If you are in the building, metal and civil construction industry in particular, you will have experienced the work health and safety (WHS) ‘paperwork problem’ probably the most.
You would have heard many labels attached to it, including that it’s ‘bureaucratic’, ‘stifling to innovation’, ‘too hard’, ‘we just ignore it’ and ‘it’s only there to cover your backside with the law’.
Adding to that, blame is often laid on health and safety paperwork being ‘legally required’, despite modern health and safety law being less prescriptive e.g. Work Health and Safety Regulation 2017 (NSW) at 299(2) Safe work method statement required for high risk construction work, requires four inclusions and 309(2) WHS management plan – preparation, requires five.
Still, adding recommendations from internal and external inspections or audits, documents or content add up, and I have heard users say ‘we can’t follow it, so we just do the job our way’.
Users of health and safety paperwork, should not have to read a ‘novel’, to identify what they need to do a task in a healthy and safe manner.
The danger is that workers and teams may misunderstand and/or depart from the agreed work method, which may lead to errors or incidents, involving injury or illness.
So how do we close the gap?
Consult with relevant workers to identify, the document purpose, scope and use-cases – because it’s users, not auditors or technical writers, needing information in health and safety paperwork.
If users don’t use a document or part of it, then remove it and only add information or instructions, if, it aligns with the use-cases.
Many of us know what it’s like getting ‘lost’ in wordy documents, which may be technically correct, but lead to risk of misunderstanding, errors or incidents, because of its readability i.e. how easy or difficult it is to understand text.
Categorising system folders and naming/renaming documents based on the document users profile and use cases, will optimise search, particularly in large health and safety management systems.
Lastly, it is always important to measure what we do e.g. the engagement of users, using the document; the effectiveness of a document in supporting users to complete a task accurately; and the efficiency of a document in enabling users perform a task in a reasonable time.
Only then will the ‘paperwork problem,’ turn into usable health and safety documents and systems that workers and businesses stop talking about and start using, as intended!