Major Challenges of Behaviour Change by Omesh Jethwani

INDUSTRY BEHAVIOUR CHANGES

WORK HEALTH AND SAFETY

MAJOR CHALLENGES OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE IN THE BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY Omesh Jethwani, Government Projects & Programs ms Manager in-conversation with Skye Buatava, Director at Centre for Work Health and Safety on the major challenges of behaviour change in the Building and Construction Industry.

You have quite an impressive resume. You have held positions with Qantas, AAPT and SafeWork NSW. How did you come to take on the role of Director at Centre for Work Health and Safety (WHS)?

What are the main core functions of the Centre for WHS?

It is not a typical path to setting up a research centre. My work history is diverse, spans multiple industries and many dissimilar roles. I think this is what helped create something different in the Centre for WHS.

I see our role within SafeWork NSW as being the catalyst for change by gaining new insights, knowledge and a more acute understanding of the issues out there.

Immediately before taking on the role at the Centre for WHS, I was the Manager of the Engineering team at SafeWork NSW. This indepth involvement with industry and workers, while at the forefront of regulation provided an avenue for seeing a greater opportunity to use evidence to inform smarter approaches in the prevention of harm and better regulation. My experience could see the critical need for workers, business and all involved in the practices we were trying to impact to be part of that evidence base. A mix of this and, right place, right time led me to the Centre.

Our core function is research into work health and safety harm and how to prevent these. But simply, the goal is to assist in the overall mission to minimise harm in the workplace.

What this does, at least what we are striving to accomplish, is to make SafeWork NSW a better prepared regulator, through that increase the increased intelligence that comes with research and its findings which will then assist our ability to achieve that overarching goal of preventing harm. To go a step further and explain how we accomplish that, the Centre works closely with our network, partnerships with individual academics and universities, business, other government, non-government agencies like yours, and community participation that spearhead our research projects. You can have good and bad research, but

it’s that key difference through partnerships, that allows a more robust and practically focused approach to research. This delivers the invaluable insights, increased knowledge and the better understanding of issues, trends both now and into the future, changing environments and even emerging risks in WHS. An important caveat is research itself won’t automatically lead to a decrease in incidents in the workplace. It is our other core functions that proceed with the lessons from research. One of those is enabling the community too, in a sense use what we have learned to make workplaces safer. We aim to achieve this by promoting innovative harm prevention strategies, new perspectives and smarter approaches to WHS issues something only made possible by doing research. Not stopping there, we also give workers and businesses new tools, up to date knowledge and the information, again from our research and findings, to meet their obligations be that employers or employees. Our hope is NSW won’t just do what’s required under the legislation but go above and beyond. Issue Two | April-June 2020 | MBA NSW

WORK HEALTH AND SAFETY

INDUSTRY BEHAVIOUR CHANGES

The Centre Team

That’s a good segue to our next aim, better regulation.

program and looking to the future of work in a WHS context.

A key outcome for the Centre is also to provide an evidence base that enables good regulatory practices and policies. We think this is a key component in preventing harm.

One of the Centre for WHS project involves real-time crystalline silica detection. What is involved in this research?

What are some of the recent projects involving the Centre for WHS?

We are excited about the potential outcome of this project, especially considering how devastating silicosis is to the human body, not to mention the impacts an effected silicosis victim has on their family.

We have one exciting project that I am keen to spruik which illustrates how contemporary the Centre is, and that’s our Changing World of Work program. It’s a fascinating set of projects that aims to speculate, with a degree of probability, what the future work environment may look like and what effects that may have on WHS. The partners on these project are yet to be confirmed; the approach we took was to essentially to open up space for basically anyone to tender their innovative out of the box ideas to receive funding to conduct their research. We took a somewhat innovative approach in that it hasn’t been done much in government to open a crowdsourcing campaign, that encouraged private enterprise, students, early career researchers and academic institutions to pitch their ideas to partner with the Centre on this project. The campaign ad itself attracted over a month 15,000 views, 8,000 hits on our webpage and over 50 applications, in just one month, which was a success as it vindicated the crowdsourcing approach we took. After a sharp evaluation process, we have selected four successful projects and the work is underway. I am personally excited about this

