Why Is Safety The Number One Priority For Spray Grass Australia

Spray Grass Australia (SGA) considers safety as an essential part of the workplace and a necessary component in everything we seek out to achieve. In consideration of this philosophy, we have placed key safety strategies at the core of our company. This underlying approach is designed to create a company culture where safety is our number one priority, and zero becomes the only adequate number for fatalities or accidents within the workplace. Every employee has the right to attend work in the morning and return home in the evening in good health. This ideology is founded on our ability to focus on promoting an understanding and availability of safety resources within the workplace, along with off-site projects.

The safe conduct of our actions and supporting operations relies heavily on the functionality of our systems, procedures, and most significantly, in the way we think and perform. Our mission is to sustain health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace to ensure that our team, including clients, visitors and contractors, are protected from illness and injury.

Our dedicated management personnel are responsible for ensuring that all safety policies are effectively implemented and maintained with regular training, updated control methods, service exercises and company protocol. This mentality ensures that accurate safety measures and certifications align with the AS/NZS 4801:2001; in addition to this, our safety systems are highly regulated and audited to align with the WHSEQ requirements of our clients who work within high-risk industries such as mining, civil, infrastructure and rail.

Leadership, Control Management and Process Safety are the three fundamental criteria that ensure workplace safety is our number one priority.

Leadership Management

SGA has recognised the necessity to place structured leadership management at the forefront of all safety initiatives to ensure a higher degree of organisation, understanding, trust and active communication at all level of the company.

We strongly believe that ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ must go hand in hand, providing an even balance of proactive planning and organisation of staff, while also having the ability to inspire and motivate them to perform with optimal functionality.

Active leadership is a prerequisite for success; management at all levels must provide support and relevant contributions to preventive approaches – this makes it evident to everybody that health and safety are considered questions throughout the company.

In practice, this indicates that:

• management is committed to effectively communicating with employees about occupational health and safety
• management has a regulated understanding of the updated company risk profile
• management lead by example and provides leadership commitment, e.g. by adhering to all occupational health and safety policy regulations at all times
• roles and responsibilities are allocated accordingly, based on certifications and job compliance regulations; these are defined, scheduled and monitored proactively
• assessments and reviews of all safety processes and procedures are an ongoing activity, maintained to ensure that these meet standards and criteria
• employees regularly participate in controlled management practices training, which allows for constructive engagement and active communication within the team, while looking at measures that could be improved

Control Management

SGA has recognised that although it is essential to have active leadership management personnel, it is also crucial to have a team that holistically identifies and carry out the necessary steps to meet their portion of requirements. We expect our personnel to have an astute understanding of their environments and have the awareness required to take control of risk management procedures when required.

Control management is triggered when any change in work activities are disturbed during on-site project duties. It is a prerequisite for all employees to participate in job training before specific projects and must complete a Job Safety Environmental Assessment (JSEA), especially when working in the mining and infrastructure industries. Having effective safety measure like these ensures that all employees can safely react to potential contingencies that may compromise on the workplace safety along with the practical completion of onsite tasks.  In conjunction with onsite JSEA, we have implemented our own Control Analysis System Methodology, designed to evaluate risk management and internal control systems on a regulated basis.

Figure A1 identifies the Control System Method intended to provide a visual indicator of existing risks and provide an opportunity to monitor their acceptability and tolerance levels detected in the risk control manual. If a risk is inconsistently within the red zone, this potential contingency must be re-assessed, and a new method attached to a lower risk level is designed utilising the Hierarchy of Control Measures (figure A2).

Figure A1: Control Analysis System Method                 Figure A2: Hierarchy of Control Measures

Control Analysis System Method

Every procedure consists of a range of roles and responsibilities which sit within a spectrum of potential risk indicators. To maintain the highest level of safety, SGA has developed a control analysis method that ensures all potential risks consistently lie within a low-level range. This risk-based strategy assessment not only provides access to optimal safety measures but also reduces the potential for assigning additional resources to lower-risk processes. The following methodology helps us to ensure that our reserves are addressing high-risk procedures.

