When people talk about a health and safety ecosystem they usually picture a glossy organisational chart with regulators, ACC, professional bodies, and businesses. Boxes, arrows, and committees.
But ecosystems don’t work like org charts.
Putting on my human factors hat, an ecosystem is a socio-technical system – a dynamic network of people, policies, technology, and environments that shape how work is done.
Safety outcomes rarely come from a single point. They emerge from the interaction of multiple layers (Rasmussen, 1997; Carayon et al., 2015). Decisions made at the policy level cascade downward, ultimately shaping behaviour at the sharp end.
What happens on a construction site at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning is often the result of decisions made months earlier in a meeting room, usually with better coffee and fewer high-vis vests.
Uniforms and an ACOP
My appreciation for this systems view started early. Working with the New Zealand Defence Force, I led a national anthropometric survey used to inform equipment and uniform design. Uniforms in the NZDF aren’t just clothing; they are part of a soldier’s identity. Getting the sizing and fit right affects comfort, mobility, safety, and even morale. It was a clear reminder that seemingly small design decision (inches) can affect the wearer, depending on what they do.
Later, at WorkSafe, I saw another layer of the ecosystem – the regulatory one. Developing an Approved Code of Practice such as updating the Manual Handling ACOP is itself an ecosystem exercise. Writing one requires regulators, industry practitioners, researchers, professional associations and workers to translate evidence into practical guidance. In other words, even the rules have to be designed with the socio-technical system in mind.
The question isn’t whether New Zealand has the pieces of the ecosystem. We do. The question is whether those parts connect well enough to influence work design, rather than simply policing how work is carried out.
The invisible toll
WorkSafe estimates up to 900 New Zealanders die annually from work-related health conditions. That figure dwarfs traumatic workplace fatalities.
Through the Work Should Not Hurt (WSNH) programme, much of my work looks through a physical ergonomics lens, particularly at musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), a major driver of injury claims.
In construction, these exposures are familiar, repeated heavy lifting, awkward overhead work, constrained spaces, vibrating tools. None of this surprises the people doing the work. It is usually the predictable outcome of how projects and tasks are designed upstream.
Spend enough time on worksites and you quickly realise workers are performing impressive feats of improvisational ergonomics just to get the job done while inadvertently compensating for poor design.
Taking a broader human factors view, these aren’t really ‘accidents’. They are the outcome of cumulative exposure to poorly designed work.
If the ecosystem focuses mainly on worker compliance at the sharp end, it misses the deeper drivers. Even the most motivated worker can only compensate for a poorly designed job for so long.
Lessons from abroad
Internationally, effective ecosystems support upstream prevention. During consulting work in the UK, I provided human factors input for air-conditioning maintenance planning at Elephant & Castle underground station in London. The analysis wasn’t limited to the technicians installing the units. It looked at access, maintenance planning, equipment layout and infrastructure constraints across the life of the system.
That kind of systems thinking is embedded in the approach of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, which emphasises organisational risk management and safety climate long before anyone steps on site.
Australia offers another example. The harmonised Work Health and Safety framework, along with recent regulation of psychosocial hazards, reflects a similar recognition that many risks sit upstream in how work is organised.
Different systems, different histories, but the lesson is that consistently improving safety requires coordination across the whole system, not simply thicker rulebooks. Frankly, if we could write our way out of harm with procedures, most industries would have solved safety decades ago!
Designing a mature ecosystem
In my view, a mature safety ecosystem needs three things.
- Rapid feedback loops: turning injury data and research into real-world practice.
- A focus on work design: recognising that design is one of the most powerful levers for preventing harm.
- Meaningful worker participation: workers understand how tasks actually unfold. Putting them at the centre grounds solutions (and uptake) in reality.
New Zealand already has the building blocks. Our challenge is ensuring they operate as a learning ecosystem rather than a collection of well-intentioned parts.
A forest thrives because its species interact to sustain the whole. The same applies here. The strength of our safety ecosystem lies in working together to design inherently safer work before workers have to redesign the job themselves (which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing.)
In conclusion, we cannot regulate our way out of poorly designed work. Let’s help design a better forest, not just work on the trees.
Dr Stephven Kolose is Principal Ergonomist with CHASNZ’s Work Should Not Hurt programme.
