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Should employers stop conducting toolbox talks? How can safety professionals market the "caring" aspect of safety to an employer? How can employers get workers in the one place to discuss safety? These questions and more are answered here.

Assessing the physical and cultural workplace environment is just one of five steps employers should take to ensure they have a best-practice health and wellbeing program, a national conference has heard.

The most highly-developed safety systems and plans will still fail if employers don't get the "people" component of their approach right, a safety professional says.

Workers who are exposed to the most adverse working conditions know less than those in lower-risk roles about safety, European researchers have found. They have also identified a link between active regulators and "favourable" safety climates.

An organisation has slashed its incident-related costs by 93 per cent, by giving "peer groups" more control over safety decisions and targets, a conference has heard.

A national employer reduced the number of provisional improvement notices issued by HSRs at its Victorian sites by 87 per cent, under a program designed to improve the relationship between safety reps and frontline leaders, the annual Safety Psychology Conference has heard.

A major infrastructure project has set a new OHS benchmark for project work by adopting safety as a core value from the inception stage, and requiring potential contractors to identify risk control measures during the tender process, according to specialist safety advisor Kevin Jones.

Employers should monitor incidents and near-misses in their broader industry - not just their own workplace - to ensure they prepare for and minimise safety risks, says Lander and Rogers partner Neil Napper.

Employers can significantly improve their OHS communication with workers who speak English as a second language by using picture-only safety signs or having policy documents translated, says Lander and Rogers lawyer Annika Anderson.

There are some simple steps employers should take to ensure safety communications have been understood by their workforce, such as asking workers to perform new tasks immediately after they are trained on them, and asking them to explain various workplace safety signs, Lander and Rogers lawyer Annika Anderson says.