NZTA INDUSTRY SUMMIT
‘100 PAGES ON A SHELF DOESN’T WORK IN THE FIELD’ The 2020 New Zealand Trucking Association Industry Summit took place on Saturday 21 November at Riccarton Racecourse, Christchurch.
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ccording to Phil Parkes, chief executive of Worksafe, 73% of workplace fatalities involve a vehicle. In the year leading up to the summit, he said, the transport industry suffered five fatalities. There were 1440 minor injuries leading to absenteeism; 528 incidences of muscular stress from climbing in and out of vehicles and loading and unloading; 381 falls from height; and 165 cases of people being trapped between moving and stationary vehicles such as forklifts and trucks. To reduce these figures,
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Parkes was straightforward: “There’s no secret science. We have to stop doing work in a way that puts people under pressure to cut corners.” What did he mean by this? Some 95% of the time, explained Parkes, workers worked with workarounds. “They do the work how it’s really done, not how head office thinks or what their health and safety policy says. It’s the workers who do the work who know what it’s really like; they know how to get around procedures that slow them down 20%. “So, the conversation April 2021
we have to have is how to set them up for success, give them the opportunity, skills and empowerment to do work efficiently and in a healthy and safe way. That’s about building capacity and resilience in the workplace, making sure the workers are given the freedom to do the job the way they think is best. You can’t do that unless you talk to them. If you sit in head office or contract someone to write a health and safety manual, you’ve missed the opportunity. They won’t read it; 100 pages on a shelf doesn’t work in the field.” Parkes suggested that the conversation needed to change if we were to impact workplace fatalities and injuries. “We have health and safety conversations, but realistically, 90 percent of Kiwis get turned off before you even get to the ‘and’.
Pretending otherwise is crazy.” He says there’s a way of having such conversations without talking about risk, hazards or “technical stuff that most people don’t care about”. “Have a conversation about what a good day looks like. You’ll find it looks like, ‘I’m excited to go to work. I have the right tools to do the job, know what I need to do and how to do it. I know when I’ve done a good job.’ As a result, you get to go home safely. Then have a conversation about what a bad day looks like: ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, haven’t got the right tools, under pressure and can’t get through everything.’ “That’s a risk-assessment conversation; you’ve identified things that could go wrong, the underlying causes of accident or injury. And then we talk about how to
