Representative Award at The New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Awards 2025

The Representative Award recognises Beth Williamson’s leadership in championing safe systems for remote, high-risk work environments.

The annual New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Awards recognise teams, individuals and initiatives that make workplaces safer and healthier.

Beth Williamson was awarded the Representative Award in recognition of her passion for contractor safety, positive influence on field practices, strong contractor relationships, and her advocacy for improved field safety tools and processes.

As a Senior Professional in our Biosecurity team, Beth plays a vital role in managing health and safety across high-risk activities including weed spraying, helicopter operations, remote back-country work, chainsaw use, and predator control. 

She’s known for her genuine, results-focused approach to raising health, safety, and wellbeing issues, both within Boffa Miskell and alongside contractors. She is also known for following through with practical, effective solutions.

Biosecurity Project Manager, Marcus Girvan says “Beth’s passion for safe work practices is compelling and energising for anyone working with her. She is constantly looking for ways to improve our company’s health and safety systems and processes, making them more robust and simpler for the end-user. She has made a significant contribution to improving the safety culture within the company and continues to hold her biosecurity sub-contractors to a high standard of safety.”

Beth views the award as a testament to the strong systems and processes we have embedded at Boffa Miskell. Examples include implementing internal initiatives, such as the Get Home Safe app, a welfare monitoring app linked to Garmin inReach devices, which triggers an automated response process when an employee fails to check in after on-site work. Within the app, a new pre-work fatigue assessment tool is being trialled to capture real-time insights and guide appropriate actions when an employee identifies that their planned work may lead to fatigue.

The recent launch of our fatigue management framework provides fairer, consistent guidelines for employees working in physically and mentally demanding conditions, including standards for receiving recovery time and defined operational limits for work hours and travel time. This framework encourages employees to raise concerns about fatigue and emphasises prevention through effective planning and adequate resourcing.

Many of our projects require various health and safety systems and processes, including:

• carefully scoping out project work requirements and responsibilities across multiple stakeholders, to ensure we understand and meet our overlapping PCBU duties,
• guiding our smaller sub-contractors to improve their pre-qualification and health, safety and wellbeing systems and subsequent on-site monitoring of these safe systems and behaviours,
• consultants building strong relationships and regular communication forums with stakeholders to anticipate and respond to project risks and variations,
• and using online tools such as Fieldmaps for identifying and sharing onsite hazards, Risk Manager toolbox for on-site meetings and safety observations, and ArcGIS Survey123 for auditing.

At Boffa Miskell, our health and safety team focuses on understanding the difference between how work is planned and how it’s actually carried out, actively seeking feedback from consultants to ensure that processes are grounded in real-world experience.