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Avetta has launched Business Risk! Click here
We've updated our Privacy Policy to provide continued transparency and to ensure alignment with our business operations and practices. Please view our updated Privacy Policy here.
Navigate a competitive Supplier market and bring aboard the skilled workers that underpin a secure supply chain.
If the last two years are anything to go by, it’s more important than ever for your workforce to be set up well. Increasingly, the focus is settling on ESG. But what does that mean and how can workforce and supply chain management software help you manage this?
Beyond being buzzwords, ESG is gaining prominence. Especially as businesses plan for the future and look to make business decisions. So, what does it stand for? Environmental, Social and Governance.
Environmental: how does your business impact the environment? The E looks at what your business does in areas like greenhouse gas emissions, waste management and energy efficiency.
Social: how does your business support people? The S looks at how your business manages relationships with employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers in areas like human rights, modern slavery, supply chain standards, and adherence to work health and safety.
Governance: what are the rules or principles underpinning your business? The G looks at the defined rights between all parties—employees and stakeholders—audits and internal controls.
In this article on World Economic Forum, they spoke to the importance of ESG in business:
“Global mega-trends such as climate change, geopolitical shifts, and the continuous emergence of disruptive technologies, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic have made Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues even more pressing for executives, boards, and policymakers.
Pioneering technologies and solutions in advanced manufacturing are opening up new opportunities across industries to measure and report accurate and consistent ESG metrics.”
They’re what allow you to measure the environmental, social and governance performance of your business. Alongside being transparent with consumers and investors, when you know your areas of risk, you can work towards improving them.
When you improve your company’s ESG rating, there’s a positive flow on effect in the areas of:
ESG is becoming an increasingly important standard used globally, and is a metric used by potential investors when looking to invest in certain businesses.
It’s why when our parent company Avetta launched their new platform, Avetta One™, there is a focus on sustainability and ESG.
Avetta’s ESG product works like this.
We collect ESG-related details (like those outlined above) from your suppliers and contractors. Using this data, we provide you with a baseline ESG score for your external workforce.
This allows you to visualise the maturity of ESG across a broad spectrum of international standards. Based on the information gathered, your suppliers and contractors are able to track their progress and take suggested actions to improve their score. When you know your areas of improvement, you can take appropriate action.
All data can be easily reported on to various stakeholders and investors.
It’s simple, customisable, and best of all, efficient.
Have you thought about improving your ESG rating this year? Talk to us today.
We’re all about safety—right from the very top, all the way down to each individual worker. In fact, it’s our focus on the safety of workers which makes Avetta stand apart from other workforce management software solutions.
Your workers are your business’s greatest strength, and biggest weakness.
Highly qualified and well-trained workers lead to success. Under educated and poorly inducted workers lead to bad business outcomes, loss of revenue, and in severe cases, loss of life.
So, how do you make sure your workers are responsible for your business success? Properly onboard them.
Onboarding new workers happens in every workplace. Or at least it should.
You must never underestimate its importance. In fact, we’d go as far as saying the first and most vital step in managing your workforce effectively is onboarding your workers well.
You need to make sure your workers have all the information they need to perform their roles and tasks with minimal risk to themselves and others. Do they have the right licences, insurances, and qualifications? Have they undertaken the right training? When was the last time they did training? Does it need to be reviewed?
You need to implement a thorough onboarding schedule for new workers and employees. By onboarding them properly to begin with, it’s a simple way for your business to manage risk.
There are three different paths you can go down: classroom, online, or a combination of the two.
For site-specific induction, classroom (or in-person learning) on site is likely to be the most effective. Being able to physically walk your workers through their surroundings before they begin work can eliminate hazards and risks pre-emptively.
Though you should implement online learning and onboarding where possible. Research shows learning online boosts retention rates by 25 to 60 per cent, compared to 8 to 10 per cent with traditional classroom training (Source: SH!FT).
By incorporating mid-course exercises, quizzes, and summaries, you help workers retain what they’ve learned. An online onboarding environment also provides the option for workers to revisit and refresh their knowledge when they start to feel a little rusty.
Combining a combination of in-person and online induction modules, you can make sure everyone working for you has the same information about how you want your business to operate. It also fulfils your duties according to the Work Health and Safety Act.
