5 min read
Due Diligence Is Personal: What Officers Should Be Able to See About Their Workforce
Board meeting, safety item. The slide shows a single training compliance percentage, coloured green. A director asks: a percentage of what? Which sites? Does it include contractors? Who checked that the assessments were real?
The room goes quiet. Nobody is hiding anything. The number came from a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet came from several systems, and nobody at the table can see what sits behind it.
That silence matters, because under WHS law the question isn't only the company's to answer. It's the director's too.
The duty sits with officers, not just the HSE team
Under section 27 of the model WHS Act, officers must exercise due diligence to ensure the business complies with its health and safety duties. An officer who fails to do so may be personally liable (SafeWork NSW). Comcare notes an officer can be criminally liable for a serious or reckless failure to meet the due diligence requirements (Comcare). Victoria runs its own OHS Act, with its own provisions for senior leaders.
Officers include directors and senior executives who make or influence decisions affecting the business. The duty can't be delegated to the safety team. Officers can rely on systems, but they have to know those systems work.
Six elements, six workforce questions
Section 27(5) sets out the reasonable steps that make up due diligence. Each one maps to a question about your people.
Know WHS matters. Do you know which training, licences and inductions your operations legally require?
Understand operations, hazards and risks. Can you see which roles, sites and tasks carry the highest workforce risk?
Resources and processes. Is there a working system that gets every worker trained, assessed and authorised before they start?
Information on incidents and hazards. When a credential expires or a provider is flagged, does it reach you quickly enough to act?
Compliance processes. Are contractors held to the same standard as employees, and is that applied every time?
Verification. Can you check that the training happened, the assessment was genuine and the record is current?
The last element is where most reporting stops short. Verifying is different from being told.
Where board reporting falls short
Percentages without a denominator. A strong employee figure can hide a contractor workforce nobody is counting.
Completion treated as competence. A finished module shows someone clicked through. It doesn't show they can do the job.
Lagging data. A monthly roll-up describes last month's workforce, not today's.
No evidence behind the number. When something goes wrong, a regulator asks for records, not the summary slide.
For the legal stakes when records don't hold up, read Industrial Manslaughter Is Now National: Can You Prove Your Training?
What LAAMP gives officers
One view of the whole workforce. Employees, contractors and visitors sit in one record, so the denominator is complete. Real-time dashboards show readiness by site, role and business unit.
Evidence behind every number. Facial verification, photo and video capture and a full digital audit trail sit behind each induction, assessment and VOC. Nothing is lost and nothing has to be rebuilt for an audit.
Verified, not self-reported.LAAMP AI confirms the person who sat an assessment is the worker on record, and flags assistance or guessing patterns before they become a pass.
Early warning, not late discovery. Automated alerts surface expiring credentials and non-compliance before they become a stand-down or an incident.
Board-ready reporting. LAAMP integrates with Power BI and Tableau through an open API, so workforce compliance can sit in the same board pack as finance and operations.
Five questions for your next board meeting
Does our compliance figure include contractors, and from which systems?
How do we know the person who completed an assessment is the person on site?
Which credentials expire this month, and who owns each one?
If a training provider were flagged tomorrow, how quickly could we list every affected worker?
If a regulator asked for the records behind this slide, how long would it take to produce them?
If any answer is "we'd have to check", that's the gap due diligence is meant to close.
Evidence over assurance
Due diligence isn't about distrusting your managers. It's about having a system that lets you verify what you're told. LAAMP gives officers live, evidence-backed visibility across the whole workforce, so you can show your workforce is trained, verified and compliant.
For the wider business case, read The Executive Case for Digital Workforce Assurance.
See the reporting view officers use to verify, not assume.
