Spotlight on Health, Safety and Wellbeing within Aotearoa’s Local Government
The key purpose of the Spotlight Discovery Project was to understand the strategic intent, desirability, feasibility and viability of establishing a local government health, safety and wellbeing sector group.
Project Objective
Spotlight, a project commissioned by Taituara and undertaken by Navona, aimed to thoroughly examine the potential of establishing a local government sector group dedicated to health, safety, and wellbeing. The directive was to discern its strategic intent, assess its desirability, gauge its feasibility, and validate its viability. In New Zealand's current landscape, there exists a myriad of health, safety, and wellbeing sector groups, with additional entities on the horizon. Given the expansive reach of local government and its extensive supply chain, it occupies a distinctive stance. Through Spotlight, the objective was to determine how this vast segment could harness its influential capacity to effectuate profound, positive shifts in health, safety, and wellbeing across New Zealand.
Project Process
To meet the project's objectives, the team at Navona utilised system design thinking and practices, collective impact models and an adaptive agile approach. This methodology harnessed the strength of end-users and the larger stakeholder community, fostering an environment of collaborative exploration. Detailed 1:1 interviews with subject matter experts enriched our understanding, while mapping of the local government supply chain provided pivotal insights. Stakeholders, spanning a vast spectrum, actively engaged in workshops, shaping the project's trajectory. Together, they designed and fine-tuned the recommendations that culminated in the project's final report.
Grounded in Critical Thinking
Our approach prioritised critical thinking, addressing complex challenges with analytical rigor. Recognising the value of prior insights and strategic stakeholder engagement, we remained agile, re-evaluating assumptions and welcoming innovative perspectives. Drawing upon the expertise of local government, industry, and supply chain specialists, we synthesised the data efficiently. Their insights were pivotal in refining our recommendations and crafting a set of Next Steps as a map for future work.
Project Delivery
Navona's commitment to excellence culminated in the delivery of a comprehensive final report, presenting a range of options, from which two pivotal recommendations were distilled. Accompanying this were a succinct summary report and a detailed Q&A document, ensuring clarity and thorough understanding for all stakeholders involved. Crucially, the final recommendations were not simply handed down but were crafted collaboratively by project participants, with Navona's guidance steering the discourse. These recommendations, strategically designed, are poised to enhance the health, safety, and wellbeing within local government and its extensive supply chain. The overarching objective remains clear: to catalyse transformative change that would ultimately uplift health, safety, and wellbeing outcomes across New Zealand.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing Challenges within Local Government
Local government provides an extensive range of public services in New Zealand, and employs a significant percentage of our workforce, both directly and via its supply chains. Due to this scale, the local government sector has significant reach and influence within New Zealand. It directly encompasses hundreds of organisations, controls assets worth $173B, has an operating expense account of nearly 5% of national GDP and modelling* suggest that over the period of a few years around 10% of the national workforce may be directly, or indirectly, employed by local government organisations.
Our research also indicated that councils tend to have very poor visibility of their supply chains and contracting chains; at best they may know the main contractors but have minimal visibility of sub-contrators beyond that. When considering the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) and that PCBU’s with overlapping duties have a responsibility to consult, co-operate, and coordinate activities with each other, these research findings are alarming.
In addition to this, our research also indicated that our most vulnerable workers in society are Māori, Pasifika, older workers, and migrant workers, many of whom are over-represented in statistics for death, serious harm and chronic harm in local government and its supply chain.
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