Safety initiatives

Key initiatives undertaken during the year include: 

  • A particular focus at WesCEF on situations or events that have the potential to cause serious harm. These are known as high potential (HiPo) hazards and incidents. WesCEF continued to focus on hazard reporting throughout the year and pleasingly achieved a 40 per cent increase, or 1,507 separate reports, compared to the previous year. Identifying and implementing additional controls to address these hazards leads to an overall reduction in risk of serious harm to personnel. Although the increased hazard reporting has not yet resulted in less incidents, continued focus is expected to achieve this outcome in future years.
  • Industrial and Safety business units prioritised team member psychological wellbeing and this will remain high on the agenda next year. Blackwoods launched its Health and Happiness community for team members to share helpful resources with each other, such as building mental resilience, guided meditation sessions and nutrition and physical health ideas. Coregas established its Work from Home initiative, which offers flexible working arrangements and support for its team members, while ensuring the team remains connected. Greencap facilitated an internal psychological health and wellbeing workshop with 82 per cent participation and commenced training mental health first aiders. Workwear Group developed a risk matrix to assess psychological risk associated with roles and piloted a psychosocial survey with New Zealand office-based team members. 
  • Officeworks introduced the Moving Mindz initiative, which provided a holistic approach and engagement with personal wellbeing that supported the mind, body and soul. More than 35 per cent of team members voluntarily participated in the 12-week Moving Mindz program, which enabled team members to connect, move and thrive.  
  • Kmart has continued to drive a strategic plan of continuous improvement across four pillars of safety, regulatory compliance, wellbeing and injury management. This work incorporated the management of the rapidly emerging and often evolving information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. To help reduce risk of community and workplace transmission, Kmart delivered a substantial program of controls and training across stores, distribution centres and national office in Australia as well as overseas operations in New Zealand, and Asia. The significant improvement of performance has been attributed to the business placing an increased focus on proactive hazard and near miss incident reporting to address and mitigate risk. The introduction of iAuditor software to all sites resulted in the capture and action of 4,193 hazards and 1,919 near miss incidents.  
  • Catch’s safety journey continued to develop and strengthen with the recent creation and ongoing implementation of the CatchSAFE Safety Management System (SMS). The SMS will ensure Catch creates a strong and resilient technical safety foundation to equip its teams to drive a zero-harm culture. 
  • Bunnings continued the use of cross-functional teams and piloted learning teams to investigate safety incidents and drive robust remedial actions. The learning teams include team members who regularly conduct the work along with subject matter experts. Their role is to harness knowledge and feedback from the team on normal business practices, such as loading and unloading timber, to determine what works well and what improvements are required to mitigate risk and enhance work processes.  

 

GRI 103-1, GRI 103-2, GRI 103-3, GRI 403-2, GRI 416-1 

Bunnings expands its Speak Up Program