CASE STUDY · NATIONAL LOGISTICS OPERATOR
Safer, more productive work, by design
How starting with people led a national logistics operator to measure the work itself.
Images are illustrative.
The challenge
Most organisations use data to design their products and services. Far fewer apply the same rigour to the design of the work their people do. Yet since 2022, work health and safety regulations in most Australian jurisdictions have required businesses to manage psychosocial risks, including high job demands.
This operator wanted to improve safety and productivity together, without trading one for the other. Like most, its safety support had grown up around responding to injuries. What it needed was objective data to design work that is safer and performs better, without asking more of the people doing it.
Start with the people
We began with the workforce. The Movement Health Program offered every worker a voluntary 90-second movement scan, with instant feedback and a personal action plan. It was designed to help people understand their own movement health and reach support from on-site clinicians earlier.
Operational teams and health and safety representatives were consulted before launch. Taking part was voluntary, and the organisation saw only de-identified, group-level trends.
86% of the workforce (802 of 930 people across six sites) voluntarily completed two or more scans, averaging more than three scans per person each year.
Positive Signs - Practical Learnings.
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When engagement peaked and support was fully embedded on site, the operator recorded its lowest injury quarter in four years (and an ~60% reduction in lost time vs matched quarters). One quarter isn’t proof, but it showed what was possible, and raised the question that came next: how much change comes from a program, and how much from the work itself?
What the people taught us about the work
Technique isn’t capacity. Manual handling training teaches how to lift. Scans showed people the specific strengths they could build to lift well, with core strength and mobility among the most common. That points to training that goes beyond technique.
Support works best inside the safety system, built into procedures and referral pathways rather than running alongside them
The work itself was changing. Workload intensity shifted across sites, and nothing measured it. Worker capacity was only half the picture.
Measure the work
We set up a RealWorld R&D project with the operator to test whether workload could be measured objectively from data the business already held. WISER (Workload Intelligence for Safety and Enhanced Readiness) analysed 5,480 site-days of roster, freight and safety data across five sites, with no personal information.
The headline finding: the pattern of work mattered more than the amount. Weeks with injuries involving lost time or treatment were linked to how unevenly hours varied from week to week, not to how much work there was. That link looked different at each site.
A tonne of freight moved as one unit asks far less of people than the same tonne moved as a hundred pieces. Volume measures miss that difference, in freight as much as in healthcare, mining or professional services.
That is why WISER is modelled site by site, and why its indicators are prompts for a proactive check, not predictions. Not every measure we tested earned its place. Indicators go live one site at a time, only after passing pre-set validation tests, and run in shadow until then.
What’s next
Integrate
Bring movement health into the operator’s injury prevention program, and extend WISER into operations in stages, with a register that records what action was taken and whether it helped.
Plan ahead
Combine workload measures with demand forecasts, so teams can target prevention activities, plan supervisor support and adjust rosters before a hard week. This is a forecast of workload, not a prediction of injury.
Support the whole person
The operator is introducing the Employee Biometric Health Program, an opt-in staff benefit that helps employees understand their sleep, activity and recovery. Their personal data stays with them.
Start where you are
Every organisation starts somewhere different: with its people, its work data, or a question it can’t yet answer. We’re happy to walk through the methods and evidence behind these findings in a briefing.