirement that when employers receive a provisional improvement notice from a health and safety representative, they have to provide that to SafeWork New South Wales. So you recall a worker who is elected as a health and safety representative, they can issue a a provisional improvement notice basically saying there's a safety issue in our workplace. Dear employer, please address it. You now have to pass that on to SafeWork New South Wales.

Even if you're gonna dispute it, that, of course, could well mean that SafeWork decide to attend your workplace or or look into that safety issue. So really important developments there in New South Wales. Finally, just a really quick look at workers' compensation and how this interacts with safety legislation. As you, I'm sure, will know, alongside safety laws, each state and territory has workers' compensation legislation, which requires employees to take out compulsory insurance compulsory insurance, which is used to compensate employees when they're injured at work.

There are rules about dismissing someone when they're in receipt of workers' compensation and obligations to assist injured workers to returning to work, for example, by giving them light or modified duties where possible.

Importantly, and I think this is something which a lot of businesses miss, there are rules in most states and territories which require employers to have written return to work programs or procedures, which must be provided to employees which deal with the employer's duties about assisting injured employees to return to work, and it is mandatory in most situations to have those written procedures in place and for them to share with employees.

The details of how that works state by state are are on the screen with with some useful links. I won't go through that now, but you can look at that in your own time.

So, look, that is the end of the formal part of our webinar. But before we check if we've got time in for a bit of a q and a, I just wanted to suggest a valuable next step you can take after today's session. It's worth pausing and thinking about what today's webinar has shown. Workplace health and safety has evolved far beyond managing traditional physical risks to now include rigorous standards for psychosocial hazards, infection management, and much more.

Modern employers need proactive systems and reliable processes in place to not only discharge their primary duty of care, but to navigate a landscape of increased union entry rights and heavy penalties for noncompliance. If you're not currently using Employment Hero, we are offering a short employment evaluation, which is a quick high level conversation to look at your HR and payroll setup. We'll help you understand if your current systems are adequate to ensure compliance, particularly regarding mandatory requirements like incident reporting, policy management, and safety training. For our

existing Employment Hero customers who don't yet have access to HR advisory, it's also an ideal time to see how adding this service can help your team, whether it's managing complex psychosocial risk assessments or correctly handling notifiable incidents. Having access to expert advisers and integrated HR systems reduces the risk of the costly mistakes we discussed today. And to be clear, these calls are purely to help you assess whether these solutions fit your specific organizational needs. So if you want to book a session, simply answer the poll that is on your screen.

Okay. I'll I'll leave that up there. I'm looking at the time. I see it's twelve o'clock.

So we do try and keep these things to time. So I think we won't take questions today, but we fear not. We have all the questions that you've asked in the q and a, and we'll put together an FAQ. And that is if Tim hasn't answered them all already.

So let me, yeah, just thank everyone for their attendance, and thank you, Nath, for all your contributions today.

And, yeah, reach out to us if you need any assistance with any of that.

But if not, thank you, everyone, and have a great day, and we'll see you soon.