WorkSafe Victoria’s new draft Compliance code: Communicating occupational health and safety across languages provides practical guidance to help employers comply with their duties under occupational health and safety laws. When communicating with employees about work health and safety matters, it’s vital for employees with limited English proficiency to understand information, receive training and participate in consultation.

Communication duties under Victoria’s occupational health and safety laws

To establish and maintain a working environment that’s safe and without risks to health, employers must provide occupational health and safety information to employees in appropriate languages and forms, and ensure that employees are appropriately represented in consultation on work health and safety. This also applies to any employees whose language skills require the use of languages other than English.

Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety Act specify communication duties in a range of situations: 

  • When negotiating agreements about designated workgroups, one of the matters to be taken into account is whether other languages are spoken by the employees.
  • When consulting with employees, including contractors, on occupational health and safety issues.
  • When resolving health and safety issues, employers must notify employees, any health and safety representatives or health and safety committee as to whether the employer intends to participate in the issue resolution personally, or nominates an employer representative, and if they nominate a rep, the nominee’s name and position description. Such notifications must be in the appropriate languages.
  • Employers must ensure that details of agreements to resolve a health and safety issue are communicated to employees in any language agreed to be appropriate by the parties involved in the resolution. 
  • There are also provisions for materials such as safety data sheets to be prepared in languages in addition to English.

Language barriers

Communicating occupational health and safety information, instructions and training are central to reducing the risk of work injury and illness. Employees need to receive and understand occupational health and safety information, be able to raise and discuss issues and be trained in safe work practices. An ongoing dialogue on relevant issues is essential to work safety, and this needs to be accessible for all employees.

The draft Code notes that in some workplaces, language and related cultural barriers can present serious challenges to communication. In dealing with this, employers need to keep in mind that language proficiency may be a sensitive issue. A person’s ability to learn is not determined by their ability to communicate in English, or their level of language proficiency.

Nevertheless, employers must ensure they’re aware of any issues that may reduce the effectiveness of occupational health and safety communication in their workplace, and take steps to address them. While English language proficiency may be a noticeable factor, it’s not the only one that can affect understanding. 

Some employees may not be able to read and write the languages they speak. This can apply both to employees who speak fluent English and those who speak other languages. For this reason, employers need to use the simplest and clearest ways possible to present information, for example, using unambiguous images, diagrams and demonstrations to support verbal messages.

Cultural barriers can also affect communication. Examples of cultural factors that could affect conversations with employees about occupational health and safety include:

  • differences in how people from different cultures interpret language, body language or gestures 
  • assumptions that the employer or supervisor must not be questioned or disagree with
  • an employees’s fear of losing their job
  • being unaware of the occupational health and safety laws in place to protect employees.

Employers need to consider these when communicating, consulting and checking for understanding.

The guidance provided by the compliance code

The draft Code gives employers a way to effectively communicate health and safety messages in workplaces where multiple languages are spoken. 

Starting with the need to understand and plan the information needs of your workforce, the draft Code describes a step-by-step process from building a language profile through various forms of communication, the use of translating and interpreter services, multilingual facilitators, teaching common workplace terms and tailoring ongoing training to language needs.

The proposed Code is open for public comment until 6 December. The final version is expected to be released in mid-2022 when it will replace the 2008 Compliance code on the same topic.