This Sunday 28 April marked World Day for Safety and Health at Work and Workers’ Memorial Day, highlighting the vital importance of preventing occupational accidents across the globe and sending all workers home safely every day. At Programmed, we strive to foster a culture where all employees recognise safety as our top priority, as is true to our goal of Zero Harm.
To help us all actively contribute to our positive safety culture, we’ll be sharing a monthly focus on high potential risks and how we can work to prevent these critical workplace hazards.
Our focus for April is Working at Heights.
Falls from heights are a major cause of fatalities and serious injuries throughout Australia and New Zealand. Many of our team members regularly perform work and heights, including work from ladders, work on roofs, work from scaffolds, work in elevated work platforms, and work while suspended at height. This is a high-risk activity requiring a strong commitment to safe working procedures.
Back to Basics - Safe Work Essentials
Our Safe Work Essentials outline a simple, specific set of minimum standards that all Programmed employees must follow when working at heights.
Stop and Report - How you can be a safety champion
Being a champion for safety means that you play a vital part in stopping incidents before they happen – if you notice that any of these standards are not being followed or if you recognise an unsafe situation, you must report immediately to your manager or Programmed Facility Management.
You’re also empowered to actively contribute to our safety culture through utilising electronic risk assessment tools through our HSEQ platform ProSafe, namely the SWMS-JSEA form (this stands for Safe Work Method Statement – Job Safety & Environment Analysis). This form allows you to follow and document a step-by-step process needed to perform a work task or activity safety and with minimum harm to the environment. This guide, available on the Programmed intranet, shows you how to access and complete the form.
More tools and resources - Working at Heights
The Programmed HSEQ team is here and ready to help, offering a huge array of resources to help you keep safety front of mind and correctly follow all relevant guidelines. We’ve highlighted some of our essential Working at Heights resources in the links below, and you can always refer to Programmed’s HSEQ intranet for additional guides and documents.
If you have trouble accessing any of these links or the Programmed intranet, please contact [email].
Thank you for championing Programmed’s safety culture and making sure we all return home safely at the end of every workday. Stay tuned for more editions of Spotlight on Safety coming soon!