Drive organisational excellence

Uniting across our organisation to become a modern, insights-driven regulator that makes a measurable difference.

Why this matters

Our planned work to grow and develop our people, and our workplace culture, is necessary to effectively and efficiently use our engagement, education and enforcement levers. Along with capable people and a unified way of working, WorkSafe needs solid and reliable data, technology and infrastructure.

Our drive for organisational excellence will help us evolve. It will support us to deliver on our vision for the health and safety system, and to become a modern, insights-driven regulator.

WorkSafe needs to lead by example and ensure we keep our own people healthy, safe and well at work. Our internal health, safety and wellbeing goal is that, by 2022 WorkSafe is a leading New Zealand organisation. We are working so that we have an equal focus across the safety, health and wellbeing of our people.

What we have achieved over the year

Our pathway and journey to become a modern, insights-driven regulator 

A key achievement for WorkSafe this year was the approval of an enterprise Target Operating Model (eTOM) that will support our journey to becoming a modern, insight-driven regulator. It is a pathway and a plan to 2030, where WorkSafe transforms how New Zealand views health and safety; where health and safety is core to what we all do at work; and where health and safety drives social and economic value into, and out of, our workplaces. It will see health and safety shift from a compliance exercise to a workplace culture.

At the centre of Taura Here Waka is the waka WorkSafe will sail in. On either side, Taura and Here are the outriggers that will give us balance and strength. Taura – the rope – symbolises the separate strands of our organisation coming together to make us stronger. Here – the act of binding – represents the unity WorkSafe will have as an organisation.

WorkSafe knows that we need to evolve the way we work as an organisation to best deliver upon our health and safety leadership role, and our vision that everyone who goes to work comes home healthy and safe. We need to work beyond our organisational boundaries to influence and participate in the harm prevention investments made by other agencies and regulators. WorkSafe needs to become insights-driven and to be adaptable to respond to a changing operating environment, and changing landscape of risk and harms.

A modernisation programme, and a new approach to programme and project management within WorkSafe, were all delivered this year. Our new systems and processes will support Taura Here Waka and our unified focus and way of working to make a measurable difference. Taura Here Waka will be supported by funding from the Wellbeing Budget 2019 to invest in foundation capability to support WorkSafe to become insights-driven by 2023.

Along with delivering the eTOM, modernisation programme and Taura Here Waka, over the course of the year WorkSafe focused on keeping our people healthy and safe, and building their capacity and capability. We also built our data, technology and infrastructure capacity and capability.

WorkSafe put in place governance arrangements to oversee the delivery of action plans to ensure our critical health and safety risks are mitigated or managed. In the midst of this, we also responded to the Whakaari/ White Island eruption and to COVID-19. Both these events placed demands on our staff, and we responded to the need to support their wellbeing. We ensured staff supporting the Whakaari/White Island health and safety investigation had access to appropriate support.

Taura Here Waka connects and integrates WorkSafe as an organisation to enable us to operate as a whole.

As part of our response to the new critical risk presented by COVID-19, we supported our staff to move out of our offices and in to remote work during the April/May 2020 lockdown. Internal health, safety and wellbeing guidance was developed for our staff for each Alert Level, including to support a safe return to our offices.

We continued work to refresh our values this year; although our ability to engage with staff in-person was disrupted by COVID-19. We sought input via multiple different platforms, and will continue this important work next year. WorkSafe will also continue to build upon our leadership development programme, and our programme focused on building capacity and capability in our Operations Group and our Inspectorate.

This year we also developed an Operations Group competency framework that will support the recruitment and training of our Inspectors; to ensure they have the skills and competencies needed. The competencies will provide a framework to inform other people development systems and processes across WorkSafe. We delivered an Inspectorate Development pathway; a flexible, blended learning approach which sets out the knowledge, skills and behaviours expected at different levels across our Operations Group and Inspectorate.

We continued our programme of work to develop our intelligence and technology base, to support us to target our operational resources where they can make a measureable difference. Under our Regulatory Intelligence Strategy, we have developed a model to support WorkSafe to more effectively make evidence-informed intervention decisions.

We have built our Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence capability. In addition, we worked through the impacts of COVID-19 on our organisation and MBIE, to keep our Office 365 programme on track. WorkSafe is working towards taking ownership of our ICT infrastructure and programmes; ensuring they are fit-for-purpose. This year, we have worked towards the delivery of a new case management system to manage energy safety notifications and certifications. This migration will move our case management from an unsupported platform onto a new contemporary platform. It reduces our technology risk and financial exposure to ICT costs on the old platform. We have also worked toward a new human resources and payroll system, with requests for proposals from possible suppliers being issued. This work, and work on our property strategy was disrupted as a result of COVID-19 but will continue into the new performance year

Our performance results

Organisational excellence	Target 2019/2020	Actual	Commentary
Staff engagement as measured in the 'We Say' survey results	≥61%	Not measured	WorkSafe delayed the ‘We Say’ Survey which gathers these esults to Quarter 2 2020; in response to having four new Executive Leadership Team members, allowing time for the new executive direction to be set, and sufficient time post our initial focus on our response to COVID-19.
Progress towards achieving the strategic goal of becoming a leader in New Zealand health and safety practice	Achieve 'Performing' level	Performing	WorkSafe's latest online survey results using SafePlus (November 2019) show that the ‘Performing’ level has been achieved. We continued to strive to maintain this level for the remainder of the performance year, with the result to be updated when we next run our survey, currently planned for September 2020.