Page 38 - HW May-June 2020

work safety & wellbeing
What’s it going to take to
become a BlackHat?
According to documents we’ve seen, a BlackHat will be “representative of those who in their front-line supervisor roles have achieved industry benchmarks in how they control their workplace activity in a healthy and safe way. This includes achievements in training and assessment.”
Aiming to cover supervision of the entire construction sector – residential, commercial and civil construction – it’s estimated that there are 20,000-30,000 front-line supervisors in New Zealand who could and, hope the safety organisations, will become BlackHats.
To become a BlackHat, construction site supervisors will need to:
• Complete LeadSafe Supervisor or SiteSafe Supervisor “soft skills” training (two days, delivered by Impac, LeadSafe and SiteSafe).
• Successfully complete the ConstructSafe Supervisor health & safety knowledge assessment.
• Have regular on-site ConstructSafe assessments completed by their manager through the ConstructSafe app.
• Attend a half day BlackHat CPD event at least once every two years.
Other optional special events will be held throughout the
year in order to provide BlackHats with the opportunity to gain specialist BlackHat credentials like a BlackHat Platinum credential for those who gain the New Zealand Certificate in Construction Related Trades (Supervisor Level 4).
All BlackHats will wear a black hard hat, clearly identifying them as the persons responsible for safety on-site.
One BlackHat would be responsible for 10 field operatives, or a five-person “fireteam” for activities classified as exceptionally high risk.
Contact CHASNZ or any of the providers mentioned above for further information.
www.chasnz.org
Brett Murray (Site Safe): “BlackHat is about ‘building supervisory competence’, creating ‘safety champions’”
adopt a similar visual indicator and is pushing to adopt the black hat to indicate trained and accredited Site Supervisors – henceforth BlackHats – as designated on-site safety leaders.
e BlackHat program may be launched as soon as the last quarter of this year and a preliminary document released to me by CHASNZ describes “BlackHat” as follows:
“BlackHat will raise the pro le of what it means to be a front- line leader who drives health and safety performance on their sites and projects.
“BlackHat is representative of those who in their front-line supervisor roles have achieved industry benchmarks in how they control their workplace activity in a healthy and safe way.
“ is includes achievements in training and assessment.
“It will be pan industry and cover supervision of the entire construction sector including residential, commercial and civil construction.”
With SiteSafe one of the key organisations behind BlackHat, CEO, Brett Murray (www.sitesafe.org.nz), warns that although there is “still a lot of work to do before we get it out there”, con rms that BlackHat is about “building supervisory competence”, creating “safety champions”.
ese “champions” will be Site Supervisors and they will need to have “a broader overview of what needs to be done rather than concentrating on speci cs,” explains Brett.
“A lot of supervisors get promoted because they’re technically good at their job – but that doesn’t mean that they’re great at managing people or are people leaders.”
WHAT’S BEHIND THE BLACKHAT SCHEME?
Back to Chris Alderson at CHASNZ, who explains more about the background to the local BlackHat initiative: “ e London Olympics was a great example of a project which statistically should have killed probably a dozen people, based on previous experience.
“But it was probably the very rst project of its kind in the world to actually achieve stunning rates of low injuries and low accidents.”
It made sense therefore for those involved in construction safety here to seek the advice of Lawrence Waterman, who was the head of safety for the London Olympics building program (and subsequently became the Chair of the British Safety Council).
Lawrence Waterman understood that he had to get to the workers at the coalface to make a real di erence to London’s
36 NZHJ | MAY/JUNE 2020
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