Qantas Group – Welfare Response Process

Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 1: “Lead obligation to safety through words and actions.” 

Background

At the Qantas Group, a relentless focus on safety translates into robust systems and processes designed to take care of our people, operation, and customers. Workplaces have increasing obligations to prevent and reduce psychosocial risk by ensuring safe workplaces for their employees, contractors, and visitors, and providing timely care for their people.  

In the context of non-normal occurrences, such as a workplace injury or an in-flight medical emergency, severe turbulence, or a disruptive passenger event, identifying and responding in a timely, consistent, and evidence-based manner can reduce the impact to people and operations but also mitigate and reduce psychosocial risk. Unmanaged psychosocial risk has the potential to inflict more harm to people and operations and escalate consequence levels. 

Whilst our support, crisis and operational teams are routinely called upon to work together to support People, Operation and Business recovery post non-normal occurrences, the type and severity of the occurrences has tended to dictate the extent to which the welfare needs of our people are considered, who supports them, and how. In the past, the welfare needs our people involved in the occurrences would be managed in different ways across our business, often with a large reliance on our Business Units and People Leaders to identify, assess and manage within their own capacities and capabilities. This approach has meant that occurrences below certain thresholds or those not overtly causing harm would not be identified until an injury or grievance was recorded, leading the occurrence to then be managed solely at an individual level, discounting organisational or systems level interventions.  

Recognising the need for our organisation to offer consistent and evidence-based support for our people following non-normal occurrences, we identified opportunities within our systems to standardise how and when the welfare needs of our people are identified, assessed and managed across the organisation - irrespective of the type or severity of the non-normal occurrence. We also identified opportunities to better support our Business Units and People Leaders in how they support their people.  

Brief description of the action/initiative 

 In order to systematise the management of this risk, we established the Welfare Response Process - our end-to-end process managing psychosocial risk arising out of non-normal occurrences. The Welfare Response Process formalises the good work that our People and Business unit leaders, Crisis Management teams, Support Functions and Operations Centres already do when non-normal occurrences arise, but extends to: 

• Cascading the welfare response consistently across the three layers that occurrences are escalated to and managed by, being: 1) Group Crisis Management Team 2) Operations Centres and 3) Business Units. 
• Enhancing existing Crisis, Group, and Operational procedures and tools to account specifically for welfare needs of our people. This has involved the inclusions of triggers, and updates to crisis and escalation checklists. 
• The introduction of the following tools, resources and interventions, able to be implemented as required, and triggered by anyone in the organisation: 
  • Welfare Response Forum- an initial meeting convened following notification of an event, led by Group Wellbeing, between relevant stakeholders, to establish common understandings of the incident, determine risks, needs, and actions, and provide subject matter expertise and guidance.
  • Welfare Debriefs - a structured group discussion held by the Business Unit for their people involved in the event with the support of Group Medical and Wellbeing, designed to clarify and confirm the lived experience, normalise psychological and physiological responses to such events, link employees and leaders to available recovery support services and resources, and provide an opportunity for organisational learning and improvement.
  • Wellbeing Playbook - a collection of wellbeing resources, support services, information and facilitated training intended to be used by Leaders in conjunction with support from their Support Functions when navigating challenges to the wellbeing of their people 

 What positive changes this action/initiative helped bring?  

 Implementation of the Welfare Response Process has increased our ability to systematically manage this risk, while also providing demonstration of care and connection to our people who are exposed to these hazards in the course of their work. We believe this has a positive impact on severity and duration of any potential injury or illness as a response to this exposure and helps to ensure early intervention and help seeking for anyone requiring support.

We have seen a very strong uptake of this process across high risk functions of the Qantas Group, with Business Units and Leaders proactively triggering Welfare Responses as part of their usual approach to managing non-normal occurrences.  

In the period from 1 June 2023 – 31 October 2023, there were over 25 Welfare Debriefs conducted across the Qantas Group. Along with contributing to the health and safety management of our people, these processes have led to key medical, wellbeing, safety and operational learnings and opportunities being identified contributing to our continuous safety improvement culture.   

Some further notable achievements of the program have been:  

• Recognition of psychosocial risk across various threat levels​. 
• Consistent approach across Group in responding to people impacts. ​ 
• Ability to address and manage mental health risk as it arises​. 
• Protecting Manager Welfare by providing access to support. organisational knowledge and learning​. 
• Protecting mental health and wellbeing of our people.​ 
• Safety culture improvement​s. 
• Meeting regulatory requirements in psychosocial safety.​ 

As was the intent of the program, there is a next phase in understanding statistically the impact of the program in reducing compensable psychological injuries, their severity and costs associated with this.  

Main challenges and lessons learned

Considering our experience with the design and implementation of this initiative, a multifaceted and collaborative approach will secure optimal results in terms of buy in and support from end users. In a complex organisation like the Qantas Group, this can mean that a degree of agility and flexibility is required when it comes to scope and timelines. Remaining flexible, testing and re-testing your thinking, co-designing and leaning on the strengths of already existing programs and procedures can be helpful to manage these challenges.  

With respect to the implementation of the Welfare Response Process, anticipating for and mitigating the risk of unintentional harm arising from delivering the various support offerings and interventions (particularly interventions delivered at a team level) was beneficial. Some key strategies were encouraging the use of alternative supports such as one on one supports for more sensitive or traumatic cases, ensuring messaging about support offerings were clear and concise, emphasising sensitivities around privacy and confidentiality, and providing employees with autonomy to engage in the supports they required and wished to participate.