Business Australia leads the way in Excellence in Safety Culture

By David Stewart, Director of Recruitment Solutions, Business Australia

Winner - Excellence in Safety Culture Award at the 2020 RCSA Industry Awards.

At Business Australia, there is nothing more important to us than ensuring our workforce return home to their families safe and well each day and are supported by us through a positive and effective safety culture.

So, what sets us apart in safety culture?

We have a very diverse portfolio of businesses including labour hire services, white collar professional recruitment, apprentice and trainee group training, nursing agencies that supply nurses and support staff to clinical facilities across the country, and community support for the elderly and those living with disability in their homes.

The rapid expansion and diversity of our businesses has required us to develop a bespoke and rigorous approach to promoting our industry leading safety culture. We’ve taken the clinical experience gained as a healthcare provider and applied the standards from this highly regulated environment to all of our businesses, combined with more traditional industrial and office-based approaches.

Through innovative communications and the smart use of technology to measure and monitor all quality, safety and risk issues, we have built a culture committed to keeping our workforce safe and achieving goals set against industry benchmarks. The technology provides for a data driven approach allowing a sophisticated analysis of our outcomes and level of risk. Indeed, a recent external accreditation audit of our community business awarded us ‘met with evidence of best practice’ for our incident and risk management. A wonderful endorsement in this year of bushfires and COVID!

This achievement has been realised through a commitment from the entire team. From the top down WHS is understood through our policies, goals and vision. It’s really come from the passion and hard work of the people within our organisation, they’ve believed in this approach and they are the ones who have driven it and made it happen.

We constantly aim to be at the forefront of setting new standards for the industry and being a role model for other businesses. To be acknowledged and recognised for this by RCSA makes us incredibly proud. 2020 has presented new and significant challenges in keeping employees safe, so never has this award been so important and we are very honoured to be this year’s recipient.