NZISM News 17 September 2025

One of the significant challenges that we face as health and safety professionals is that the world, the people in it, and the way in which they undertake their work does not fully correspond to our mental models and the systems we build based on these. Significant risk creeps into the gap between what we think is happening on the ground (Work as Imagined) and what is actually happening (Work as Done).

One of the symptoms of this gap is that employers consistently have a rosier view of health and safety in their organisation than workers do. For example, this graph is taken from a major set of surveys conducted by Verian for WorkSafe: Segmentation and Insights Series: Workers and Employers 2023 (pg 29).

The orange bar represents the percentage of employers agreeing with the statement and the green the number of workers. There is a persistent gap of 20% or more between the workers' and employers' responses and I suspect the workers have the clearer view.

This is one of the major reasons why worker engagement is so important for health and safety decision making and why a structured approach to communication with workers is so important.

I’m delighted to launch this year’s regional roadshow, Closing The Gap, to address this topic head on. Brent Sutton has been a long-term member and friend of NZISM. He’s also been doing a significant amount of work on how to improve worker engagement and participation (through Safety Differently and other mechanisms).

Brent’s workshops will provide evidence and practical advice to NZISM members as to how to lessen the gap and reduce your safety blindspots by engaging with workers. It’s going to be an intensely valuable session and I’m delighted that we can bring it to all of the NZISM branches (plus online).

I would strongly encourage you to sign up and to bring your colleagues along. Many of you will have experienced the quality of Brent’s previous presentations (I can recommend his three-part series on risk assessment Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 are all available in our webinar library). If you haven’t attended one of Brent’s presentations yet, this is your big chance. See you there!

Ngā manaakitanga

Jeff Sissons
NZISM CEO