Communicating for Compliance

Incoming work requests

Every worker and visitor in a facility is bound within the Work Health and Safety Act (2011) to uphold a reasonable duty of care. A part of this requirement, along with taking reasonable care to protect themselves, is to ensure their “acts of omissions do not adversely affect the health and safety of other persons”.

As the facilities manager, you’re the one who receives these reports, and are responsible for actioning them. Depending on the severity, additional risks could raise their head if that alert isn’t received promptly.

Previously, facility users had to provide that information via phone or, more commonly, email.

Once that user has taken reasonable steps to make you aware of the incident, their duty is fulfilled. They hit send, and the risk of non-compliance is transferred from the facility user, to you as the facilities manager.

But what if that information is not received?

Their email could go to your junk, could be stuck in the sender’s outbox, or you might simply not see it because you're on-the-go.

Due diligence, according to the Act, specifies that you must have an “appropriate process for receiving and considering information regarding incidents, hazards and risks and responding in a timely way to that information.”

This email-based process, or worse – a paper-based process of leaving a note on your desk, can hardly be considered appropriate in todays’ world.

Duty holders

As the facilities manager, you have an obligation to consult with not just facility users, but other WHS duty holders in the organisation.

If an incident occurs, there are additional communication requirement to alert the WHS committee. All details about the incident must be accurately recorded and delivered to the committee in a timely manner. What happened, when it happened, the response, result and residual risks must all be recorded, and provided, with no detail spared.

For facility users, this communication provides them with relevant information to take reasonable steps of self-preservation. Keeping workers informed means consulting them when hazards are identified, and when remediating actions are being undertaken.

This is where non-compliance comes into play. While often these communications are viewed as a courtesy, they are a fundamental part of your obligation under duty of care.

Your obligations to consult with other WHS duty holders are similar to those obligations to the WHS committee around incident response. WHS duty holders all have some level of obligation to ensuring the continued safety of workers. With shared obligations, comes shared risk and responsibility, so it is critical that everyone is on the same page.

All duty holders must have access to the same, up-to-date, detailed information to ensure compliance with WHS requirements.

WHS Committee

If an incident is to occur in your facility, you are obligated to provide a detailed report to the WHS committee. This committee needs to know every detail of the incident, and it’s their job to find out what caused that incident, and why.

Many organisations leverage incident management systems to record this information. However, when it comes to providing the information, your FM system can come into its own. Relevant work orders and asset histories can be exported within seconds for upload into the incident management system, offering context that would have otherwise taken weeks to obtain.

Keep everyone in the loop

Without a centralised system, communication is limited to calling, or manually emailing every facility user and stakeholder. Engaging in this clunky communication, necessary every time an incident or hazard occurs, is both non-compliant and inefficient.

By leveraging a centralised system, you can take this arduous process, rife with potential for a compliance breach, and automate the hard work and pain out of it.

Systems such as FMI Works allow you to send out automated status updates to facility users to ensure everyone is appropriately informed.

Recording details of work, hazards, and incidents in a centralised place, gives other duty holders confidence they are accessing accurate, updated information. As with the communications for facility users, automated notifications can be set up for duty holders, keeping them informed of the process.

This automation removes guesswork from an otherwise convoluted communications process, and significantly reduces your risk of non-compliance.

Alerts in one place

Solutions such as FMI Works provide you with a dedicated platform to receive alerts and manage requests, all in one place.

Facility users will also receive confirmation when logging the incident, giving them additional confidence that their duty has been fulfilled.

Leveraging a centralised system for requests, offers certainty that the request will be received, and, will usually have multiple people monitoring that system, as opposed to an individual inbox.