Sydney Summit 2026 Recap

Sydney Summit 2026: Ready to Work

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Avetta Sydney Summit 2026.

Health and Safety, Procurement, and Operations leaders joined together to explore what it means to build teams that are ready to work – safely, efficiently and with greater confidence.

The conversations focused on how organisations can see risk earlier, make better decisions faster and protect the people, operations and relationships that keep work moving.

Key insights from Sydney

1. Readiness is a business capability

Hollie Rowsell, Manager, Solution Engineering APAC & Global Value Engineer at Avetta, shared a compelling view on the value of readiness and why it matters in protecting people, maintaining productivity and preserving business value.

A key message from Hollie was the impact a single incident can have across an organisation, disrupting operations, delaying projects, affecting supplier relationships, damaging trust and creating financial consequences.

Survey findings from Closing the Work Readiness Gap: Why Compliance Alone Is Not Enough, highlight the risk to ready gap. Of the professionals’ surveyed

Only 15% of respondents report being able to quickly verify in real time that a worker is “ready to work” in real time.
42% say workers sometimes or often start before all required safety checks or credentials are fully verified.
59% have limited, partial or no real-time visibility of who is on site, their role and risk profile.

Download The Value of Ready presentation >

2. Genuine readiness is the goal

As part of the Insights to Action: Ready to Work Together mainstage presentation, Abid Yousuf, Chief Customer Officer at Avetta explored what genuine workforce readiness looks like in practice.

A view of readiness brings together competency, training, assessment, and verification. The Summit's customer conversations showed why readiness needs to be connected to the point of work. It asks a practical question: can this person perform this work, in this place, under these conditions, right now?

3. Procurement as a safety control within organisation

Research shows that only 27.4% of workers in high-risk industries describe safety, procurement and operations as highly or fully aligned when managing supply chain risk – meaning about three quarters are not yet operating from a strongly aligned view.

The Summit’s From Risk to Ready client panel with Sarah Bean, Group Head of Procurement, Sydney Airport; Chris Mansfield, Pacific Subcontract Category Lead, Honeywell; and Wayne Corby, Procurement Manager, Zip Water & Culligan Australia, reinforced that readiness depends on the involvement of the right experts.

The panel highlighted practical priorities:

Make visibility useful: The value of data comes from connecting supplier, contractor and workforce dependencies to business continuity, and using that insight to guide decisions.
Build relationships, not just records: Data insight creates the foundation for better supplier conversations. Regular engagement helps organisations respond effectively and build trust.
Turn early signals into action: Risk registers, supplier performance conversations and financial-risk notifications create value when they trigger a decision such revisiting a contract or escalating an issue.

Stronger alignment can help organisations make risk visible earlier, and connect supply chain decisions to operational continuity and business performance.

4. The next advantage comes from connecting culture, technology and data

Misha Fazen’s presentation Embracing Data and Digital Transformation provided an example of how embracing data as a cultural change can create meaningful operational shifts. When reframing data from a compliance obligation into a strategic asset, past performance can be explained and used to intentionally shape safer outcomes for the future.

5. A multi-layered approach beyond compliance closes the gap

In her Advancing Workforce Maturity presentation, Lynda Richards showcased what safety maturity looks like in the context of the modern workplace, and how organisations can utilise leading indicators to make more confident, risk based decisions to close performance gaps and drive continuous improvement.

View the Advancing Workforce Maturity presentation >

2026 Avetta Customer Awards

Celebrating excellence across APAC

At this year’s Sydney Summit we recognised the organisations, teams and individuals driving meaningful change across safety, workforce readiness, sustainability and supply chain performance throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

The 2026 Avetta Customer Awards attracted an exceptional calibre of submissions, showcasing innovative programs, measurable outcomes and genuine leadership from organisations committed to creating safer, more resilient workplaces.

View the 2026 Avetta Customer Award finalists and winners >