Health and Safety

Ngā Kawenga Whakaruruhau ō Contact (our Health and Safety Management System Commitments and our Health and Safety Policy) applies across all our activities and describes how we protect our people, our business partners, and our communities.  Our subsidiaries maintain their own Health and Safety management systems, specific to their own scopes of work. 

We operate a no-blame just culture, where our people are encouraged to pause and if necessary, stop a job at any time to raise concerns. 

Contractors are considered members of our team, and as such we expect them to demonstrate the same strong commitment to health and safety as we do. We assess this through our procurement processes and ongoing contractor management processes. 

The people who do the work are deeply involved in designing how they work, including developing guidelines and procedures to capture how we do our work successfully and safely. 

We use Bowtie risk assessment methodology to help understand how to mitigate risks and develop robust emergency responses to potential events. We put in place prioritised action plans that address risks through the implementation of effective controls. Our people and leaders play a key role in verifying the identified controls are working. We regularly review our risks to make sure that we are focusing on the right things and addressing any emergent risks. To do this, we establish prioritised action plans that address risks through the implementation of controls.

We are a learning organisation, learning not just from when things go wrong but by also seeking to understand why normal work is successful most of the time. We believe if we can learn from what makes us successful, and strengthen these areas even more, it will lead to fewer incidents.

Our tools include:

• Learning Teams 
• Root cause analysis
• Incident Cause Analysis Method (ICAM)

Our people are our best source of insight, and we have both formal and informal ways of engaging with them and making sure we all know how work gets done safely and successfully:

• daily toolbox meetings
• safety culture maturity, wellbeing and engagement surveys
• observation cards
• workshops
• focus groups
• small experiments
• Health, Safety & Wellbeing committees
• inspections & audits
• leadership site visits 
• one on ones

In addition, each Contact site has a Health and Safety committee, with diverse members from frontline to managers. These committees have their own budgets and charters, and through regular meetings gather insights and set expectations for the site. 

We use the insights from all these channels to identify improvement opportunities and allocate resources to priority areas. These insights help us put in place relevant training, development, and learning opportunities to ensure our people are knowledgeable in all aspects of occupational health and safety. Initiatives include communications campaigns on key topics, learning seminars, and online learning via Contact University which is available to all our team members.  

Our investment in role-specific health and safety training – from first aid, to confined space entry, and hazardous substance handling, together with ongoing mentoring – ensures work is carried out safely. 

When incidents do occur, our learning team approach brings together the teams involved with minimal management presence. Through expert facilitation, timelines are established, stories are told, and everyone involved gets the opportunity to contribute. We look at the hierarchy of controls to ensure actions are focused on being able to engineer, isolate, substitute or eliminate hazards rather than relying on administrative controls.

A great demonstration of our people-led approach is the Get Home Safe app.

Ken Middleton works in remote areas around our Clyde hydro plant. As a lone worker he found the system for checking on him and his colleagues was manual, unreliable and occasionally error prone – Ken thought there had to be a better way.  After doing some research in his own time, he found a local company who had developed an app for this exact purpose. He shared it with his health and safety committee and a successful pilot quickly followed in 2022. Now, Get Home Safe has been rolled out to all lone workers across Contact.

We always seek to reduce the possibility of incidents occurring and we always look to learn from these incidents. We acknowledge that traditional lagging safety metrics measure “unsafety” or “things that have gone wrong”. Lead indicators tend to count the number of positive things we have done like audits or observation cards but do not always give great insight into what makes our work successful and safe. We are establishing new ways of measuring health and safety performance, to offer predictive insight into what makes us successful and safe in our work. These metrics include: 

• people data such as the ratio of experienced to inexperienced workers
• process safety data like the ratio of proactive to reactive maintenance 
• efficiency data like how long it takes to put a change request through the change management process. 

Once we have discovered our own unique set of performance metrics, we will gain enhanced visibility of what makes us successful, and we can trend the metrics to make sure we aren’t unknowingly eroding what keeps us safe, allowing us to reallocate resources where we spot trouble ahead. 

We track traditional lag and lead indicators including Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) and Total Injury Severity Rate (TISR) and we have a set of corporate targets to measure safety performance. 

To see health and safety performance over the years, see our ESG Reporting page.