By Steve Dixon
Businesses quite rightly invest substantial time and money in health and safety. They build systems, maintain risk registers, conduct toolbox meetings, arrange training, complete audits and retain records.
There are good reasons for doing so. Employers genuinely want their people to go home safely, but they also know that following a serious incident they may need to demonstrate what risks they identified and what reasonably practicable steps they took to manage them.
Yet, anecdotally, I regularly see significantly less discipline applied to HR and employment relations.
Employment agreements go years without review. Policies are copied from somewhere else and forgotten. Managers make verbal commitments without recording them. Restructures begin before advice is sought. Performance concerns accumulate for months without documentation and then suddenly become untenable, demanding immediate action. Employees are called into disciplinary meetings before anybody has properly established the allegations.
That is difficult to reconcile with how common employment disputes actually are. MBIE delivered more than 23,800 employment dispute-resolution interventions in 2024/25, up 13.19% on the previous year, while applications for employment mediation increased 9.1%.
Yes, a Worksafe inspector can visit your premises and issue an improvement notice with a fine – and people fear this scenario…. But so can a labour inspector? If a labour inspector interviews one of your employees and you can’t produce a signed Individual Employment Agreement for them, you can receive an infringement notice on the spot.
The advantage employers often have
There is another important difference between employment relations and many serious health and safety events. An incident can happen unexpectedly. A dismissal usually does not.
Neither does a restructure, a formal warning, a performance process or a decision to alter somebody's employment.
Those are deliberate management actions. In most cases there is an opportunity to stop before acting, establish the facts, check the employment agreement and policies, obtain advice and make sure the proposed process is fair.
Employment law also expressly examines both what the employer did and how the employer did it. For dismissal and disadvantage grievances, the statutory test asks whether the employer's actions and the way it acted were what a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances.
That means good evidence and good process matter. That is not to say they aren’t important in health and safety - they are essential. The difference is that, once someone has been seriously injured, good documentation cannot undo the harm that has occurred. The focus then turns to whether the risk was properly identified and whether reasonably practicable steps were taken to eliminate or minimise it.
In employment relations, by contrast, the existence of a dispute does not necessarily mean the employer was wrong. A well-supported decision, backed by good evidence and a fair process, may still be successfully defended.
You do not need to predict every employment dispute. You need systems that put the business in a defendable position when one arises.
Document the conversations. Keep employment agreements current. Record commitments. Train the managers making employment decisions. Slow down before restructures and disciplinary action. Seek advice before making the decision, rather than after delivering it.