Our most recent Industry Safety Forum, held in Brisbane on 06 December, was another very successful event – a packed room of just over 200 senior leaders and key workforce representatives from 84 member companies and other invited organisations attended.

The Forum focused on the theme of “Engage and Embed”, emphasising the challenge of embedding the Standards and tools developed by Safer Together and engaging the people within our industry to use them to drive improved safety performance.

“Think Again”, a thought-provoking theatre-based performance by ACT Australia about the Texas City Refinery incident in 2005 highlighted some fundamental questions for delegates to consider:

  1. how do you know your safety messages are not lost or filtered before they reach your frontline?
  2. how do you encourage managers, supervisors and the workforce to speak up and raise their safety concerns?
  3. what process safety concerns do you have and what are you going to do about them?

Delegates then rolled their sleeves up and first did a self-assessment of their company’s progress to date in implementing Safer Together Standards and tools, before then sharing ideas for improving workforce engagement. A collective summary of the ideas generated by each table group was then discussed and neatly captured at the same time in a visual cartoon drawing – see below. The conversation concluded with delegates recording 2-3 actions for their company to take forward, as well as suggested actions for Safer Together.

Cartoon image.jpg

Other highlights of the Forum included:

  • Launch of the Safety Culture Survey
  • Updates from each of the six Working Groups reflecting on what’s been accomplished in 2016 and what the impact has been, as well as what’s planned for 2017 and how their Group will support better workforce engagement
  • A Panel session, in which frontline representatives and senior executives from the Safety Leaders Group engaged in a frank and personal conversation about workforce engagement.

Thank you to everyone that attended for contributing to a very enjoyable and worthwhile afternoon.

Next Forum (Q2-2017)

Our next Forum event will be held on Tuesday 13 June 2017. We very much hope to see all member companies represented at the event and we encourage you to block 13 June in your diary now.

For more information about Safer Together click here.