Rod’s Approach

Australia Post operates one of Australia's most complex and distributed workforces — across delivery, processing, retail, and logistics operations, with a risk profile spanning vehicle operations, manual handling, and machinery. As General Manager Safety and Wellbeing, Rod Maule was responsible for designing and leading a five-year safety strategy that could drive genuine improvement in safety performance at scale.

The strategy was built around a principle Rod has carried through his career: focus on the controls that matter most, and build the leadership and data capability to verify them consistently.

One of the practical challenges in a workforce of this size and complexity is understanding where risk is actually concentrating. Early in the strategy period, Australia Post was working with a camera and telematics system across its motorbike fleet. Set conservatively, the system generated enormous volumes of footage — and significant cost, running to close to a million dollars a month in data management and storage. The challenge was finding the right calibration: sensitive enough to capture the incidents and near-misses that would yield genuine insight, not so sensitive that the volume of data overwhelmed the capacity to act on it.

That calibration question — what data do we actually need, at what cost, and what action will it drive — became a model for how the safety function approached decisions across the strategy period. What are we trying to learn? What does the minimum viable version of that insight look like? And what will we do with it?