Workplace Safety and Health Council • 2019

Helping organisations promote good workplace safety and health practices

Redesigning the Workplace Safety and Health Council's (WSHC) website.

Overview

The Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) Council is a statutory body under the Ministry of Manpower that is supported by Tripartite Alliance Limited (TAL). The TAL family of websites includes the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management (TADM) and Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment (TAFEP), which undergone redesigns (led by PebbleRoad) in the last few years. TAL wanted to align the WSHC website with the family as well.

WSHC works closely with the industry, unions, professionals, trade associations and other government agencies to raise WSH standards in Singapore.

“For topic pages, instead of focusing on the definitions, suggest focusing on how to prevent hazards, what to do and the implications.”
— QH assistant manager for site and operations
‍‍
“We want to make sure that we’re compliant and we want to reference WSHC quickly so that we can argue with the operations team that this is required.”
— Employee from a transport and logistics firm‍

Goals

User: Find information and resources easily to share within their organisation so that they are compliant with the WSH standards and create buy-in for WSH practices.
Organisation: Help WSH officers raise awareness, educate and offer easy access to resources and programmes so that they can enable them to support good WSH practices in their organisations.

Role and Duration

I was the sole designer working with product owner and content strategist helping to conduct user interviews, plan synthesis workshop for stakeholders, designed key pages and kickstart the design style guide before leaving midway for another project.

The project was from October to December 2019.

Research

User Interview

We conducted 10 user interviews with WSH officers. The goals of the user interview were to:

Understand safety officer's needs (e.g. what they use the website for)
Understand how they use the website
Uncover their challenges and pain points (e.g. findability)

Synthesis with Stakeholders

After conducting user interviews, we ran a synthesis workshop with the stakeholders. This helped build up a holistic understanding of the problems and users. It also helped to provide more varied insights from different perspectives.

We got the stakeholders to go through the interview notes, cut out interesting quotes or observations and cluster the cut-outs into themes. We discussed the most compelling themes which helped generate the key insights below.

Key Insights

Employers and WSH professionals visit the website for help on what they need to do
‍They are most interested in content that can help them to ensure that their organisation follows legislations and industry standards.
The usefulness of content depends on how specific it is to the industry
Users are interested in industry-specific content, as it helps with generating buy-in and developing appropriate safety practices.
Building a safe and healthy workplace culture is a common challenge
Many professionals struggle to create buy-in for WSH practices as they may not have the skills or resources to manage organisational change. Culture-building is especially difficult if the practice is not a legal requirement or if management does not believe in WSH.

Solution

We organised the topic content to not only focus on the definition, but how to prevent hazards and its implications. We also added a resource section which tags all relevant resources to the topic so that it is easier for WSH officers to find and tap on these resources.

WSH officers can also search and filter for resources and events. This allows them to reference resources such as regulations and Code of Practices (COP) easily.