Opinion: Employment law - A gateway to safer workplaces

Law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watt discusses the most comprehensive reform that New Zealand’s health and safety system has seen in over 30 years.


A series of policy developments, which began two years ago, have resulted in the most comprehensive reform of New Zealand’s health and safety system for over 30 years. The overhaul has an impact on all New Zealand workplaces, organisations and individuals. Are you keeping up with the changes? Law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts may have a solution.

The challenge to comply

There is an increasing burden on businesses to ensure staff understand and comply with all existing and new health and safety obligations. Breaching these obligations can be costly; not only in a financial sense but also in terms of the commercial and reputational fallout.

Your business needs to be able to prove that adequate staff training has taken place.

Meeting the challenge

Safetrac has the answer. It provides compliance training that is accessed online, making meeting this compliance obligation easier for businesses. Safetrac delivers user-friendly training for staff coupled with assessing the effectiveness of that training, while reducing compliance management paperwork to a minimum. Many businesses already have training in place but it is difficult to record and report on its effectiveness. Dr Ross Patterson, the founder of Safetrac, points out “The real value of Safetrac is in the analytics and the back-end reporting which face to face does not give you. At best you have a piece of paper that someone ticked that they attended the session. With a bit of luck that might be on file.”

Cost-effective, online compliance

Because Safetrac is delivered online and is scalable to an organisation’s need, Patterson comments that “it is a cost-effective way of delivering initial and ongoing compliance training. A per annum licence fee is applied to the total number of staff enrolled in each course in that year, so the more employees you have, the lower the cost per employee will be. The courses including Health and Safety are kept up to date by Minter Ellison Rudd Watts experts so they remain current in a fast moving regulatory environment.”

Safetrac’s platform rolls out the training automatically and offers a detailed reporting tool giving information on organisational, divisional and individual training progress. You save time and money, and your risk is reduced by knowing exactly who has yet to complete the training. Safetrac has been successfully adopted by organisations across all industry sectors.

 

Want to find out more? Visit www.safetrac.co.nz or email [email protected].

Recent articles & video

ERA calls company director's daughter 'employee'

Upton admits brain drain 'possibility' for New Zealand

What NZ employers need to consider before implementing a living wage

Which countries hired the most expats in 2023?

Most Read Articles

Company blocks former worker's employment with competitor

Unjustified dismissal: technician who didn't have enough work wins over $20,000

Employer assigns manager to smaller area – is it constructive dismissal?