Articles

Primary Duty of Care – reviewing your health and safety systems

"Primary duty of care” (Section 36 of the Health and Safety at Work Act) is, in my opinion, one of the key sections that all businesses should take note of, understand its application, and apply to their businesses. Many business owners don’t know it exists, let alone understand its implications if...

COVID-19 = a duty of care by all

Recently, there was a case in Napier of an Air New Zealand traveller refusing to wear a face mask, as required by government and the airline safety rules. This raises an interesting and challenging question, as to the ability of a business to enforce the wearing of face masks for...

Taking time out

(Written in mid 2021 - but still appropriate!) The last twelve months has been, and still are, a challenging time for all countries with the COVID-19 pandemic. New Zealand has not escaped the heartache, fear, stress, and anguish that has been associated with this horrible event. From a business viewpoint, the pandemic resulted...

Brainstorming with your Employees

If you don’t encourage brainstorming with your employees, you just might be missing an opportunity to take your business from zero to hero! No one person, business owner, manager, or supervisor has a mortgage on knowledge. A business may have 25 employees - what an opportunity with 25 fantastic, creative, qualified,...

Continuously Improving the PDCA Cycle

The PDCA cycle is a well-established continuous improvement tool that's long been used to structure employee involvement in health and safety. This is not a new concept – it's a process that's been used to train first line managers for decades. What is the PDCA improvement cycle? It’s a process that came...

How to make Contractor Prequalification easier

With contractor prequalification part of the New Zealand health and safety scene, this process can still be frustrating and time consuming for many smaller business operations. For many small businesses, whomever does the administration of the business, is also in charge of HR, and thus ends up the health and safety...

The Prescribed Person – the 2021 edition

The day of the tradie is here...