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Health, Safety, Environment and Wellbeing

From traditional to transformative

Improving health and safety performance and unlocking efficiencies while being legally compliant requires a unique blend of skills and experiences. Our Health, Safety, Environment and Wellbeing (HSEW) practice together with our WHS Legal practice provides trusted advice and assurance services to industry-leading organisations and public bodies. Deloitte helps you protect your people and optimise the return on your health and safety investments, while helping you comply with the WHS laws.

Our multi-disciplinary team and international HSEW community bring clients bespoke and integrated capabilities that address their strategic and statutory HSEW risks. This draws on our capabilities in strategy, WHS law, leadership and culture, organisational design, data analytics, technology, social sustainability and psychosocial health and safety to help you achieve better health and safety.

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Offerings

Protecting your people at work is critically important for all organisations – but navigating it has become increasingly complex. Deloitte’s unique approach can help your organisation meet its responsibilities, protect people and profits, and create sustainable improvements in HSEW performance.

Based on pragmatic systems and practices, Deloitte has a unique approach to building safety leadership and culture. Our specialists can conduct safety leadership and culture assessments of your organisation and provide practical guidance for continuous improvement. We align culture to safety outcomes by: 

  • Understanding and quantifying the maturity of safety practices
  • Designing and implementing safety maturity frameworks
  • Assessing ethics, leadership and organisational culture and their impacts on health and wellbeing
  • Developing foundational training packages, which are tailored to your needs, including due diligence for officers, safety leadership and culture, incident investigation and analysis, managing contractor risks, etc.
  • Designing an approach to not only address health, safety, and wellbeing outcomes but to also enable increased productivity for better business outcomes.

Deloitte’s safety specialists working with our Strategy and Operations practice can help you develop a safety strategy that will improve business outcomes. When it comes to safety, the strategy is about minimising risk and reducing incidents. We can help your organisation by doing the following: 

  • HSEW strategy and framework assessments
  • Workshop facilitation on current and future state
  • Design of strategy, frameworks, and models
  • Match strategic direction to risk profile
  • Leadership coaching
  • Assess economic factors and workforce demographics impacting workers and work-design

Our approach to Psychosocial Health and Safety is holistic and prioritises the management of key risks to employee wellbeing while enabling the necessary changes within an organisation’s culture to facilitate these initiatives. We work with leading organisations to help them adopt an ongoing and effective approach to managing employee wellbeing. We deliver our approach to psychosocial health and safety in the following ways: 

  • Psychosocial risk assessments that identify and assess risks against legislated standards and further risks that may be prevalent in your organisational context
  • Wellbeing strategy and framework assessments.
  • Training and awareness of psychosocial risks or hazards to promote leadership and organisational capability.
  • Context-informed control design and implementation to mitigate or manage psychosocial hazards or factors impacting employee wellbeing.
  • Asset development to support the integration of psychosocial health and safety management to enable consideration as part of business management or decision-making frameworks.
  • Identification, design, and integration of wellbeing analytics within performance reporting frameworks.

When organisations focus on understanding and controlling hazards, they often fail to maintain an underlying management system, thinking the system is out of date or doesn’t comply with current standards. Our team of specialists have significant experience in helping organisations work through safety problems and overhaul management systems aligned to health, safety, and wellbeing risk profiles. We specialise in: 

  • Design specific management systems components or plans e.g., emergency response plans, contractor management, sexual harassment gendered violence, etc.
  • HSEW management system design and implementation
  • Customisation and implementation of smart technologies for management systems.

We conduct advanced safety analytic projects, utilising existing client data and proprietary Deloitte data to understand key risk trends, dispel commonly held myths about safety performance and determine why things happen. Our analytic approach increases an organisation’s capacity to act in an informed way, and we do this by: 

  • Review existing reporting systems and identify improvements in reporting metrics and requirements
  • Design a suite of performance indicators and metrics that are outcome focused (with lead, lag, and mental health metrics), noting any limitation of existing data sources
  • Evaluate the impacts and effectiveness of the WHS system (e.g., assess the risks to people; and the impact on business performance, such as the impact on productivity, reputation and WHS outcomes etc.)

Contractor management can be a challenging area to understand, and therefore, contractor risk management should be integrated into your safety management system. Our range of services includes: 

  • Review the current contractor safety management process and make recommendations
  • Undertake HSEW tender reviews and development of onboarding processes.
  • Development of a contractor safety management program demonstrates safety leadership and includes safety procedures, checklists, induction and/or training, etc.
  • Development of a fit-for-purpose contractor assurance and governance framework to ensure you meet your legal obligations without ‘over-managing’ your pool of contractors.