Hierarchy Of Control Measures

1. Elimination
The framework surrounding our internal safety strategies is intended to eradicate risks and hazards to a point where there is zero opportunity for workplace illness or injury. The priority when reviewing our processes is to ensure that they sit within the low-level risk zone between 1-2, however, if it is recognised to have merged into the red area between 3-7, our team are required to investigate an alternative process that meets a lower risk category.

2. Substitute
Substitution is based on a comprehensive evaluation designed to reduce high-level contingencies to a low-level category. When the substitute process is implemented, all workplace employees are notified with these changes and must immediately comply with the defined practice. To ensure that all personnel have wholly understood this, they are required to sign off on all new process and procedure to acknowledge that they have clearly understood their obligation to adhere to the requirements.

This process will remain under a temporary test period with additional attention taken until management is satisfied that the new method has adequately met the low-risk classification.

3. Isolate
When a high-risk process is unable to be substituted, it must be isolated and accompanied with clear signage indicating restricted access; this should be placed directly on or near plant and equipment, or in the case of a substance, locking them away with clear limitations surrounding their use. A step by step procedure will be issued to guarantee that when the high-risk activity is in motion that all employees know the correct processes to ensure zero illness or injury.

4. Engineering controls
Covering a broad spectrum of possible interventions that are intended to reduce personnel exposure to physical, chemical or biological agents. It involves redesigning a method to establish a barrier between a person and the hazard or by removing the risk from the person – this could include the implementation of plant or equipment proximity guarding, exclusion systems or relocating the operator to an isolated location away from the high-level risks.

5. Administrative controls
Involving the stringent planning and implementation of avoidance tactics is the adoption of operating procedures, safe work practices, ongoing training, instruction, and access to information. Administrative controls are designed to ensure that the correct occupational health and safety measures are up to date, to reduce the possibility of harm and or adverse health effects, for example, some control measures may comprise of isolation or a permit to work.

6. Personal protective equipment (PPE)
PPE is an indispensable obligation when working within our company; each of our procedures involves specific equipment and protective measures depending on the task requirements. The specific PPE may include the implementation of a safety helmet, earmuffs, eye protection, and high visibility clothing, protective footwear and or gloves. These measures are designed to reduce the potential exposure of hazards affecting our personnel and are our last line of defence within our control measures.

Process Safety

Process safety is at the forefront of our company framework, regulated to maintain the integrity and ongoing operational systems that align with our internal safety guidelines, along with those that complement our client’s processes and procedures. This ideology considers our core values that aim to deliver the highest safety measures imaginable. Our operating systems ensure that standard process deviations do not compromise the basis of safety.

Successful process safety management involves a systematic method for evaluating the entirety of external and internal processes. These evaluations are the basis for providing critical data that trigger the attention of operational processes that need to be investigated and reviewed. This approach is an on-going action integrated into regulated evaluations of the following areas:

1. Accountability: objectives & goals
2. Stability of operations
3. Stability of systems
4. Stability of the company
5. Quality process
6. Management accessibility
7. Communication
8. Company expectations
9. Process knowledge /documentation
10. Monitoring hazard reviews/recognition

Our safety strategies underpin all aspects of Spray Grass Australias reliability and are an integral part of the way we successfully deliver all tasks. This structure is a forward-thinking tactic intended for determining safety as a line of defence in preventing illness, injury, or fatality. Our safety strategies have set our company on a path that strengthens our workers from now and into the future, as a result of providing structured leadership management, control management, and process safety.

It is the responsibility of every single person within the company from, those on-site across to those in leadership management roles, to exercise their obligation of care so that every worker can go home safely to their families at the end of each day.

If you have any further questions about our safety policy or would like to know more about our environmental services, please don’t hesitate to get in
contact with our team today.