About Us
THRIVE Safety & Wellbeing | A Kitney-Mapien Collaboration
Who we are...
Kitney is a forward-thinking consultancy with a focus on supporting organisation’s to create safer, healthier, more capable and productive workplaces. By coupling expertise and technology, Kitney’s solutions transform organisations across industry and any size from start up to large corporation.
Mapien are workplace strategists, coupling technical expertise with pragmatic thinking to partner with clients to solve people problems. With deep experience in every Australian industry and state, across strategic human resources, employee relations, immigration services, organisational development, and psychometrics, our clients’ people challenges are covered.
Together, Kitney and Mapien are combining our expertise to help understand, share, and enable safety specialists to make their workplaces safer by leveraging technology. We want workplaces to THRIVE:
Roadmap
Challenges for Workplace Health & Safety
People responsible for Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) in organisations face multiple and daily challenges.
When supporting our organisations to maintain safe and healthy workplaces:
- We write policies and procedures so we know what needs to be done, however how it is done often varies greatly
- WHS is currently reliant on managers and workers knowing what is needed, and prioritising health and safety amongst competing priorities
- Paper-based safety management systems are reliant on manager, supervisor, and worker knowledge and compliance
Going digital offers solutions to some of these challenges:
What’s happening in Australia with work-related fatalities and injuries?
To reduce these statistics, consider not just root causes, but also how digital systems could support reduction in work-related fatalities and injuries.
Challenges and opportunities for digital adoption
Emerging technologies presents challenges and opportunities for organisations, through technology including robotics, chat bots, AI, augmented reality, cloud, and big data.
The next five years will see incredible changes in industry, and an organisation’s approach to create capacity for their people to adopt technology is an obstacle for individual and organisational growth and efficiency. Gaps will appear in digital adoption until we find ways to enable and support technology adoption and transformation.
Various trends demonstrate the imperative for us to be picking up the pace of digital adoption now:
- It’s predicted that that 50% of employees will require reskilling by 2025 to keep up with technology shifts (Schwab & Zahidi, 2020).
- Approximately 30% of skills deemed “essential” in 2025 are not yet regarded as crucial (Li, 2022).
- 6 out of 10 jobs have approximately 60% of tasks being automatable (McKinsey, 2018)
How we find ways to comprehensively understand context-specific obstacles, and opportunities, for digital adoption is an invaluable opportunity for data-driven insight to lead the way for accelerating digital adoption.
Some of the key levers we explored in our research were inspired by the years of research into user adoption frameworks that identify the fundamental attributes that must be present for a user to adopt tech:
- Expectation management, attitudes and perceptions, true or not, about specific technology has a significant impact on user adoption.
- Love for technology, the more that people have a genuine interest to play and explore tech the swifter the adoption in organisations.
- Peer pressure, as with all experiences in life, our peers’ perspectives towards specific technology will speed us up or slow us down.
- It works, put simply…in the views of the user, all aspects of the system should work as they were intended.
Helping us achieve So Far as Is Reasonably Practicable (SFAIRP)
In the context of WHS Act and Regulation, Safe Work Australia defines ‘reasonably practicable’ as that which is, or was at a particular time, reasonably able to be done to ensure health and safety, taking into account and weighing up all relevant matters including:
- The likelihood of the hazard or risk concerned occurring
- The degree of harm that might result from the hazard or the risk
- What the person concerned knows, or ought reasonably to know, about the hazard or risk, and ways of eliminating or minimizing the risk
- The availability and suitability of ways to eliminate or minimise the risk, and
- After assessing the extent of the risk and the available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, the cost associated with available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, including whether the cost is grossly disproportionate to the risk
With the digital solutions now available to organisations, especially cost-effective and accessible solutions such as Microsoft 365 and the Google Suite, paper-based safety management systems will be harder to defend as ‘reasonably practicable’.
Digital solutions are becoming more commonly known, available, and used, and no doubt, soon the expected standard to meet WHS obligations.
Questionnaire... achieving a safer, stronger workplace
By bringing together Kitney and Mapien’s expertise, knowledge of our respective disciplines, and a genuine passion to see organisation’s achieve a safer and stronger working environment, we have created an industry questionnaire to help find valuable insights that individuals and organisations can use to inform priority areas to invest time and focus to accelerate the digitalisation of health and safety systems and practices.
