A TEYS team will learn this week if they’ve won an award for a program that recognises their workers are “industrial athletes”.
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Teys Tamworth is a finalist in the excellence in recovery at work for business category, in the SafeWork NSW Awards in Sydney on Thursday.
WHS manager Tony Dean is also up for a leadership in safety award and the two finalist berths are the only ones from the New England.
Mr Dean said this recognised Teys’ efforts to not only help staffers return to work after an injury but also to help them avoid one – and even to become fitter for their job now or the one they wanted.
Teys had opened its on-site gym in February 2016, initially “trying to … improve our workers getting back to work as promptly as we could and in the best condition,” he said.
In the past year, the facilities had been opened up to a wider range of uses.
“[Now,] workers have the opportunity to increase their fitness or conditioning levels so they can take on more demanding roles or other roles they might not have been able to,” Mr Dean said.
“An ageing workforce, in our industry, can be someone in their 30s if they’ve been boning or working in those sorts of tasks for 10 years. It’s really important that we give them support to prolong their careers so they don’t get injured.”
Rural Fit physiotherapist Judy Coates is on hand on Tuesdays, and exercise physiologist Bronte Pearce on Thursdays.
Miss Pearce said she helped workers with strength and conditioning programs – but in a specific way that recognised their line of work.
“We call the guys that work here at Teys ‘industrial athletes’ – the work that they do is really, really strenuous, really repetitive and really quite hard,” she said.
“So we’re just building up their capacity here to get them as strong as they can be for the tasks that they’re given: a lot of pushing and pulling and a lot of work that corresponds to what they do down in the processing plant …
“We’re not out here to run a marathon, but just to get them as strong as they can be in the desired aspects.”