From maintaining roads in the Pilbara, to cleaning hard surfaces in Auckland, designing and constructing telecommunications infrastructure across Australia, and operating and maintaining the M5 East tunnel in Sydney – what we do matters to our clients, their customers and the communities we operate in.
Christian Frost
As the Executive General Manager for SHEQ (Safety, Health, Environment and Quality), I make a point of getting to as many different projects as possible, giving me the opportunity to share your views on what matters when it comes to safety.
Every day I spend at Ventia, I’m increasingly impressed by the strong safety culture across the business.
Part of my role is to encourage all of our people to think about how they embed safety in their everyday work and to help create a safety culture where people know and apply our Critical Risk Protocols (CRPs), look after each other, have the courage to speak up and the commitment to embed our practices.
As you read the following stories of our people living our safety values, I hope you feel, as I do, a sense of pride working at Ventia.
What are our most important safety priorities as we look ahead to the remainder of 2019 and into 2020?
Without doubt the most important is continuing to embed our CRPs. I’ve seen first-hand how our people are implementing the CRPs in their day-to-day work. This commitment is clear and drives our strong safety performance. But of course, none of us can afford to be complacent.
When it comes to safety, we have to aspire to the highest standards in everything we do.
This means an unwavering focus on continuous improvement. We recently completed a thorough review of the CRPs, to ensure they remain as robust and relevant as possible. The review involved an analysis of safety trends and challenges from around the operations, benchmarking against best practices, as well as listening to feedback from you.
When we launch the revised CRPs, you’ll notice some simple but important changes – like clearer requirements in certain areas. Please ensure you review and understand these changes when they are released.
For our leaders, we’ll be launching a refreshed LEAD tool that aligns more closely to the CRPs. We will be working to strengthen our review processes using ICAM, a leading safety investigation process, so we can understand the root cause and learn from incidents where they do occur.
The CRPs are our first priority, but I also want to highlight some other important SHEQ priorities.
Mental health is a major issue across society and within every workplace. This year, we’ll provide mental health training for selected employees and leaders so they can better support those who might be struggling. You’ll also see greater promotion of the support services we already offer – such as our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) – and new trials of technology that makes it easier for people to reach out for help.
Driving safety has been identified as a key priority for our SHEQ agenda – read more in our driving feature on page 14. This year we’ll also be introducing an additional CRP which focuses on driver safety. Stay tuned for more details.
Our business management system is also a priority. We are improving the content and presentation of VenDocs and InVentia to be clearer and more intuitive, as well as promote better mobility. The goal is to roll these changes out progressively and have them completed later this year.
Every leader and every individual at Ventia has an obligation to themselves, their family, their friends and their work colleagues to be safe. This safety-focused edition of Connect is a great way of energising our shared commitment to safety.
If you have any feedback or suggestions on how we can become an even safer workplace, contact me directly.
Christian Frost
Executive General Manager, SHEQ
Main image above: Shield Miranda and Mick Crowe on site at Yallourn Mine
