Diverseco wishes nothing more for its employees than for them to return home from work in the same healthy state as when they arrived that morning. And not just our employees. We also want the same thing for our suppliers, customers, regulators and even the general public that we cross paths with.
For that reason, and like many other companies, Diverseco has a Health and Safety Management System to manage occupational health and safety, or work health and safety as it’s referred to in national legislation, at all of our premises.
We employee a National Work Health and Safety Manager to manage our System on a day-to-day basis. Each one of our branches also employs a Work Health and Safety Representative to manage health and safety at their local branch and together, the Representatives and the National Work Health and Safety Manager form our Work Health and Safety Committee designed to exchange information, overcome challenges, solve problems and promote health and safety within all areas of Diverseco.
We call our Health and Safety Management System and our Committee: Safety Matters.
Information is king. Arm an employee with information, knowledge and understanding about their health and safety and the health and safety of others and we have a fighting chance of developing a genuine health and safety culture within Diverseco. Information sharing begins at the new employee induction stage and continues throughout their entire career.
Every one of our branches has a health and safety training quota that they must achieve each year. We also love sharing information with our employees. For example, we always include a health and safety article in our internal newsletter, Synergy, which is published periodically throughout the year. We send out a monthly email blast (a short message) to our staff highlighting some topically relevant information at the time, such as an incident that may have just occurred and how we can avoid repetitions of it in future. We have health and safety-related posters erected at many of our branches.
Employees are reviewed throughout the year regarding their health and safety performance through our annual Performance, Development and Review (PDR) process.
But the communication isn’t all one-way. We also enable and even encourage our employees to provide us with feedback and concerns through a number of means, one of which is bound to suit their personality and disposition.
Employees can discuss concerns or issues publicly, say through a monthly Branch Meeting (during the Work Health and Safety meeting agenda item), or privately using one of our Improvement Opportunity Forms or through formal or informal discussion with their manager.
The feedback and concerns that we sometimes receive from our employees is not always comfortable to hear but it does help us achieve one of our goals, which is continual improvement. We can always improve on making our workplaces and work practices even safer.
And, of course, we are aware of the many benefits of having safer workplaces. We find safer workplaces produce fewer incidents and injuries and are also more productive workplaces. We observe an increase in staff morale when they feel safe and secure at their workplace, and they are more likely to contribute to improvement because they feel that they can make a difference and their opinion matters.
So while some may think that we have a Health and Safety Management System just to meet our legal obligations and to reduce our exposure to risk, we’d like to think that we actually champion health and safety because we can see the intrinsic value in it. We can see how important it is to our staff and how important it needs to be to us as a company and we trust that our actions reflect our integrity on this subject.