So you’ve properly onboarded your new staff. But if you can’t report on and view their results, you’re missing out on vital feedback. This is where the our LMS comes in—and why you need a workforce management solution.
The Avetta LMS empowers you to simplify the onboarding and ongoing training of your workers. You can setup automated reminders and gain access to insightful analytics about the education of your workforce. These reports also provide visibility over training blind spots among your workers.
You can ensure all induction materials and training are tied to safety outcomes and legislative requirements, both from the WHS Act and industry-specific legislation.
All of this can be combined and cross-checked against worker-specific roles in your workforce management solution with Avetta.
So, what are you waiting for?
Talk to Avetta today about implementing LMS for onboarding your workforce.
Everyone wants the people coming to work for them to be safe. But sadly even with strict legislation, workplace injuries still happen. So, what can we learn from common workplace injuries and how can we translate that into a safer workforce?
Each year, Safe Work Australia releases key Work Health and Safety statistics, providing an insight into common workplace injuries and fatalities. Within these devastating numbers are lessons to be learnt which can be applied to your workplace. Especially when there’s a common thread among the main culprits.
In 2021, there were sadly 169 workplace deaths recorded in Australia. Of those fatalities, they occurred by:
Thirty-five occurred by other methods.
*vehicle collisions include fatalities that occurred as a direct result of a vehicle crash. Vehicles include not only road vehicles such as cars and trucks, but also machines such as aircraft, boats, loaders, tractors and quad bikes.
In 2021, there were a staggering 130,195 ‘serious claims’ (workers’ compensation requiring at least a week off work) related to workplace injury and disease in Australia. Those incidents occurred by:
*vehicle collisions include claims where the injury was the direct result of a vehicle crash. Vehicles include not only road vehicles such as cars and trucks, but also machines such as aircraft, boats, loaders, tractors and quad bikes.
It’s important to remember that behind every number is a person. Someone with family and friends. Someone with a life outside of their job. A person who expected to go to work and be safe.
It’s why safety is our mandate at Avetta. No one wants to be responsible for the death or injury of someone else because of poor workplace safety.
There are many lessons here.
We can see some common culprits on both lists: vehicles, falls, and being hit by moving objects. Knowing this, what can you do?
First up, it’s time to conduct a risk assessment on your sites and projects (we’ve covered this before here). If you don’t know where to begin, start with the common places outlined above and apply them your business. Is there something that needs to be changed to ensure further safety? Do you have proper processes in place to diminish the level of risk?
Next, it’s time to look at training. Safe Work Australia has a wealth of resources and training around working from heights, in vehicles, with machinery, the list goes on. Making use of a Learning Management System (LMS) and having regularly scheduled training for your workers can help reduce workplace injuries and death.
Another often overlooked step is having role-specific safety requirements.
From ensuring you have the appropriate ergonomic set up for office workers, to knowing how to safely operate heavy machinery, every role in every job has safety requirements. And it’s up to everyone, as well as your business, to know these requirements and follow them.
Every workplace, from film sets to ALDI supermarkets has special and specific job requirements. Because these roles are all slightly different, how to be safe within your role will be different too.
It’s in the specificity where Avetta shows our strength.
Business rules are where we help with specificity. We can create a business rule for anything. One of the benefits from our years of experience is the knowledge we’ve gained working across industries and clients.
We understand safety isn’t a one-size-fits-all.
When you tailor the specific and clearly communicate these expectations with your workers, and train them properly, you’re setting your business up for success, while improving safety.
And there’s nothing more important to your business than keeping your workers safe.
Talk to the safety experts at Avetta today about how to increase safety in your workforce.
If someone were to ask you, how much would you be able to tell them about the risks to your business? Underpinning your workplace success should be a risk management process.
There’s even an entire section of the Work Health and Safety act related to risk management. You’re legally required to establish a plan and guidelines for a thorough risk management process to control any foreseeable risks within your workplace.
So how do you do this? Join us as we go through the 6 steps to manage risk in your workplace.
First up, you need to know the difference between a hazard and a risk. A hazard is situations or things that have the potential to harm a person, while a risk is the possibility that harm (injury, illness, or death) might occur when exposed to a hazard.
Some workplace risk is unavoidable—especially when it’s related to the nature of the work your business does. But to manage your risks, you need to be able to identify them. This is where a thorough risk analysis should come into play. You can’t protect your workers from risks you don’t know about.
