Driving Good Work2015 Virtual Seminar Series – Safe Work Australia
The role of the accidental design professionalVideo Transcript
Dr Peta Miller, David Caple, Geoff Hurst, Barbara McPhee and Peter Holmes
Driving Good Work
The Role of the Accidental Design Professional
Presented by
Dr Peta Miller, Safe Work Australia, Introduction
David Caple, WH&S Consultant, Facilitator
Geoff Hurst, President of the Risk Engineering Society, Panellist
Barbara McPhee AM, Ergonomist, Panellist
Peter Holmes, National Australia Bank, Panellist
Dr Peta Miller:
Good afternoon. I'm Dr Peta Miller from Safe Work Australia. Firstly I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting today, the Ngunnawal People. I acknowledge and respect their continuing contribution to the life of this city and our region. I'd like to thank our studio audience for joining us today and our online audience who are joining us too for today's exciting discussion onDriving good work – The role of the accidental design professional.
We know that the poor design of buildings, plant and the way we work is behind many of workplace deaths, injuries and illnesses and importantly these are preventable. We know that the most effective and durable means of creating a safe and healthy working environment is to eliminate these hazards before they ever enter the workplace – design them out. In fact, this is a legal obligation across every state, territory and the Commonwealth in Australia, yet it is not common enough.
Recently the Conference Board - a global industry research association - reported that the single greatest reason that US workers had grown unhappy and disengaged in their job was because their organisations designed their work so poorly. I'm sure this is not an uncommon complaint in Australian workplaces. Our Safe Work Australia Members recognise the need to continue to encourage the traditional focus on the better design of buildings and of workplace equipment but also to urge people to eliminate hazards and risks through the better design of work, work processes and work systems.
Recently, Safe Work Australia Members released a handbook on 10 Principles to achieve good work through a more effective design process. This outlined why good work design is important to people and to businesses, what needs to be considered during that process and how it can most effectively be achieved. Professor Parker's interesting seminar yesterday particularly focused on how good work design can eliminate or minimise psychosocial hazards in the design process.
But before I go any further I should say a little bit about what we mean when we talk about ‘good work’ and why we're interested in the role of the design professional. Good work is healthy and safe work where the hazards and risks are eliminated or minimised and where the work design optimises human performance, job satisfaction and productivity. In addition to preventing harm good work can improve the health and wellbeing of workers and improve the business'sfinancial performance through example through higher productivity resulting from better worker motivation and engagement.
A broad range of people actually design work whether they're consciously aware they are or not. The CEO makes decisions about whether to downsize. Strategic management teams design work where they decide the business priorities and allocate companies and organisation's resources to make this happen. Our human resource personnel, the information technology consultant, our financial advisors, even the person designing the office fitout – all their decisions will directly or indirectly change how work is actually done.
Today we'll hear three quite different perspectives from our work health and safety professionals today and our strategic chain agent, how this can and should influence the design of work, workplaces and systems of work.
First, our first panellist is Peter Holmes, Head of Network Design Planning at the National Australia Bank. Peter's a thought leader around the design of innovative solutions that transform our digital and physical spaces that are used both by customers and the bankers. Peter has partnered with organisations such as Lend Lease, IBM and Telstra to transform their spaces to improve customer and employee experiences.
Our second panellist, Geoff Hurst. Geoff is the President of the Risk Engineering Society, a Fellow of Engineers Australia,an Associate Lecturer at the Victorian Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and a Member of the Safety Institute of Australia, and a Director and Founder of a consulting company, Engineer OH&S Proprietary Limited.
I'm also delighted that today we've got an old colleague of mine, Barbara McPhee. Barbara is a professional Ergonomist and a specialist Occupational Health Physiotherapist with over 38 years’ experience in occupational health and safety. She is a past President, Fellow and professional Member of the Ergonomics Society of Australia and a past Board Member of the International Commission on Occupational Health. She was awarded an Order of Australia for Significant Service to Physiotherapy as a Practitioner and an Occupational Health expert and is an author. She was appointed as an Independent Expert Member to the New South Wales Mine Safety Advisory Council in 2006.
