A safety meeting should be a shared forum where a committee works out whether the workplace’s work health and safety (WHS) risks are understood and under control, and where workers and managers decide together what to do next. Done well, it serves more than a hazard checklist or a briefing from the safety committee chair. Most of that comes down to the agenda and the topics below can be used by any committee member, on the worker side or the management side, to improve their own meetings. This guide covers the topics a meeting should always include, then the ones a stronger meeting adds, with organisational risk at the centre.
What a good safety meeting is for?
A safety meeting does two jobs, and the best meetings hold both in view.
One is assurance. The committee works out which risks are the serious ones, and whether the controls meant to deal with them are in place and working. That concerns everyone in the room. It also feeds the duty that officers, the senior people who make the big decisions, carry under section 27 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, which is to take reasonable steps to see that the business manages its risks.
The other job is participation. Workers and their representatives help shape safety decisions instead of being told about them afterwards. The law backs this up. Sections 47 to 49 of the same Act require a business to consult workers, so far as is reasonably practicable, about health and safety matters that affect them, and where there is an HSR, that representative has to be involved (section 48). In most workplaces, the committee meeting is where consultation happens.
Setting the agenda together
The agenda belongs to the whole committee, not just the chair. Any member can put something on it, workers and HSRs included. It helps to settle the agenda ahead of time and to send out any papers beforehand, so people arrive ready to discuss what matters to them rather than meeting it cold.
Core topics every safety meeting should cover
Some topics earn a place on nearly every agenda.
- Run through the actions agreed last time and check what has been done. Actions that carry over from month to month are usually the first sign a committee has lost momentum.
- Cover what has gone wrong since the last meeting and what is being done about it, including the findings of any investigation and anything that had to be reported to the regulator. The people who were on the spot at the time usually know more than the report does.
- Look at any new hazards and the risk assessments behind them. Consulting workers at this point is not optional, because the law requires it when hazards are identified and controls are chosen. Sound decisions work down the hierarchy of controls, and personal protective equipment sits near the bottom of that order, so it should rarely be the main control.
- Check whether the controls put in place earlier are holding up well enough. A control that looked fine on paper can quietly fail in use, and an independent WHS audit is one way to test it. Workers on the floor will often say straight away whether a control works or is being worked around.
- Make room for the concerns workers and HSRs have raised, and for any issue that is still unresolved. Where something cannot be settled in the room, the WHS laws set out an issue resolution process to follow. This item matters as much as anything else on the list.
- Keep track of training that is due or overdue, inspections coming up, notices from the regulator, and any change in the law that touches the work.
What a stronger meeting also covers
The topics so far cover how the workplace runs day to day. The next few look wider, at risks built into how the organisation works.
- Psychosocial risk is a good place to start. It is harm to mental health caused by the way work is set up and managed, such as heavy workloads, weak support, bullying, or change handled badly. Every Australian jurisdiction now treats it as a WHS risk in its own right, so it belongs next to the physical hazards. Fatigue, the risks that ride along with contractors and supply chains, and big changes such as a restructure sit in the same group.
- A small number of risks could cause a death or a life-changing injury. They deserve more of the meeting’s time than the rest, and a hard look at whether the few controls that really count are reliably in place.
- The committee should read both kinds of safety measure and ask what they are saying. Lag measures, such as injuries and claims, describe harm that has already happened. Lead measures, such as hazard reports, training completed and audit actions closed out, point to what might happen next. A committee that watches only the lag numbers is always reacting after the event.
- Much of what shapes safety is settled well away from the committee, in budgets, rosters, purchasing and production targets. A committee doing its job names those decisions and asks whether the money and the people needed to control a risk are there.
- It is worth asking plainly whether the safety system runs the way the documents say it does. The gap between paper and practice is where a good many serious incidents begin, and a meeting where workers can speak freely is one of the few places to catch it.
Making consultation real
Consultation is a duty under the law, and it is also a right that workers hold. Section 48 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 sets the standard. The business has to share the relevant information and let workers have a real say before a decision is made. It then has to take what they say into account and tell them what was decided. Where the decision is already made before anyone speaks, it is not consultation. The test is whether workers and HSRs can point to something that changed because of what they said.
HSRs carry weight of their own. An HSR who has done the required training can issue a provisional improvement notice, which is a written instruction to fix a problem, and can order unsafe work to stop. A worker can also refuse work that would put them in serious danger. Committees that take these powers seriously tend to hear about problems sooner.
A note for Victorian Safety Committees
Victoria sits outside the model WHS scheme. There, the duty to consult employees comes from section 35 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic), which covers much the same ground. Victorian HSRs hold similar powers, including the provisional improvement notice. Victoria has no officer due diligence duty of the model-law kind, although its senior people still answer for safety and the state has a workplace manslaughter offence. None of this changes the agenda for a Victorian committee, only the legal references it points to.
Getting more from committee meetings
A meeting that works through these topics, with an agenda the whole committee owns and an honest back-and-forth in the room, earns its keep for everyone who attends. Workers are heard, and they go home safer. The serious risks are better understood and kept under control. Meeting the legal duties then tends to follow on its own.
We suggest committees measure their own agenda against this list. The meetings that work best are the ones where any member can shape the agenda, and where consultation can change an outcome rather than only record it. Safetysure can help a committee build that structure and the checks behind it. To talk it through, see our WHS consulting services.
You might like to read Dealing with disruptive ideas at Safety Meetings
Sources
- Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (model law adopted in Queensland, New South Wales, and most states and territories), sections 19, 27, and 47 to 49, the issue resolution provisions (sections 80 to 82), the health and safety representative powers (including provisional improvement notices), and the health and safety committee provisions (sections 75 to 79)
- Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic), section 35 (duty of employers to consult employees), the health and safety representative provisions, and Part 5A (workplace manslaughter)
- Safe Work Australia and Comcare guidance on the due diligence duties of officers under section 27