Spreading the safety load is best practice.
Compliance is important, and it affects every aspect of your work. If you completed your review and identified the quick wins like we suggested in our previous post, you’ll know just how long (and far-reaching) the list can be. That’s why it’s important to share the load across your teams and individuals. In fact, the WEPR regulations make it not only important, but obligatory! Safety cannot be the job of a single person. While directors and managers should be involved, they should not be bogged down with the full daily responsibility of safety management—it’s not an effective way to do things.
If you’re a director, your job is to know your approach, know that it works, and make sure that it occurs. It is not to make every decision and oversee every detail in person.
Effectively giving compliance roles and responsibilities to your people requires some pragmatic thought. Delegation is great, but it’s crucial to delegate tasks and responsibility in a way that makes sense and matches the skill set and capability of the assigned person.
The right balance of roles and responsibilities when it comes to safety and compliance will help you meet legal responsibilities, distribute obligations more evenly, and imbue the knowledge and practices throughout all levels of your organisation.
The risks of keeping it all on your own plate
Decided that you, a single business owner or manager, are going to make compliance solely your responsibility? Good luck! It’s an important job that needs to be in capable hands, but relying on one single pair makes it much more likely that the ball will be dropped.
When compliance is not a shared responsibility, things tend to fall through the cracks. One person can not have full knowledge of what goes on in every part and function of a business, which can result in important tasks being missed. The potential consequences of compliance obligations being missed, particularly safety-related requirements, are very real. Worksafe’s statistics from 2022-2023 show an average of 146.8 notifiable incidents per month, many of which would have been preventable.
Having clearly documented official responsibilities allows for informed change. If a person’s job description is fairly generic but they are actually doing much more, these accumulated informal add-on tasks and areas of expertise can be missed. This is a significant risk—when compliance is informally shared (as it naturally will be) around but responsibility is not officially given to the people who are doing the work, transitions will be very tricky. Bear in mind that safety is not a concept apart from the rest of your operations; it’s a compilation and record of good, sound practices that prevent incidents which can waste time and money as well as put people in danger. Safety is something that should be weaved into how we do business daily, not a standalone chore.
Why spread compliance across the team?
Making compliance a team effort has benefits for all involved. Here are a few:
- When you have people in different areas or departments with compliance on their mind, gaps are usually spotted much earlier. It’s crucial to have people “on the ground” everywhere who are trained on and looking for compliance actions.
- Giving people more responsibility, even if it’s small, offers them a chance to shine. Many clients have discovered management potential amongst their team members this way. Your next health and safety manager might be waiting in the wings! It could be the administrator you hired straight out of school three years ago who has a tonne of organisational knowledge and is keen to learn.
- Making new employees part of your compliance systems can help them to learn the ropes and integrate into their teams faster, which can only have a positive effect on your business outcomes.
We also mentioned WEPR earlier. The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 says that all PCBUs should:
- engage with their workers on matters which relate to health and safety
(including specific issues which must be engaged on); and - have effective, on-going ways for their workers to participate in improving
health and safety in that workplace.
It is, therefore, a legal obligation as well as a good idea to include your people in your compliance systems. When responsibility is thoughtfully shared around, you have evidence to prove you’re abiding by the WEPR guidelines.
An aside: you can’t contract your way out of the law
We always say it: while outsourcing has an important place in many things, you can’t fully outsource safety and compliance. It needs to be part of the fabric of your operations and organisational IP.
We’ve spoken to business owners who churn through advisors because they are frustrated that no-one can just take the whole thing out of their hands.
The truth is, there is only so much an external party can do. If something serious does happen, advisors are not the ones who will be questioned and held responsible. Directors and senior management must know the risks and what’s in place to control them—not doing all the work themselves, but aware of what’s being done and why.
How to distribute compliance responsibilities
A significant portion of compliance implementation is recognising what’s already being done—and formalising it in policies, role descriptions, and other documentation. Rather than creating new responsibilities and systems, make sure you are first recognising those that already exist under the radar. This might require some investigative work. It’s important to speak to those who know what’s really happening day-to-day; that will be those on the “shop floor”, whatever that means in your operations.
There are double benefits to adding these informal roles to org charts or structures. It allows managers to see where there is single person dependency, and is also a really helpful tool for new starters. They can see that they should talk to Fred in accounts about the social club or see Sally in purchasing if a customer has a question about a particular product because she is the expert on it. You can even add in some quirky ones if that fits with your company culture—write down in the org chart that Nico is into acrobatics and he’s the go-to for anything requiring extra flexibility.
A good place to start with new allocations of compliance responsibility is to consider what’s currently being missed. What are you having to chase up, or what are you being chased for? Try to gather all the evidence for a prequalification. If you are having to pursue a particular piece of information, that area of safety probably needs work. Who has or should have responsibility in that area? Also, who has responsibility for reviewing and changing it?
Look at your position descriptions collectively; they should build a story. One role does, the next role reviews, the next role manages! For example, if one role does something and no one has overarching responsibility for it, it's likely someone does and it’s not documented—or you are missing a trick.
We need to give permission as equally as we limit it. In a recent blog post about risk management, we discussed the need to ensure workers are authorised to mitigate risk—this applies in the broader context of compliance, too. When you’re handing out roles, responsibilities, and tasks, think about what decision-making requirements they might entail.
TL;DR: Compliance is everyone’s job
Compliance is something that affects all aspects of a workplace, and therefore it can’t be the sole responsibility of one person. It’s important to share the load! The right balance of roles and responsibilities when it comes to safety and compliance will help you meet legal responsibilities, distribute actions more evenly, and imbue the knowledge and practices throughout all levels of your organisation.
The benefits of sharing the compliance load include:
- Spotting gaps and issues much earlier, with more people having compliance on their mind.
- Offering more opportunities for your people to prove themselves and to discover areas of expertise or passion.
- Integrating new employees faster.
- Following the WEPR regulations (a legal requirement).
Not sure where to start? Here are some top tips to help you assign compliance roles and responsibilities:
- Recognise and formally record (and include in org charts) the informal roles that people tend to take on. Who is the go-to or the specialist for which tasks?
- Identify what’s being missed and decide where that task or responsibility should be assigned.
- Review job descriptions collectively to make sure that each task has a person assigned to do it, one to review it, and one to manage it.
- Give permission as equally as you limit it. Make sure people have the go-ahead to do what they need to do.
Get the right help
If you’re preparing for a prequalification, certification, or just looking to make sure your operations are compliant and well-oiled, Emendas can assist. We help businesses to structure their teams and organisations for better retention, productivity, and outcomes.
A very easy way to discover gaps in your compliance systems is to wait and see which particular brand of shit hits the fan when something goes wrong. However, with the information outlined in this article and our years of experience in creating better business together with our clients, we can help you get ahead of disaster.
Get in touch today and future-proof your compliance!