Work health - strengthens your business

On Screen Text Work health - strengthens your business

Peter Keyte, General Manager Trade Services, Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd
Before we introduced our healthy lifestyle programs the port was solely focused on safety, which meant a focus on incidents only and trying to determine the cause of an incident.

Back in 2011 we realised we had a huge cultural problem. Our LTI's were very high as a percentage of the workforce, our absentee rates were very high, we recognised that we worked in a remote location, not a lot for staff to do in their lunch hours, difficult for people to make the decision to come to work. That was costing the business money, time and poor engagement with the staff.

In 2010 the Port Of Brisbane would accumulated forty five claims to a value of $86,000 in compensation. So in 2011 we decided to turn the whole health and safety culture on its head and we implemented a new health and safety management system.

What that did was focus more on health and wellbeing as much as safety.
Since introducing the program in the last financial year they have reduced to nineteen claims and less than $36,000.

Nicky McMillan, Owner/Director Regson Fabrication
Since becoming a lot more involved in the construction industry, I noticed that there was a lot more need to spread the health worker message.

I guess when health and wellbeing became our focus cause we started putting up little posters and things around our workspaces and from there I started implementing health cooking classes and teaching the blokes about health and nutrition, teaching them how to cook rather than actually going down visiting the canteen down the corner and buying something out of the hot box which was probably deep fried or very high in sugar.

Joseph Meissner, Manager Work Health and Safety, Seqwater
Health and wellbeing is really important to Seqwater, because we believe in our people, in developing our people and also their health and wellbeing is a really important part of it. It's vital that we focus on the health and wellbeing of people appose to just preventing injuries. We also want to get into those lead indicator spaces in safety and if we invest in our people and keep them healthy and well then we'll know that we will get the best out of them in the work place.

Peter Keyte, General Manager Trade Services, Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd
Port of Brisbane's healthy life style program is one that we are extremely proud of. This has become a great place to work. We ran an engagement survey with the staff just late last year and our staff engagement results have increased by another thirty percent as a result of introducing these programs.

Nicky McMillan, Owner/Director Regson Fabrication
The health and wellbeing inactive was going pretty well and I thought what we would do is try and introduce it on a wider scale and since we had contact here at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital, I would approach Lend Lease and see whether we might be able to keep that health and wellbeing initiative alive and see if we could just build on that and see if we could reach a little bit further to a lot more people.

Lend Lease were really supportive when we purposed the idea about our health and wellbeing inactive and we thought isn't this an excellent opportunity to reach many people in the construction industry all in the one place at the one site.

Lend Lease were able to actually implement some of this communication through tool box talks, text messaging, the OH&S talks with the blokes so it was able to keep going just through those regular communications on site.

Tracy Co, Injury Management and Health Programme Coordinator, Seqwater
I think strong leadership is fundamental in establishing a wellness program, having leaders who are wellness role models but also having that visible commitment to work place and wellbeing.

Joseph Meissner, Manager Work Health and Safety, Seqwater
We are very lucky at Seqwater we have a strong management commitment to our health and wellbeing program, more importantly it is integrated into our management system so in that the executives, the CEO, all the way to the board, regularly receive reports and luckily enough for me with the information the evidence that I gather about the improvement in risk factors and the reduction in risk factors amongst our staff, I then can go back to them and show them how important the program is been in improving the health and wellbeing of our staff and reducing those overall risk factors so we are very lucky now that the program has been running for a period of time that we are able to show now so real evidence and proof about how effective this program is for us.

Nicky McMillan, Owner/Director Regson Fabrication
There have being many improvements since we have started our health and wellbeing program and I think the biggest one is the workers are happier. They don't have many days off work, they're not sick and definitely up there for me it's just less injuries and that's what we are all trying to aim for.

Joseph Meissner, Manager Work Health and Safety, Seqwater
On a personal level for me it's been an amazing journey to be a part of our transformation. I now have realised that even a senior manager in the business you can affect people's lives every day.

Nicky McMillan, Owner/Director Regson Fabrication
If I was going to give any advice to any other business starting up a health and wellbeing inactive in their workplace I would just tell them to start up very small and build on that. Once you've got the workers trust then I think you can do bigger and better things.

Peter Keyte, General Manager Trade Services, Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd
Leadership here at the Port is not about chain of command, it's about the management team getting involved in the rest of the staff, integrating with them and working with them to improve the health outcomes. Talk to the staff focus heavily on the positives, there your building blocks to find further improvement in the outcomes for safety in health and wellbeing.

RUN TIME:  6 min 19 sec