And last but not least, let me introduce today's Facilitator, David Caple who has over 30 years' experience as a Work Health and Safety Consultant. David's an Adjunct Professor at the Centre of Ergonomics and Human Factors at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Federation University Ballarat. He's the past President of the International Ergonomics Association and a Member of the Human Factors Society of the USA. As a Certified Ergonomist in Australia and in the United States, David's a Fellow of the International Ergonomics Society in Australia and also in the UK and Sweden, and David has been a long standing and respected member of the Advisory Board of the – of the Victorian Regulator.
I'll now with great pleasure hand over to David to facilitate what I'm sure is going to be an engaging discussion. Thanks David.
David Caple:
Thank you Peta and thank you to everybody who's joined us here today and also to the audience that are viewing online. This is an interactive panel with our three presenters and it provides an opportunity for those that are online, to tweet in any comments or questions as we proceed. So just use the live wall or the #virtualWHS and join in our discussions as we explore this topic as introduced by Peta.
This topic is part of the broad action areas in the current Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy which is looking at how do we look at safety in design and today's focus is safety in designing good work but also organisations such as the government and how they embrace good work in designing what it is that our public sector staff do.
So I think it would be interesting to maybe ask Peter as Peta with an "a" explained, Peter has been involved in a major project with the National Australia Bank and looking at the retail experience for both staff and customers. So Peter maybe tell us a little bit about the design impetus for this and just very briefly walk us through the journey and what some of the outcomes were?
Peter Holmes:
No problems. Thanks David. Look I think the impetus for us is really driven from the customer and I guess what we're seeing is the only real constant now is change and the way that our customers want to interact with us as a bank and with their money is just continually changing. One of the big drivers of that has probably been digital and particularly with internet banking and mobile and online which has really meant the role of the branch has changed quite significantly and quite quickly over the last couple of years. So we're really sort of forced to sit back and listen and go "What do our customers want and how do we respond to that?" and therefore what does that mean in terms of how we design work practices going forward?
So it's a very exciting opportunity to really think about how we transform that experience for customers and when you think about sort of how do you approach that? You know, traditionally we've probably always designed it from the bank's perspective and what we've done is sort of step back and say "Well let's understand first and foremost what our customers want and what's important for them", and then equally make sure that we engage very broadly across the organisation with not only our frontline people who are working in those environments every day but also our specialist areas, say health and safety, security, understanding what's important for brand, marketing, how that links back to the organisational strategy. Really all of those areas are involved then in shaping how we design that space for customers moving forward. So it's been a very exciting journey to be able to approach how we've designed this space quite differently than we probably have for the last 150 years. So I think that's what's been really exciting for us.
That's a very iterative process. So we really approached that from the point of view of understanding "What's happening today?" So really, research and saying "What are customers doing and saying?", "How are they interacting with us?", "What are our people doing?" and that gives us a baseline to sort of understand "What's the current state?" Then as we move into really shaping the design, really making sure that it's quite iterative and everybody's involved in that.
So we have our customers come in and actually help us design what the space may look like. We have our people come in and do that and then we use really great sort of prototyping approaches to test, learn as we go, evolve that design and then put a solution out to market and understand have we achieved the goals of the organisation but also for our customers and our people as well? So it's been a very interesting sort of journey.
David Caple:
We might explore some of the details of how that journey unfolded a bit later. But Geoff, I mean you're an Engineer but also a very experienced safety professional which possibly by accident you – tell us a little bit about that. But Peter alluded to a lot of stakeholders involved and I suppose as a safety professional how do you work in that partnership process to achieve a holistic outcome?
Geoff Hurst:
Yeah well certainly Peter – Peter and David – the challenge is to identify all the stakeholders that you need in the workplace or that are in the workplace or that need to be involved with the project or change that you're talking about and then not only just speaking with them or consulting with them as the terminology is, but actually engaging with them and collaborating with them. Define the problem with them, determine what the problems might be – it might be more than one problem - and then collaborate with them to actually solve that problem together. It's that involvement that they have with you as the professional on the scene that helps them understand what needs to happen and then also contribute to what actually needs to happen as well. It's a real challenge to do that but the way to do it is to make sure that you get down from the high seats in the organisation and actually watch what your people really do. Just like, just as Peter's sort of saying in NAB.
