One of the critical requirements for Australian businesses is to ensure that they comply with industrial manslaughter laws. To meet their obligations, organisations must:
- review all the potential hazards and risks (physical and psychological),
- manage them within a risk management framework,
- train employees in the safe practice of high-risk activities,
- regularly refresh the training to ensure ongoing competence and
- keep detailed reports and records.
This article discusses the importance of keeping detailed and ongoing reporting of employee competencies and knowledge of critical risk and control measures to comply with industrial manslaughter laws.
How Do You Comply With Industrial Manslaughter Laws?
As a business, you must have your house in order to comply with industrial manslaughter legal requirements. Below are eight steps you can take:
- Review all the potential hazards and risks (physical and psychological) in your workplace, and manage them within a risk management framework.
- Conduct a formal review of your safety systems and controls to ensure they are effective and a correct reflection of your processes.
- Review all your existing policies and ensure they are complete.
- Examine your health and safety leadership and culture for possible negligent practices.
- Ensure all company directors, senior officers and managers understand the implications of the legislation.
- Review your incident action plans and responses.
- Consider your business insurance arrangements. But remember in NSW and WA insurance policies cannot pay WHS fines.
- Train all employees in the safe practice of high-risk activities. Regularly refresh the training to ensure ongoing competence and keep detailed reports and records.
See our article, How to Adhere to Industrial Manslaughter Laws.
Regularly Train Employees
Training around high-risk activities plays a vital part in injury prevention. However, assuming that once training is complete, employees are set for life doesn’t help you to comply with industrial manslaughter laws. High-risk activities need regular refresher training to ensure that their knowledge is up-to-date and that your employees not only retain the information but can put it into daily actions.
Training needs to change behaviour because otherwise, it’s just an exercise in compliance and injuries and fatalities are likely to continue at the same rate. Also, more and more in today’s regulatory environment, compliance training doesn’t cut it. Because prosecutors want to know that your employees clearly understand critical hazards and control measures and can apply their knowledge; especially in high-risk tasks.
The Tap into Safety training platform has a significant number of out of the box safety training courses that cover high-risk tasks such as working at height, working around moving plant, working with electricity and handling hazardous substances, at a very affordable price. There is no need to spend time and resources, creating your content because we can easily integrate into your portal or LMS via a simple URL. Contact Us for more information or try a free 7-day trial.
Keep Accurate Training Records
As a business, you need evidence of your employee’s knowledge of the risks in their work environment and the correct control measures they need to use to keep themselves and others safe. You need to include both physical and psychological risk to comply with industrial manslaughter laws. Consequentially, in light of the industrial manslaughter laws, you must keep accurate training records and evidence that your employees remain competent and compliant.
Safe Work Australia argues that keeping accurate records of safety training provided to employees and visitors is an essential element of an effective training system. Training records are evidence that you are meeting your WHS obligations. Also, they provide a valuable audit trail.
They recommend that copies of course content and assessment tools, as well as training records, should be kept to show that the business has complied with the regulations. Reports may be saved electronically and should be made available to employees and regulators. Keep the reports for as long as the employee works for your business.
Record-keeping should extend to recording training that also aims to reduce psychological risk. You should document the number of staff who have completed mental health first aid training, wellbeing campaign topics and activities and any other reported information that can be stored to demonstrate ongoing training to support employee mental health.
Tap into Safety’s Mental Health Literacy Training is focused on the employee and uses MicroLearning methods. We aim to increase their mental health literacy by providing animated stories on workplace stressors that can impact on their mental health over a broad range of topics. We teach coping strategies to reduce stress, anxiety and depressive thoughts, all the while encouraging employees to reach out and seek help if they need more support.
See our article, How Critical Are Training Records in Proving Safety Compliance?
How Can Tap into Safety Help With Your Reporting?
To help you to comply with industrial manslaughter laws, the Tap into Safety training platform provides comprehensive reporting. Upon completion of the training, you have evidence of your employee’s knowledge about high-risk tasks and their understanding of the correct control measures.
The safety reports detail the gaps in their knowledge so that you can immediately rectify any misunderstandings. The mental health reports show that you are training your employees on a broad range of topics that can impact their wellbeing, including change and burnout, depressive thoughts, grief, gambling addiction and financial stress.
The reports provide a record that you have proactively and regularly trained your employees about high-risk tasks, and this helps you to comply with industrial manslaughter law requirements. Where they also support your organisation is they are an accurate audit trail that you can use to show you are regularly training around high-risk tasks.
To Conclude
There is a critical need to keep accurate training records to comply with industrial manslaughter laws. As a business, you must meet your OHS obligations.
You need to review all the potential hazards and risks, manage them within a risk management framework, train employees in the safe practice of high-risk activities, regularly refresh the training to ensure ongoing competence and keep detailed reports and records.
Where companies fail is when they take the view that ‘trained once is trained for life’. There is a real need for refresher training for high-risk tasks and the ongoing collating of training records to have evidence that you comply with industrial manslaughter laws.