Fonterra wins top New Zealand health and safety awards

Dairy giant Fonterra Co-operative Limited has taken out top honours at this year’s New Zealand health and safety awards for two innovative employee health and wellness initiatives.

The awards, run by Safeguard magazine and supported by WorkSafe New Zealand, were announced at an industry gala dinner at SKYCITY Convention Centre in Auckland on 25 May.

The company won WorkSafe’s category award for the best initiative to address a workplace health risk with a program addressing milk tanker driver fatigue. WorkSafe Chief Executive Gordon MacDonald said Fonterra had demonstrated innovative thinking in areas of risk in the workplace that are often hard to detect and mitigate.

“Milk tanker drivers are working from the early hours of the morning through till late in the day... Fonterra’s put a layered program in place to identify at-risk drivers and told the judging panel they’re now having much more honest conversations about fatigue with their drivers,” he said.

Fonterra also won another category for looking to the welfare of all contractors and subcontractors on the firm’s major construction projects.

“The village concept not only provides a clean, dry and safe environment for workers, it is also a place where the collaboration between tradies that is so important to workplace health and safety is happening — and other companies are keen to try the concept,” said MacDonald.

According to the convenor of judges, Safeguard editor Peter Bateman, the winning initiatives represented the ‘beyond compliance’ thinking in which health and safety is used to genuinely engage with staff and contractors, and which results in collaborative and highly productive workplaces.

Other winning entries can be viewed here.

Image caption: New Zealand Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Michael Woodhouse with Greg Lazzarro, Fonterra. Image courtesy WorkSafe New Zealand.

Originally published here.