Health and Safety

Health & Safety at Contact

Health, Safety & Wellbeing at Contact Energy is owned by everybody. We are always looking to improve our Health, Safety & Wellbeing performance by working with our people to give us the solutions that lead to safer ways of work.

We believe that safe and healthy ways of working are generated by work that is well thought out, well designed, well planned, and thoroughly risk and hazard assessed by passionate, well trained, and competent people who know the job. We make sure our people have the right tools and resources at their fingertips when they need them.

We have gained a deep knowledge of the work we do and have collaborated with our workforce to identify our critical risks. We use Bow Tie risk assessment methodology not only to understand how to mitigate risks, but also to plan for when things go wrong with the development of robust emergency responses to potential events.

We put in place prioritised action plans that address identified risks through the implementation of effective controls. Our people and leaders play an important role in verifying that these controls are working, and we regularly review our risks to make sure that we are focusing on the right things and addressing any emergent risks.

Safety is enabled and enhanced through health and safety management systems which are designed for an easy user experience, focussing on operational excellence which in turn leads to a safer and healthier workplace. 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.

Some of the environments we work in can present long term health risks for our workers if they are not suitably managed. We ensure our workers are well educated and understand the health risks associated with their work. We provide appropriate Personal Protective Equipment and monitor potentially hazardous environments. We also provide health monitoring of our workers to make sure their work is not adversely impacting their health.

We identify relevant training, development and learning opportunities for our people, ensuring our people are trained and knowledgeable in all aspects of process and occupational health and safety. We regularly run H&S campaigns, initiatives and learning seminars to maintain high levels of engagement with H&S topics.

We form mutually beneficial and inclusive partnerships with our Contractors, treating them as part of the team. We hold them to the same high H&S standards we expect of our own workforce, and they must demonstrate that they have a strong commitment to H&S. Assessment of Contractor H&S performance is an important aspect of our procurement strategy.

Safety will eventually be something we don’t need to explicitly talk about, it won’t be the first item on the agenda or at the toolbox, it will just happen as a natural outcome of work done well. We will know we have been successful when we don’t need a health and safety team anymore.

Measuring Safety

We are establishing new ways of measuring H&S performance, focusing on our capacity and resilience to work safely.  We still measure and publish traditional lagging and leading safety metrics like Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) and Total Injury Severity Rate (TISR) in our Integrated Report. We look to learn from these to continuously reduce them, whilst acknowledging that they are really measuring “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 give great insight into what makes our work successful and safe. We are identifying metrics that can give us true predictive insight into what makes us successful and safe in our work. We need to go beyond traditional “safety” metrics because we believe safety is an outcome of work well done and so the metrics need to look at a wide range of operational excellence data. This includes people data such as the ratio of experienced to inexperienced workers, process safety data like the ratio of proactive to reactive maintenance and efficiency data like how long it takes to put a change request through the management of change process. Once we have discovered our own unique set of performance metrics, we will gain new visibility of what makes us successful, trending the metrics to make sure we aren’t unknowingly eroding what keeps us safe and allowing us to reallocate resources where we spot trouble ahead.

Strategic Goals

We set Health and Safety Strategic Goals every year and then work on achieving these through initiatives designed to deliver against these goals. There is a focus on improving our systems that support and enable work with a goal of making life easier at the work-fronts for our people who must manage goal conflicts and variability every day in their work. We are working with consultant Sentis to deliver a safety citizenship & leadership programme that will help our people and people leaders to understand how their attitude towards safety and the resultant behaviours influence safety outcomes in the organisation.

Worker Engagement

We believe our people are the solution to having a safe and healthy workplace. We gather insights from our workers through multiple channels including engagement, safety culture and wellbeing surveys, one on ones, focus groups, safety observations, Health, Safety & Wellbeing committees, toolbox talks, learning teams, pre-mortems, audits, inspections, investigations and leadership site visits. Our workers are deeply involved in designing how they work including the development of guidelines and procedures that capture how we do our work successfully and safely.

A good example of how worker participation leads to improvements in the way we work is the introduction of the Get Home Safe App. Ken who works in the Dam Safety Team at the Clyde Hydro site thought that there must be a simpler way of protecting our workers who go out on their own to do monitoring work on the hills surrounding the Clyde dam. Instead of raising an observation to record his concerns and pushing the problem to a committee, he did his own research and came to the committee with a well thought our proposal. A successful pilot quickly followed, and the Get Home Safe App has gone live for all our lone workers across Aotearoa. This is a great example of employee engagement and empowerment having a positive impact to our safety performance.

Learning from work

We want to understand what it is we do at Contact that creates safe and healthy ways of working. We use learning teams to understand why events happened, but we also recognise that 99% of the time work goes well and that understanding what makes work successful is an important factor in ensuring continued success. This enables us to better define what makes up our safety margin and helps us to understand when we might be in danger of eroding that margin. We believe that if we can learn from what makes us successful and strengthen these areas even more, it will lead to less bad things happening.

Industry Participation

We are active members and participants in many groups, all striving to make improvements in health & safety in our industry and beyond. These include groups and forums like StayLive (electricity industry body), NZ Institute of Safety Management, HASNZ, Safety Governance Foundation and more.

Public Safety Management System certification

We operate a Public Safety Management System as required by the Electricity Act 1992 and are compliant with NZS7901:2014 Electricity and Gas Industries – Safety Management Systems for Public Safety.