A commentary based on Miks’ online social commentary, Co-Founder of Capyble.
More than 100 workers at BHP lost their jobs, or resigned, during the past financial year after sexually harassing colleagues. BHP’s own reporting put it at 109 people, out of 113 substantiated cases.
This is one of the best resourced companies in the country. They have a dedicated Response and Investigations team, a safety investment measured in the hundreds of millions, and the number of serious, confirmed cases still went up on the year before.
Reactive prevention isn’t prevention
“That’s what happens when prevention is reactive,” Miks says, “when the system is built to respond to harm after it happens, not to see it coming.”
A Response and Investigations team is a good thing to have. It’s also, by definition, downstream. It tells you how well an organisation handles harm once it’s already happened. It doesn’t tell you anything about whether the organisation is any good at stopping it from happening in the first place, and BHP’s own numbers this year are the clearest evidence of that gap you’ll find.
What positive duty is actually asking for
Under Respect@Work, positive duty isn’t a policy you write once and file away. It’s a standard you have to keep proving you’re meeting, across all seven standards, on an ongoing basis, not just the response and reporting one.
Most organisations read “positive duty” and think compliance, a document, a training module, a box ticked. What BHP’s report shows is that you can staff a response function properly and still be behind on prevention, because they measure different things. One measures how fast you act after harm. The other measures whether you saw it coming.
Most organisations don’t have BHP’s resources, and don’t know where they stand
BHP has the scale to run its own dedicated investigations team and still be publishing numbers like this. Most organisations don’t have anything close to that infrastructure, and most don’t know where their exposure actually sits until something happens and they’re forced to find out in public.
“Most organisations don’t have BHP’s resources,” as Miks puts it. “Most don’t know where their exposure actually sits until something happens.”
Where to start
- Separate your response metrics from your prevention metrics. Track them differently, report them differently, because a fast, well-handled investigation and a genuinely lower rate of harm are not the same win.
- Get an honest read on where you actually stand against the seven positive duty standards, not just the ones that are easiest to evidence (policy, training) but the harder ones (risk management, culture, monitoring).
- Treat a declining number of reports as a question, not a win. Fewer reports can mean things are improving, or it can mean people have stopped trusting the system enough to use it. Those look identical on a slide and very different in reality.
- Resource prevention like you resource response. If the investigations team has a name, a budget line and a mandate, the prevention work needs the same three things, not leftover time from someone’s existing role.
Where this leaves us
This is exactly the gap we built CapyBenchmark to close at Capyble, a way to see where you actually stand against the seven pillars before you’re the next headline. Not because BHP got this uniquely wrong, but because most organisations are flying just as blind, with far less capacity to absorb the fallout when the numbers catch up with them.
