The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) requires businesses to involve their workers in health and safety. This is called worker engagement, participation, and representation (WEPR).

Workshop – How to build a strong health and safety culture

This workshop is for leaders. It covers three key things you and your team can do to build a strong health and safety culture at work – speak up, step up, have a health and safety person.

Run this workshop at your workplace

Use the PowerPoint presentation and the facilitator notes to run the workshop at your workplace. The workshop video focuses on how to build a strong health and safety culture.

The workshop will teach you why it’s important for workers to speak up on health and safety matters, how workers can step up and get involved in health and safety, and what it means to be the go-to safety person.

This workshop is designed to help you identify and address common challenges related to worker engagement and participation in health and safety, including issues around communication, confidence, clarity, trust, and awareness across your team.

The PowerPoint file and facilitator notes include suggestions for what to say when sharing the workshop with your team.

Request a WorkSafe engagement workshop

If you need support identifying the engagement and participation issues your workplace is facing, let us know and we can support you to run a workshop or run one for you.

Request a workshop(external link)

Practical tools – explore the five resources

These resources offer practical ways to help understand these duties and build a healthier, safer workplace. Under HSWA, businesses have two related duties to engage with workers and enable them to participate in improving health and safety.

You must:

• ensure that workers’ views on health and safety matters are asked for and taken into account, and
• have clear, effective, and on-going ways for workers to suggest improvements or raise concerns on a day-to-day basis.

Worker engagement and participation can be direct or through representatives.

Each resource provides a simple, practical conversation guide that support you in your engagement and participation conversations.

Start your journey today.

Growing connection

• Building trust and good relationships to create a positive health and safety culture.
• Includes ready-to-use quotes and insights from businesses about things they do that work well.

Recognising good work

• Encourages positive reinforcement and highlighting what’s working well.
• Conversations for celebrating the small actions that improve health and safety at work.

Speak up

• Supporting open, honest conversations about the risks at work, and how the risks can be identified and managed.
• What does your team do that supports your workers to feel confident when they speak up about health and safety concerns?

Team kōrero/talk

• Promotes collaborative discussions about work health and safety.
• Teams have conversations and share ideas to find solutions together.

Step up

• Encourages workers and leaders to take responsibility for work health and safety.
• A conversation about what people think, feel, say, and do when it comes to their own health and safety, and that of others.

Feedback

If these resources were helpful in your health and safety conversations, or you have other ideas about what works well, let us know. Your suggestions could help other businesses build a strong health and safety culture.