My view is that in part; as long as OHS is not yet a subject in Civil Engineering curricula, then little is hoped for management REAL appreciation to safety.

100% of construction project managers are civil engineers

I believe the same notion applies to many other businesses.

Thanks

TopRep, I have no experience about the OHS duties of OHS regulators to their own staff and, certainly, my article had no reference to OHS regulators. There may be some evidence of this type of behaviour in the various inquiries over the last few years in to the OHJS regulators in Victoria, NSW and South Australia but I am not aware of any.

Thanks for commenting.

I have worked in a couple of regulatory agencies where this behaviour is at its most obvious, who’s going to regulate the regulators behaviour? This toxic behaviour started at the top and seeped all the way down through every management level of the agencies. Poor audit results were covered up and plans to correct them were never honored, HSR’s were targeted and isolated, all with the knowledge of so called inspectors or OHS Champions and nothing was done to prevent this behaviour. Tokenism was the order of the day “don’t ask don’t tell” became the culture. Fortunately I got another job with a great employer who is proactive and treats employees well and seems genuinely concerned about health and safety outcomes. Our WHS Agencies should be an open book on health and safety practices and should be the exemplar of safety culture and not the enigma. If the regulators are participating in these “avoidance behaviours” what chance do the rest of us have!

Excellent timing Kevin. We are currently looking at options

David, I accept that universities teach OHS graduates these concepts but what is being done to provide these concepts to those taking Masters of Business Administrations or Project Management. I see you are located in Central Queensland University’s Bundaberg School of Human, Health and Social Sciences and CQU offers both MBAs and Project Management diplomas. Do lecturers from your School provide any instruction to the students in the business schools? If not, why not?

However I am pleased to say that in the safety sphere where importance is being given to competence and proper targetted training is provided to ensure personnel are aware of their repsonsibilities, things can and do improve. The last job I have been on, if persons in roles such as the one you describe, did not take a good hard look at their repsonsibilities, did not do walk rounds, did not gete involved in looking at the incidents and so on, then the history for that organisation is quite clear, the specific persons did not last long on the job and were replaced by persons who understood the safety requirements of competency in that role.

There is still hope for continued change and improvement. That then raises the issue of when it does improve and it would be demonstrated by a whole range of things, not just reduced LTI’s or the company TRIFR rate, the regualtors don’t accept the detail and want to know what has not been reported or insist you cannot have achieved such an outcome. There needs to be change in that area as well, rather than just sticking to the usual indicators and trends that have gone on for years.