Improving our safety

With a believe in better mindset, Southern Ports has been on a journey to improve our safety over the past six years.

Between 2019 and 2024, we embedded safety into organisational culture to create real behaviour change – it’s now no longer a ‘tick-box’ exercise but a ‘lived and breathed’ mentality that has seen our business put people first in daily operations by empowering leaders, delivering easy-to-use tools and advocating for new ways of working.

We have always been good ‘safety citizens’ – with a strong sense of responsibility towards our employees and committed to compliance with all appropriate legislation and regulations. But the shift in our approach to WHS management over the past six years required more than that. It required fundamental change from every level of our organisation – from the Board and Executive, every employee and all contractors.

That paradigm shift included:

• Prioritising safety – ‘safety’ was instilled as a Value in 2019. Six years later, it is expressed and enacted in a much stronger manner that is explicit about the priority safety takes in our business. It stands above all else. The focus is on putting people first - above innovation, above achievement, above ambition comes the safety and wellbeing of our team, our customers and our communities.
• Building a strategic safety leadership team – introducing a Group Health, Safety and Environment Manager and several on-the-ground safety-focused positions. A new-look safety Field Leadership program also ensures leaders are in the field, engaging and supporting team members and assisting to eliminate or control hazards. It helps create a culture of openness, constructive feedback and continuous improvement. It encourages all employees to be leaders when it comes to safety.
• ‘Brain’ training – investing in more than $1 million in an external whole-of-organisation psychological safety training program to change the way everyone thinks about safety. This focused program drives workplace safety improvements by providing employees (and Board members) with a better understanding about how the brain works, and how different belief systems and attitudes can influence behaviours. It provides insights into thinking patterns to empower staff to make better decisions about safety. Since inception, 510 people have undertaken the training.
• Better systems – a complete overhaul of 250 disparate and site-specific legacy policies, procedures and practices at Albany, Bunbury and Esperance now strengthened and streamlined into 115 organisation-wide aligned resources – all available on a new and easy to use mobile in-field safety management platform.
• Putting people first – empowering our people by funding employee-led health and safety initiatives, a Health Safety Representative program, a stretch program to reduce injury, and a proactive approach to call ‘stop works’ and ‘safety pauses’.
• Leading by example – establishing a business-wide WHS Steering Committee with high-level representation, and instigating and leading the development of a WA Ports WHS Reporting Framework – now generating national interest.
• Bringing stakeholders on the journey – introducing a new-look contractor management and an ‘authority to work’ process within a complex operating environment.
• Continuous improvement – introducing leading performance drivers and proactively driving safety culture surveys, two-way feedback, and staff and stakeholder forums.

Future-focused

While Southern Ports safety transformation has been a six-year program to date – it is ongoing. We’re not resting on our laurels, we’re driven to continue questioning and challenging ourselves to create an even safer working environment.