David Caple:
Okay. So Barbara we seem to be learning that watching what people do and understanding the user experience is fundamental to what a safety professional's role is in good design. So being a certified professional Ergonomist and maybe reflecting on your many years working in the mining industry here in Australia and internationally do you want to comment a little bit about those areas of input that you have in design from an ergonomics perspective?
Barbara McPhee:
Yes. It's very interesting because as originally,a physiotherapist and then an ergonomist, when I first went into the mining industry, I was terrified because I thought "I'm not a design engineer. I'm not a designer. I'm not an engineer. I am just somebody who's looking after people's health at work." My future boss at that stage said "We've got enough engineers. We want you to identify problems and work with the engineers and work with the workers most particularly, to sort the problems out."
Now, that then, was actually harder than doing the design job, in many cases, because the design job is actually quite straightforward. You don't have to deal with people. Dealing with people, all the range of people right from your managers, right down to the, in my case face workers, coal face workers, is quite an art and trying to get the two groups together or three groups together because you've often got managers and supervisors in the middle who have an entirely different view. But one of the things that I always do and insist on when I'm scoping a job is to say "Let's sit down and have a chat”, find out exactly what people are asking us to do – really important because they may have one idea, you're going in with a completely different idea and you come out with a third idea which is probably closer to what they want.
So the talking I think is very important and if people are not prepared to spend time talking and exploring a particular line or a particular issue then you may not necessarily succeed. Up front you've got to know that.
David Caple:
So I suppose in the Good Design Principles we talk about the planning stage and understanding what it is we're actually there to design and what are the assumptions, what are the measures of success that we want this design to have and addressing those health and safety principles as part of that journey.
Barbara McPhee:
And setting it out up front, quite clearly "These are what we see as our outcomes”, "This is what we want”, "This is what we think is reasonable to achieve." I work with small and medium sized businesses often and I think they're a quite different bunch of people and they're struggling with lots of issues with health and safety, just like the big guys are but they find it more difficult. Just they don't have the human resources and they certainly don't have the financial resources. So they have to actually be quite clever and the greatest joy you can have is when somebody says "Oh”, you know the light bulb goes on and you think "Yes, got you."
David Caple:
Well done. So Peter, Barbara's talked about the small and medium sized workplaces but you're talking about an international banking company and I suppose the question with design and the vision, do you see it as a top-down driven model or a bottom-up model or somewhere in between? Where does good design outcomes actually get the vision and the drive?
Peter Holmes:
Absolutely. Look, I think David it's both in that it's important to actually make sure you understand at the coal face you know, how people are working and what they're doing and I think it's very important you start there. But I think equally the role that leaders play and senior leaders in the organisation is equally really important. So it needs to be both and I think it's often this kind of who's in the middle. I think on reflection for myself over the last few years I think increasingly that is the customer and so it's not about middle management or those sort of supervisors. It's actually about how do you put the customer in the middle of that and actually rally people around that to understand what it is the organisation's goals are, what our people want to do, what our customers actually want and how you bring that together.
David Caple:
Okay.
Peter Holmes:
So I think it's not an 'either/or'. I think it's an 'and' and you need a sort of catalyst in the middle to bring that together.
David Caple:
Geoff do you want to comment on that?
Geoff Hurst:
Yeah. I certainly see that having worked across a number of sectors of industry in my working life I've seen organisations like Peter's talking about where they're ready for that sort of approach with their workers, where I've also seen sort of decades behind where management are still struggling with how they work with their workers. The workers are still out in the grass and the only time they talk is when they're out in the grass. It just doesn't work that way.
So the challenge is for management to actually speak with their workers in a collaborative way and if you're used to fighting with them it's pretty hard to have that conversation. So the supervisors tend to find themselves in the middle. The middle management people are one, working with their workers to try and help them do their jobs better on a daily basis – safer etc, but at the same time they're trying to defend this position that management keep putting to them "We need to change this”, "We need to change this”, "We need to change this”, and they just can't do all that change and still do it safely in the workplace. So the supervisors are trying to be listened – trying to gain the audience of the management above them but at the same time they're trying to also gain the audience of the people below them. The good supervisors will work with their people by listening to them and then they earn the respect of their people so that they can actually expect to be listened to as well.