Save 10-20% on ACC levies

Burke Consulting has over 15 years experience in managing health and safety, providing advice and in developing systems to improve business results and health and safety performance.

With several successful audits at tertiary level in the ACC Workplace Safety Management Practices and Partnership Programmes, a national health and safety award, a variety of innovative injury prevention programmes, reduced injury rates and improved safety culture we have demonstrated our ability to improve organisational health and safety.

We specialise in the development and implementation of safety leadership, safety culture, injury prevention initiatives, employee competence, and simple, reliable and sound processes and systems that are customised to the needs of your business. All of these aspects are strongly supported by our knowledge of people management processes.

Burke Consulting has a thorough understanding of the requirements necessary to enter the ACC Workplace Safety Management Practices (WSMP) and other ACC incentive programmes as well as significant experience in developing the tools to allow this. Benefits include a 10% to 20% saving on levies as well as the broader principles of good health and safety management.

Real heath and safety and operational benefits come from safe practices, and behaviours in the workplace, not mere compliance. Health and safety can also be a great tool for improving workplace culture which can further improve productivity.

Rapidly progress your culture and leadership

Establishing a culture is about understanding the types of behaviours that will be encouraged or discouraged and developing these in the business.

Management commitment and leadership in health and safety management is the foundation on which effective safety management practices are built. It is all about the policies in place and management actively demonstrating their commitment at all times by:

• making health and safety visibly in the workplace
• standing behind and enforcing policy and procedures
• leading, though change, establishing, communicating, modeling and building commitment to the vision of a healthier and safe future
• involving, consulting and communicating with employees
• planning, monitoring, reviewing and evaluating their own and other’s performance

Paper based or electronic systems are the starting point for establishing standardised practices that align to the business needs and introduce sound and consistent methods that deliver without creating bureaucratic nightmares.

Burke Consulting can lead you through the process of increasing employer commitment and develop a sound and simple way to operate your health and safety programme.

Become safe, more successfully

Injury prevention is critical to business success. Hazard management is the key aspect for providing a safe and healthy workplace by identifying and managing those parts of the work or work environment that might cause harm to any person.

Burke Consulting have an extensive database of hazards and hazard controls that may apply to your workplace, all you have to do is identify from the list which hazards apply to your operation.

Burke Consulting can assist with:

• Simple and effective models for identifying and managing (eliminating, isolating and minimising) hazards
• Advanced methods of hazard management and sharing information across numerous and diverse sites.
• The introduction of behavioural observation type techniques that determine safe or unsafe acts and conditions

We can also help with a risk based approach to manage the workload and ensure the most harmful matters are dealt with first.

Stress and fatigue are commonly used terms and both can have an adverse effect on your workplace, there are a range of activities that can reduce the impact and assist people to manage stress. We can provide advice and direct you to expertise in this matter.

Prevent daily disruption
to your business

Incidents is a broad term that describes injuries, accidents, spills and a variety of other general failures. Health and safety incidents always have negative outcomes for your employee and you. Prevention is better and cheaper for everyone than cure.

In most organisations the number of incidents recorded is far less than what is actually occurring. Understanding what is going wrong in your business, particularly at the coalface, will help you improve health and safety and service quality and to reduce cost by preventing the serious disasters and daily disruption to your business.

Burke Consulting can assist with:

• Simple and effective models for incident reporting and injury prevention; or,
• getting more from your incident reporting system by increasing the level of incident reporting; or,
• increasing the analysis of the data to identify problems and prevent the rare but devastating incidents as well as the lesser impact of daily occurrences; or,
• investigation techniques that find the real cause of the problem, not just apportion blame.

Could a minor crash cost your business over $8000?

All incidents will impact, usually badly, on people, performance, productivity and ultimately profit. Therefore solving the issues that cause injuries and incidents will benefit your business. Take this example:

A work vehicle has a minor crash at an intersection that damages the front corner panel, there is no injury, the repair will cost $1000.00. However there is also a range of indirect costs, such as:

• time taken to trade details (30 minutes at $30/hr)
• late arrival at the job (60 minutes at $30/hr)
• time to complete an accident form (15 minutes at $30/hr)
• time to complete an insurance claim (15 minutes at $30/hr)
• getting witness statements (30 minutes at $30/hr)
• management or admin time to ‘sort it out,’ (60 minutes at $50/hr)
• time to switch to a replacement vehicle (60 minutes at $30/hr); and,
• cost of a rental vehicle ($200)

Lets round this up to $500.00 allowing for any item missed out or underestimates. The total cost so far is conservatively $1500.00.

Other costs arise if there is an injury (doctors, physiotherapy, hospital, medication, lost time ACC premiums), more than one person in the van, more serious damage, driving offences, damage to cargo, communication costs and probably others.

Assuming you have an excess of $500.00, forgetting about your no claims bonus and remembering that you can’t claim for the indirect costs, the cash outlay is around $1000.00 off your monthly profit.

But wait there’s more!

If you have a profit margin of 12%, in order to recover the $1000.00 cost of this accident you need to increase your sales by $8,333.33 for this accident alone.

This logic applies to all workplace accidents and injuries, not just motor vehicles, identifying the problems occurring, the causes of the incident and then preventing further similar incidents is beneficial to people and your business.

Optimise the ability
of your employees

To optimise the ability of employees to work safely and perform at their best, health and safety and general information must be available to them. There is also a legal requirement, depending on the size of your workforce, to have approved health and safety representatives and an agreed scheme.

More importantly though involving employees in managing health and safety has significant benefits to your business. Information should be supplied to employees at the beginning of and throughout their employment. It should detail their responsibilities, the employment relationship, policies and procedures, people they work with, pay rate, levels of authority and where to go with problems.

Inducting employees paints a positive picture: it motivates, improves safety, clarifies what is required of them and allows employees to perform to a higher standard more quickly.

Are contractors a liability
to your business?

The answer is most definitely “Yes.” Contractors and subbies can be a law unto themselves, you need them to perform specialist tasks and often you don’t know the details of how they will perform the work. You do have an obligation to ensure that they and your employees are protected from harm that either party may introduce.

Burke Consulting can assist you manage your health and safety obligations for contractors and subcontractors and reduce your health and safety risk.

Could you cope if 40% of your workforce were off sick?

Being prepared for any disaster that may occur at your business is really another form of hazard management. An action plan will help you to ensure the safety of your people and visitors, reduce the harm and damage caused and enable you to re-establish your business expeditiously – this could include your business continuity planning as well.

Simple risk analysis of your business can help you prepare for unexpected and unforeseen events. Recent examples include preparation for the swine flu or any pandemic influenza outbreak. How would you cope if 40% of your workforce are out of work for a week?

Burke Consulting has resources that will assist you to manage your influenza risk as well as being prepared so that you come out the other side in better shape than if you hadn’t.

Burke Consulting can assist you to manage these matters and develop the necessary processes. We have helped many companies do the same and have a long list of clients who were extremely satisfied with the outcomes.