Now you’ve identified your hazards, you need to assess the associated risks. Are they avoidable? Are they necessary to the work you perform? You need to understand what possible outcomes might happen because of the hazards and determine the likelihood of the risk occurring.
Your next step is developing and implementing a risk register. This can be done through a Broad-Brush Risk Assessment where hazards associated with all workplace activities are captured.
Another approach to risk management is implementing what’s known as the Hierarchy of Control:
Underpinning this is your need to consult your workers. Alongside being a requirement of the WHS Act, when workers are engaged in the risk management consultation process, they’re more likely to adopt safe work practices.
A simple yet effective way to manage risk, is to make sure the people working for you are qualified to carry out their roles. Do they have the right licences, insurances, and qualifications? Have they undertaken the right training? When was the last time they did training? Does it need to be reviewed?
Documenting and sharing your risk management procedures is essential to ensuring everyone working for you is aware and informed of the risks being managed. The easiest way to manage risk and avoid workplace accidents is by having appropriately qualified and trained workers.
Risk management is not set and forget. You need to regularly review and revise your policies and procedures to make sure they’re still current and reflect of best practice. Every time something in your workplace changes, you need to review to ensure you haven’t missed any additional risk.
Staying on top of these procedures is your best line of defence against workplace injuries.
In our experience, all organisations benefit from having risk management procedures and hazard reduction initiatives. It helps you meet your legal requirements under the WHS Act and assists in making your business run as smoothly as possible.
Our software exists to provide total insight into your workforce, manage risk, increase productivity, control compliance, and stay connected. With Avetta's workforce management software, you can pre-qualify the contracting companies working for you—you can even request a safety management system (SMS) review from our team. You can make sure all your workers are competent and deny site access to those who aren’t. Using our learning management system, you can keep your entire workforce up to date with your risk management procedures.
The options are endless.
Talk to Avetta today about how we can help you manage your workplace risk.
Everyone knows how important workplace safety is. No one wants to see their workers injured on the job because they cut corners when it comes to safety.
It’s so important in fact, that there’s a legislative act—Work Health and Safety Act 2011—which underpins all Aussie businesses. And it’s up to you to make sure it’s followed in your workplace.
Creating safer workforces is why Avetta exists. And we do this, in large part, using data.
Many organisations lack the insight into their workforce to make informed decisions. They may collect data, but it’s of little use if it’s difficult to decipher and doesn’t allow them to act.
Good data—the right data—helps to inform business decisions and lead to better workplace performance and outcomes. It also reduces workplace risk, which leads to improved safety. It’s a win, win.
There’s also much to be learnt from data.
In their recently released Key Work Health and Safety Statistics, Australia 2021, Safe Work Australia gives cause to celebrate the improvement in workplace safety over the past 20 years.
All of this begs the question—what can I do to make my workplace safer? It’s where Avetta and the data collected in our platform comes in to play.
How much do you know about the people working for you? Capture their qualifications, their training, insurances, licences. Find out everything you can and have it loaded into your workforce management solution.
When you have contracting company and worker data captured, take a look and see if there are any skills gaps missing. Is more training needed? Do you have enough people covering the positions you need to meet your business goals? Do workers have skills and qualifications needed in another area of your business?
Business rules help your contracting companies and workers know what you need from them to work for you. Providing this fundamental level of understanding sets the tone for your workforce, letting them know that you expect the best and safest work practices.
This is the time to comb through your data and see what incidents and injuries have happened on your job sites or projects. Is there a common denominator? Do injuries around lifting and manual handling frequently occur? If so, it might be time to update your procedures and figure out where you went wrong. You could set a regular training requirement through the LMS to make sure your workers get a regular refresher of best practice to avoid injuries on the job.
To make your workplace safer, you need to have an effective and thorough risk management process which is constantly updated, in consultation with your workers. We covered 6 steps to manage workplace risk here.
Talk to Avetta about how to gain insight into your data to keep your workforce safe on site.
We’ve all done them.
From childcare centres to office buildings and construction sites, we’ve all ‘practiced’ emergency evacuations.
Often called fire drills, they’re more than just the opportunity to chat with our colleagues huddled together outside.
They exist to prepare businesses for an event—a fire, flood, or other kind of threat, like a dangerous accident—which requires everyone to leave site immediately. Fire drills test the readiness of your business and look for flaws in the process. This way, in the event of an actual emergency, you’re prepared.