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It’s a novel project where we canvassed the globe to find someone who could develop a real-time respirable crystalline (RCS) detector. This world-first technology will be such a game changer. Consider the current practice whereby workplaces bring in air monitoring equipment, take samples and when the results come back from the lab, tell you if you were, past tense, exposed to harsh levels of silica dust. You can see what value a real-time detector could bring to preventing silicosis dust exposure in the workplace, as workers would get the immediate feedback required to take the necessary actions to protect themselves, much like a smoke detector provides instant feedback to the household of the presence of smoke, leading to preventative measures. Our role in this project was initially to perform the background research to identify the objective of the project to prevent silicosis. That entailed looking at past research, consulting industry on how workers work with silica-rich materials, blending that with what are the current safety practices to identify what became the best way to prevent silicosis ultimately and that was developing a real-time respirable

crystalline silica detector. In January this year, we partnered with Trolex Nome (Australia), who with their based parent company, specialises in hazardous dust monitors it for the mining and tunnelling sector. Trolex Nome’s R&D supported with funding from the Centre is developing a world-first realtime RCS detector. Going one better, we are also aiming to develop a miniaturised, wearable detector – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to ensure the feasibility on that one after the larger prototype is ready. Either way, a successful finish to this project will be a mass-produced real-time RCS detector that would be available in Australia. I am especially proud of this project, as the Centre can lay exclusive claim to be the spark to the scientific advancement in the interests of NSW and even Australian workers. In your opinion, what do you think is the best practice and implications of using Building Information Modelling (BIM) in WHS management? Best practice of using BIM in WHS management in Australia can’t be explored as the WHS modules that complement BIM, are not available to fit within our specific domestic environment. Our international counterparts in places such as the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong do, and they are reaping the benefits. The Centre is looking at WHS management using BIM, that in summary, is investigating the barriers to its use, comparisons to current practice, identifying preferred models and understanding implications in the Australian context. This should provide us with the

INDUSTRY BEHAVIOUR CHANGES evidence and path forward for enhanced WHS management through BIM, and best practise for the future. Several societal and economic trends are causing new, current and emerging challenges in the work health and safety landscape. Care to elaborate for our readers. Sure, there are many of these like the casualisation of the workforce, the advancements in digitisation and automation, changing work practices like an increase in working from home, particularly in the current COVID-19 environment, and the ageing workforce. These all present unique challenges to WHS, some of which the potential effects are not well understood or known. Therein lies the opportunity for the Centre for WHS. One example of an emerging challenge that most people would foresee is the possibility of social isolation and mental health consequences as a result of working from home. We have started advancing work in these areas through various projects, most recently through the changing work of work project mentioned earlier. What does the Centre for WHS core stream of research focus on? We have three parts to our core stream of work. Firstly, there is an alignment with NSW’s Work Health and Safety Roadmap. Here we

do research that focuses specifically on areas set out in the Roadmap—for example, high-risk harm and priority industries, like transport and construction. Our second research stream aims to identify, plus address current and emerging WHS challenges like those affecting small business. Third and last, looking at research to inform effective WHS policy in NSW. What is the relationship between the Research Foundation and the Centre for WHS? I’m very proud of the Centre’s Research Foundation. It is a group of leading academics from the nation’s top universities, and industry innovators from business, government and non-government organisations convened by the Centre to provide advice on our research and its strategic direction. They are such an eclectic mix of people with divergent experience and ideas. The Centre, and by extension, the community is the beneficiary of this world-class expertise in WHS. The Foundation meetings are great; our members challenge each other and step outside of their areas of expertise, leading to some unique insights. The Foundation members are true leaders in WHS and should be commended for taking on this role. The MBA’s very own, David Solomon is one of our inaugural Centre for WHS Research Foundation members. He brings a practical and candid perspective to this group, bridging

WORK HEALTH AND SAFETY

the gap between academia and the real world, and keeping us all in check. This is invaluable. What is the Centre for WHS aiming to achieve in the next decade? So much. The Centre for WHS is new, by research standards anyway - we launched in December 2017. What this means is that our next few years will see us ramp up the delivery of a great volume of outcomes from our early research ventures. On the flip side, being two years old, has seen us learn so much. We have embedded ourselves in the WHS landscape, and we’re dialled into the problems that need to be taken on, where we can have the greatest impact. It’s exciting to be at the Centre for WHS in this ever-changing work environment that will always pose questions to be answered. The Centre has established a great model that sees us always adapting, with an appetite to challenge the traditional ways of research, seek novel solutions to longstanding problems and invest in preparing for WHS in our future workplaces. Having found our place in the WHS research setting, it’s also time to give back, encouraging the WHS researchers of tomorrow to come forward for the benefit of future workplaces. Attracting bright new sparks and their original ideas to this discipline is integral to the sustainability of our WHS tertiary education programs.

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Issue Two | April-June 2020 | MBA NSW