Safety health and wellbeing

Our top priority is ensuring the safety, health, and overall well-being of our employees, contractors working with us and the people working on our network across the state. We aim to develop our safety, health and wellbeing capability and strengthen our safety culture.

Lost-time injury frequency rate

Over the past 12 months our lost-time injury frequency rate has increased significantly compared with previous years, a flow-on from change in our business and operations as we move to deliver maintenance and minor capital works utilising our own workforce. The majority of our 512 new employees are delivering works in maintenance. A new Safety Health and Wellbeing Plan is under development, informed by input from more than 1,000 employees across the organisation. Our total recordable incident frequency rate is also above target coming in at 12.6. We will continue to focus on mitigating actions for our critical risks and demonstrating safety leadership across the organisation.

The following show our top three critical risks over the past 12 months and the root causes, enabling us to focus our attention on areas that matter most.

Workers compensation and injury management

There were 33 workers compensation claims lodged last year with 23 of these being lost-time injuries. This reflects the change in our workforce with the ongoing transition of maintenance in-house.

Safety banner alerts

We regularly communicate alerts across the organisation and to our contractors, providing lessons learned from serious incidents. In the last 12 months we released 167 banner alerts.

Preventative health & wellbeing

During the year, we encouraged healthier habits to prevent illness and chronic disease and promote a healthier lifestyle for our workforce. We provided:

• 193 heart health assessments
• 522 skin cancer screening checks
• 9 wellbeing webinars to 614 attendees
• 42 ergonomic assessments

Mental wellbeing plan

This year we launched our Mental Wellbeing Plan to guide a coordinated approach to improving the mental wellbeing of our people and ensuring everyone feels supported, valued and encouraged to reach their full potential.

A strong theme emerging from development of the plan was the critical importance of high-quality manager–employee relationships for mental wellbeing. To address this, a key action is to support managers with tools and skills for having conversations about things that matter – such as mental wellbeing, work demands and coping, and career aspirations. In addition, to provide opportunities for staff to raise anything that’s concerning them. Our new Manager Skills Development Program is a custom-designed program addressing identified skills and program rollout has commenced this year.

Eliminating bullying and harassment

We have developed a suite of support for employees raising concerns. Face-to-face training on awareness of bullying, harassment and discrimination has been delivered, with nearly 30% of our employees now trained. We have revised our grievance policy and procedure, developed a new guide to difficult conversations, created a new template for supporting staff to document an incident and a guide to resolving workplace issues. A coordinated communication campaign has raised awareness and aims to set the tone for expected workplace behaviours.

Mental wellbeing support

We support and encourage employees to raise psycho-social risks that are of concern to them as a part of regular performance conversations. Our HR business partners and the Manager Assistance Program provide one-on-one guidance on an asneeded basis to managers overseeing employees with mental health related concerns. Our mental wellbeing plan identified a need to reduce stigma in relation to accessing care for mental ill-health, and we have delivered a series of initiatives that have been successful in increasing the connection of staff with wellbeing support.

Our Peer Support Program has continued to grow, providing the opportunity for staff to connect with colleagues who have been trained to provide effective support. Beyond our peer supporters, mental health education of our people continues, with over 12% of employees trained, increasing the level of knowledge about mental ill-health and contributing to a positive mental-wellbeing culture.

We have also extensively promoted our Employee Assistance Program, which enables employees and their families to access registered psychologists to help them cope with work and home-related challenges. Information about the program is integrated into relevant articles, we have delivered presentations to staff groups about the support available, and we bring a psychologist into head office monthly to make access more convenient for our staff. Our usage data indicates that initiatives targeted at increasing the uptake of support services have had a positive effect.