Deloitte recognises that a critical aspect of a safety management system is identifying, assessing, and controlling hazards and risks. Our risk profiling methodology can help your organisation develop a better understanding of exposure – from the top down as well as the bottom up. Our offerings include: 

  • Physical, psychosocial, and environmental risk assessment
  • Safety case development and reviewRisk management workshop facilitation
  • Health, safety, and environmental incident investigations (ICAM)
  • Environmental aspects and impacts register development
  • Process safety assessments

Our team provides HSEW assurance over an array of organisational risk-management activities, HSEW systems, processes, and performance. We ensure HSEW risk management controls are implemented, resourced, and reviewed through the verification of: 

  • Compliance with legislation, codes of practice, industry standards, organisational values, policies, and processes.
  • Effectiveness of processes that inform and resource HSEW risk controls
  • Ensure changes to the client’s risk profile are identified, prioritised, resourced and addressed

Rapid innovation in technology is impacting every corner of business operations—and workplace health, safety environment and wellbeing is no exception. Deloitte assists organisations with the definition of their functional and non-functional requirements and maturity assessments to aid in the implementation of new technologies. Deloitte’s HSEW experts have: 

  • Defined a better practice functional requirement, which highlights all expected functionality that an environmental, health and safety technology should deliver to help achieve safer outcomes
  • Partnered with digital providers to deliver customised technological solutions for clients to enhance their operational agility, productivity, culture and create safer workplaces

Case studies

We undertook a Safety Framework Review within the education sector to establish an overarching safety strategy and redesign their safety operating model and service delivery model. 

Deloitte delivered the following outcomes:

  • In consultation with senior leadership, established an overarching strategy to improve safety management across the organisation
  • Reviewed the organisations safety operating model and its interfaces across the organisation.
  • Reviewed the effectiveness of the organisation’s health, safety, environment, and wellbeing (HSEW) service delivery model.
  • Ensured that industrial and legislative obligations were being met
  • Prepared and delivered a Current State Report and Recommendations paper which outlined the current state findings and a proposed design options for a more effective Safety Operating Model and HSEW Service Delivery Model incorporating corporate, regional, and learning environment considerations for the delivery and management of health, safety, and wellbeing services across the organisation.

We undertook a Safety Culture Assessment within the transport sector. 

Background 

Deloitte was engaged to conduct a Safety Culture Assessment (SCA) to understand key strengths and areas of focus to build a positive safety culture across the organisation. The SCA formed the foundations for ongoing improvement projects with Deloitte, further conducting workshops to establish key priorities, improvement plans, design strategic safety plans and finally conducting a safety culture pulse check over 2 years. 

Solution and outcomes delivered 

Deloitte’s methodology for assessing safety culture was based on a phased approach: 

  • Designed the focus groups using interactive keypad technology and developed an internal communication plan along with supporting tools.
  • Administrated a Safety culture survey with employees through a series of focus groups at several locations across 4 states.
  • Conducted an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative survey data to identify key themes in safety culture.
  • Provided a detailed safety culture health check report to measure progress, benchmark comparisons to external companies and identify areas for improvement and opportunities.

We provided Health, Safety, Environment and Sustainability (HSES) specialist support in the Governance Risk and Compliance function. 

Background 

Deloitte was engaged as the Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) support for various giga-projects. Deloitte Australia provided HSEW specialist support into this GRC function for two major projects. The projects involved the development of a vast land area for hyper-luxury sustainable eco-tourism. 

Solution and outcomes delivered 

Deloitte Australia led the HSEW risk assessments on both projects which has resulted in the: 

  • Developed overarching enterprise risk management frameworks to ensure adequate consideration of HSES risks
  • Identified lifecycle hazards (design, construction, operations etc) across the differing projects and office-based activities
  • Assessed the availability and effectiveness of controls and monitoring mechanisms in place or in-development
  • Identified and prioritised additional or improved control measures
  • Developed risk treatment plans in consultation with operational leadership and process owners
  • Escalated and reported strategic level risks to the Project Boards
  • Developed Internal Audit plans that targeted problematic and emerging risks identified through the process

How we conducted a maturity assessment of the clients Mental Health Framework. 

Background 

As suicide and mental illness are increasingly recognised as key risks for businesses, our client built a five-year mental health strategy in the hope of minimising the impact on their organisation. Deloitte was engaged to conduct a maturity survey of their current mental health framework, overall approach, policies, and practices used to support the mental health of employees and determine their current level of maturity according to Deloitte’s Mental Health Maturity Model (MHMM). 

Solution and outcomes delivered 

The focus of our work was to set the organisation up for success through providing key insights to enable and inform their five-year strategy, which involved the following outcomes: 

  • Performed stakeholder interviews and desktop reviews to gain an understanding of their desired future vision on mental health.
  • Determined the organisation’s current state of maturity through an analysis of key data and compared their mental health framework against Deloitte’s MHMM, which included a survey across critical mental health success factors.
  • Provided key recommendations and development areas to assist the organisation in their mental health strategy, including refinements and links to better practice.

The increasing complexity of modern work means that workers are exhausted, and one-off interventions are no longer enough to restore depleted wellbeing (and associated performance) levels.

Safe Work Australia (SWA) is an Australian government statutory agency tasked with developing national policy to improve work health and safety and workers’ compensation arrangements across Australia.