Preparing for an emergency is an essential part of managing your workforce. An effective response across all areas of your business means your people get home safely after an emergency event.
To do this well, you need an emergency evacuation plan, safety wardens, first aid officers, and an emergency evacuation point (or muster point) where workers and visitors know to meet.
When an emergency occurs, and you need to get everyone off your site or project, the first thing you need to do is make sure everyone is accounted for—how does your business do this?
Do you have a log of everyone who is in your building, or on your sites or projects, at any given time? And how quickly can you access this information?
Alongside making sure your workforce is qualified and compliant, Avetta's workforce management software can help when it comes to emergency evacuations with our reporting and mobile solutions.
If you use Avetta on your sites or projects—especially Site Access—every person who enters your site or project needs to log in and out at an access point. This can be through the mobile app, logpoint, or kiosk. This ensures you have an accurate record of who is on your sites and projects at any given time, making it easy to account for them in the event of an evacuation.
There are three ways Avetta gives you the power to manage emergency evacuations:
The Avetta Onsite Mobile App features useful emergency evacuation functionality.
Don’t use the mobile app? You can jump on your laptop to open the ‘Emergency Evacuation Report’ direct from the Onsite database. You’ll see every person logged in at your site at the time of the evacuation. This allows for accurate roll call at your muster point.
This rugged tablet can be removed from its docking station and taken to your muster point. Workers can use it to scan their access ID cards and mark themselves as safe.
While no one wants an emergency event to happen, they can and do occur. Is your business ready?
Ensure everyone is safe in an evacuation with Avetta. Talk to someone today about supporting safety in your workplace.
Despite your best efforts, no supply chain will be without a disruption. Any one of your partners could experience operational delays, accidents, sourcing errors, or any other number of events that will affect your company. While you cannot control those situations, you can prepare for them, minimize their impact, and get your supply chain up and running again. Your preventative actions now will determine your supply chain resiliency going forward.
Like any relationship, knowing as much as you can about a potential long-term partner will help avoid headaches in the future. Knowing that they have the same goals in terms of safety, deliverability, and risk will bring stability to the entire supply chain. However, you cannot know these things unless you do the necessary research. Alternatively, you can partner with a service provider like Avetta to vet supply chain partners for you. Avetta helps reduce the cost and administrative burden associated with contractor prequalification, document management, auditing, employee-level qualification and training, insurance verification and risk management.
Before making a decision on your supply chain partners, it’s important to know how much risk you are willing to expose yourself to and how much risk each supplier, vendor, and contractor adds to your risk profile. More importantly, decide on what your organization can do to reduce those risks. For instance, diversifying your supply chain can help mitigate the impact when a supplier is disrupted. As an example, if one supplier can’t deliver because of a natural disaster, then your organization can rely on a backup supplier until your primary supplier is operable again. Every supplier adds risk, but understanding the maturity of the supplier and their capability to manage threats will help you decide if the added risk is worth working with them.
It’s easy for buyers and suppliers to be agreeable with each other’s demands when there’s a chance of doing business. However, being too agreeable sacrifices the acknowledgement of risks for the sake of the partnership. Similarly, taking hardline stances on demands can make a supplier hide risks so that they don’t lose the business. Instead, both parties should communicate openly and honestly, identifying risks along the way and discussing solutions to handle those risks. This kind of alignment will drive more positive outcomes when negative events occur.
When accepting bids from suppliers, understand that the lowest upfront cost is not always the best choice. Suppliers may be budgeting for risk in their bid. As such, discuss risk openly with suppliers, and identify potential threats so that you can decide if you’re over-paying for risk mitigation or if the supplier has factored risks into the bid at all.
No supply chain is perfect, and you will eventually experience a disruption. Don’t let these events be a complete negative – learn from them to make your supply chain more resilient. Document the cause of the disruption and how you and your partners responded. Learn where the weaknesses are and develop best practices to bolster those areas. Then share your findings with your supply chain. Just because you’re developing a plan doesn’t mean your partners are. Use the power of social knowledge to reduce the risk profile all along the supply chain.
Learn more about Supply Chain Risk Management and how Avetta Services can help you to reduce risk, improve safety performance and build a sustainable supply chain. Visit Avetta.com today, email [email protected] or call 844.633.3801.