Workplace Health and Safety Workshop (TSSI)

Note: Location has been changed to Christchurch.

The Institute of Organisational Psychology is pleased to bring you this one day workshop, presented by Associate Professor Chris Burt, on practical strategies to improve workplace safety.

This Total System Safety Integration (TSSI) approach is argued to deliver a positive safety culture which helps eliminate many know safety risks, while also enhancing other performance metrics such as increased organizational citizenship behaviours, reduced employee turnover, and enhanced commitment and motivation.

New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act (2015) requires organizations “to eliminate risks to health and safety, so far as is reasonably practicable; and if it is not reasonably practicable to eliminate risks to health and safety, to minimise those risks so far as is reasonably practicable”.

While the goal of the legislation is clear, the path to achieving it is not. A considerable amount of research work has isolated factors that cause accidents, and devoted some attention to strategies that can be adopted to eliminate risk factors.

The adoption of a broad range of risk elimination strategies is often argued as providing the foundation of a positive safety culture. The workshop will focus on the foundational components of safety culture, how each component is really just an extension of fundamental management practices (e.g., leadership, supervision, environmental management, talent management, skill development etc), and how practical strategies to improve safety can be integrated into each process.

Workshop objectives:
- Discuss safety culture components, and how they relate to general management activities.
- Discuss the broad aims of developing a safety culture that is just, flexible, learning orientated, and open through supportive voicing.
- Identify known safety risks associated with the failure to manage each safety culture component.
- Examine each culture component from the perspective of best practice development and management, and describe the integration of risk reduction strategies.
- Examine measurement options to allow impact and outcomes to be evaluated.

Christopher Burt is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Canterbury. He leads a research programme on workplace safety with a specific interest in issues associated with new employees, including the assessment of new employee safety potential, the relationship between trust and safety within teams, the management of risky helping behaviours, and employee safety voicing behaviour.

He has published many works on safety, including New Employee Safety: Risk Factors and Management Strategies 2015 Springer International, and numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Safety Science, Journal of Safety Research, Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation, Journal of Health, Safety and Environment, Applied Ergonomics, and the Journal of Environmental Psychology. He regularly speaks at international conferences on employee safety management, and consults to industry in this area.