An employer that revamped its safety policies and procedures by focusing on technology and the on-boarding process, and putting dozens of employees through certificate IV WHS training, has won an award for its commitment to workplace safety.
DFP Recruitment Services recently won the Recruitment and Consulting Services Association's McLean Award for Workplace Safety for its extensive redevelopment of OHS procedures and training.
DFP people and performance manager Athena Iliades told OHS Alert that what sets the recruitment agency apart from other organisations is its implementation of safety into all aspects of the business, instead of keeping it as a separate element.
"All our business plans, all our meeting agendas, all our operations plans, all our KPIs have safety in them, which means that [considering safety] is something that happens on a daily basis," she said.
About three years ago, DFP's risk profile shifted when it made a number of significant acquisitions of major hazard facility recruitment businesses in regional Western Australia, prompting it to rethink how it approached and where it could best influence workplace safety.
"For a recruitment consulting firm, we've got contractors engaged all around the country and often we don't have control of what they do on a day-to-day basis," Iliades said.
The agency believed the best time to influence safety was during the on-boarding of a worker and the ongoing supervision of that worker by a consultant, she said.
Technology was the solution
DFP "heavily integrated" technology into the on-boarding and supervision processes because it wanted to "take out that administrative burden but also mitigate the risk of people forgetting to do important safety steps", Iliades said.
It developed an online on-boarding platform that ensures no worker goes on site without completing a safety induction, reading and accepting OHS policies, and "seeing some fairly fundamental safe work method statements" relating to, for example, manual handling.
"Unless they go through training, they can't actually start on site and they won't get paid," Iliades said, noting that the on-boarding system prevents workers accessing the payroll system if they haven't completed the OHS requirements.
She added that DFP consultants are aware if a worker hasn't completed the requirements because the system sends them an email alert.
Consultants also receive alerts on a worker's first day on assignment that remind them to contact the worker to ensure they were inducted onto the host employer's site.
Make safety more than "just another form to fill out"
Iliades said DFP wanted safety to be "very much a part of what we do".
"It's a cultural shift embedding processes within an existing recruitment process to make sure things become a way of being, rather than just another form to fill out," she said.
It is vital for employers to make OHS part of an existing process and make it easy for all workers to integrate it into their day-to-day duties, so it isn't "standing alone as yet another thing that they have to do", she noted.
"We're all over it"
Iliades said DFP required 25 of its internal staff to undertake a certificate IV in work health and safety.
"We wanted to make sure our people were as good as many of the subject matter experts out in the field in our client sites and could talk the talk and were well ahead of any of our candidates that they could guide and facilitate safety on site," she said.
"It gives senior level OHS stakeholders within our client sites a level of comfort that if their own managers or supervisors are missing something, that we've got enough knowledge to pick up and consult.
"They can see in those major hazard facilities [that] we're all over it."
As a result of these measures, DFP has significantly decreased non-compliance, workers' compensation claims and lost-time injuries.
