Workplace harm extends beyond injuries at work.
It’s estimated that about 100 people die from workplace accidents every year in New Zealand while the economic and social cost of work-related injuries is $3.5 billion. One in five New Zealanders experiences mental health issues every year, and the annual cost of serious mental health is estimated at 5% of gross domestic expenditure. Add to these issues has been the impact of Covid-19 on employees and their families.
These work-related injuries and illnesses represent a huge cost to workers, their families, employers and society as a whole. However, many workplace injuries and improved mental wellness can be avoided through improved employee education and communication.
As a global multi-line Third Party Administrator (TPA), Gallagher Bassett is focused on delivering custom claims management solutions that suit the requirements of our individual clients, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
This extends through to our free online service, Poster Designer, designed to help employers around the globe run targeted health and safety campaigns in their workplace.
In most organisations and businesses around New Zealand, health and safety staff (or management) develop in-house campaigns for their workplace that address the key risks their workers face – in order to educate their workers about prevention strategies.
Not only can this be a time-consuming process, but also an expensive one that may sometimes require input from graphic designers to create professional looking materials. The process is further complicated for organisations with a geographically dispersed workforce who may want to customise their health and safety materials (such as posters) for their individual worksites (e.g., local OHS contact information or details of a site-specific OHS event).
Quite often for small to medium businesses, there is no resource available to have dedicated health and safety staff in-house.
When campaigns are both time consuming and expensive, employers are limited in the number they can carry out each year; impacting on the amount of information that is communicated to workers about risks and common workplace injuries.
The main objectives of Poster Designer are to help employers communicate health and safety effectively with their people and promote safer workplaces around New Zealand, supporting the mental and physical health of employees. The purpose of the online tool is to ensure companies are engaged and kept up-to-date with best practice workers’ compensation and personal injury knowledge.
Helping employers by providing core resources to run health and safety campaigns, Gallagher Bassett’s Poster Designer is continuously updated to meet the evolving needs of the industry and challenges in real-time.
Most recently, we added to our collection a series of mental health posters which was in addition to the COVID-19 collection of posters to assist businesses with keeping their employees safe during the pandemic. Hundreds of organisations in New Zealand and globally have used these posters to promote safer practices during the pandemic.
Businesses are also able to request a new poster design using an inbuilt form, which is created and uploaded to the portal. Dozens of new posters have been created in this way.
As such, the online tool provides employers access to dozens of customisable health and safety posters for use in their workplace. Poster Designer allows users to create bespoke health and safety campaigns to suit particular industries and individual companies. It allows anyone to create their own custom health and safety posters, choosing from over a hundred different pre-designed templates that have been developed with support from GB’s inhouse health and safety consultants.
The online tool is free for anyone to use, regardless of whether they are a current client.
