IN THE KNOW – ADAM TAYLOR

Our industry is built on experience. Each edition, we feature someone who knows their field inside and out, sharing the knowledge they’ve gained over many years. From practical advice to lessons learned the hard way, this is insight you won’t find in a manual. This month we hear from Adam Taylor, Founder of Note It, on the Resource Regulator’s new supervision material, a genuinely useful piece of leadership guidance.

Supervision is a control. The Regulator has just said so plainly.

On 16 July the NSW Resources Regulator released a video setting out its expectations of supervisors, together with a discussion guide for the managers of those supervisors. About twelve minutes of footage, several inspectors and specialists, and in the announcement one line worth reading twice: effective supervision is one of the most important controls for preventing incidents and managing health and safety risks at mine sites.

Note the word. Control.

It is worth being clear about what this material is. It is not a new obligation and it is not an enforcement campaign. It is a resource, built to support supervisors and the people who manage them, in a role the Regulator has identified as a common contributing factor when things go seriously wrong. Read it that way and it is one of the more useful pieces of leadership material published in this industry for some time.

Why it matters

Nothing in it is new thinking. Anyone who has run a crew, or managed people who do, has been making these arguments for years. What is different is that the Regulator has now set them out plainly, which gives everyone the same reference point.

That matters more than it sounds. Supervision has always been the part of an operation where the standard lives largely in people’s heads. A published description of what good looks like gives supervisors something to measure themselves against, and the people developing them something specific to work with.

What it says

The core message is that supervision is an active role, not a passive one. Presence is not supervision. Signing the JSA is not supervision. Supervision is the verb: observe, challenge, verify, intervene, and stop work where safety cannot be confirmed. The material is also plain that inspectors will continue to assess supervision closely.

Three things in it stand out.

The first is the line most people will quote back: being qualified does not always mean being competent. A ticket says somebody was assessed once, by someone else, somewhere else, possibly years ago. It does not say this person can do this job, on this shift, safely. Every supervisor already knows who they would put on a job unsupervised and who they would not, and the answer does not map neatly to who holds what. That judgement is some of the most valuable safety information in the business, and at the moment it lives in the supervisor’s head. It leaves when they leave.

The second is the method the material supplies, and it is four questions. How often do you do this job. When did you last do it. What could go wrong. What controls stop that happening. Asked as questions rather than as a script, they tell you more in ninety seconds than a signed document ever will. They also lead to the judgement being asked of the supervisor, which is whether they are comfortable saying the work can be done safely. If you cannot say that, you have not finished supervising.

The third is psychosocial risk, and it is the part of the landscape still moving. The NSW WHS Regulation was remade in 2025 and now requires psychosocial risk to be managed through the hierarchy of controls, the same structured approach long applied to physical risk, and it is clear that policies and training are not sufficient on their own. Psychological health and physical health carry the same weight. The Regulator’s material reflects that, covering psychosocial safety alongside hazard identification and risk management, and supervision plays a key part in it.

The reality of the role

Technical ability plays a large part in how people are recognised for opportunity, and there is good reason for that. But leadership is a learned skill rather than an extension of technical capability, and it forms a key part of supervision. The step from doing the work to leading it is one of the biggest anyone makes.

The role also carries more than it once did. Get the shift away, keep the equipment turning, cover the absences, close out the actions, and supervise across all of it. What has grown fastest is the administrative side. Each of those requirements exists for a reason, most introduced after something went wrong somewhere, and few are unreasonable on their own. But they accumulate, and they land on the same person. That is not a criticism of any operation. It is the environment every operation is working in, driven by legal and corporate expectations that show no sign of easing.

Which puts a sharp point on this material. If supervision is a control, it needs the supervisor in front of the work and the people doing it, because that is the only place supervision happens. So the practical question is not whether supervision matters. It is how the industry protects the time to do it while everything else asks for more. Anything that lets a supervisor meet a requirement in less time is time handed back to the crew, and that is where the effort is best spent.

The material applies to statutory and non-statutory roles, permanent employees, contractors and people stepping up. The person filling in on a Thursday carries the same expectations as the person appointed to the role and is usually newest to it. A shared reference point helps them most of all.

Then there is something structural, which is our observation rather than the Regulator’s. The statutory duties of the open cut examiner are written as two separate things: supervise workers and inspect work areas. Same person, same shift. One produces a plan, a record, a shift report entry and a review. The other produces nothing at all.

Which means a site with strong supervision and a site with weak supervision can generate identical paperwork. Good supervision prevents the events that trigger the reporting systems, so the better it is, the less trace it leaves. That is a gap in how the duties were written rather than a reflection on anybody’s systems, and the discussion guide is the first thing we have seen that puts a question next to it.

Where this goes

Our view is that supervision follows the same path as every other control. It gets named, then defined, then backed properly. This material is the naming, and a good part of the defining.

There is a line in the discussion guide worth holding onto: supervisors must be supported to fulfil their obligations and given the time and resources to do so. That is the Regulator confirming what good operations already work at, and it makes that work easier to argue for at every level of a business.

The response is the part the industry controls, and the easy response is the wrong one. Anything that adds another form or another sign-off to the same person works against the intent, however well meant. What will land is the response that takes things off the list rather than adding to it, gives supervisors better prompts than a blank page, and makes the routine conversation between a manager and a supervisor about what they saw on the shift.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Every supervisor already knows that. What this material does is give them, and the people backing them, something to point to on the day they stop and address it.