case study

Rethinking safety in New Zealand workplaces

The Accredited Employers Programme is the premium injury prevention and management programme for NZ’s highest performing workplaces, responsible for continuously and sustainably improving everyone’s health, safety and wellbeing.

A number of features of the programme were not functioning as intended and this was having a negative impact on health, safety and wellbeing for employees of some of New Zealand’s largest employers.

case study

The Challenge

Instead of being a programme consisting of the best health and safety performers, the AEP was being used as a cost saving programme.

“Some of these businesses are just not investing in H & S or trying to prevent injuries and it is causing people serious injuries and sometimes death.” (ACC)

ACC needed a compelling redesign which positions the worker at the centre of the programme and provides. ACC with assurance that members are high performers in the health, safety and wellbeing space.

Our Response

ThinkPlace had worked with ACC in the discovery phase of the AEP redesign work, which meant we already were aware of some of the existing issues as well as the impact they were having. We leaned heavily on our previous expertise and knowledge so we didn’t ‘start from scratch’. Instead we leveraged the fact we already had a number of experts on the current AEP and the state it was in.

We implemented a sprint approach where we compartmentalised features of the programme and spent two weeks on one area, diving deeper into the problems, the impacts and what a better design would be from a worker, employer, ACC and Government point of view.

“Most of the business hadn’t ever worked on something this big and in such a short amount of time, it was a great experience and enlightening.” (ACC)

Key stakeholders within ACC, including senior leaders, subject matter experts and operations staff actively participated in the co-design process over a 14-week period. The team relied on user typologies (developed from qualitative and quantitative research) to ensure the voice of workers and employers was considered at all times.

The team used current behavioural insight approaches and modern regulatory approaches to ensure the newly proposed Target Operating Model was best practice for this type of programme and future proofed.

To ensure appropriate governance and senior leader buy-in, there were weekly demo sessions to walkthrough the redesigning features and to get their input into the design. This avoided any surprises once the sprint cycle was finished and ensured buy-in throughout the entire project. We were proposing wholesale changes to the operations side of AEP within ACC. These weren’t minor tweaks but transformational discussions so getting senior leaders across this thinking early helped to set the direction and gave the project team permissions they needed.

Our Impact

The team developed a cohesive story and rationale for the proposed TOM design. The TOM was used to socialise the case for change with the ACC executive team and the Minister for ACC.

ThinkPlace has since been contracted again by ACC to refine the design further. This work is ongoing and the refined design is due to be completed by October 2019.

“Hearing that we won the contract for the next round of design work for AEP made the team feel proud. All the hard work and devotion ThinkPlace had was obviously noticed and valued too.” (Project Manager)
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