By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why do safety duties slip on a roofing business during storm season?
Safety duties usually slip on a roofing business not because the owner stops caring, but because storm season and insurance work arrive faster than the business can add capacity. A roofing crew set up for a normal month of re-roofs and repairs suddenly has extra crews, extra height work and extra sites to manage in a short window, and the induction, scaffold check and edge protection steps that take time are the first things to get rushed.
Most roofing businesses do not lose track of safety because of one bad decision. It happens site by site, as a wave of storm damage calls comes in and the owner is juggling quoting, scheduling and a crew that has grown quickly to handle the insurance work. A site that would normally get a full roof inspection and a proper scaffold and edge protection setup before anyone goes up instead gets a quicker look, because the next job and the next weather day are already stacking up behind it.
Why does insurance work add extra risk for a roofing crew?
Insurance work adds risk because it puts a roofing crew on unfamiliar roofs, often damaged by the same storm that is driving demand everywhere else, under a timeframe set by someone other than the roofer. A crew sent to tarp a leak, replace flashing or deal with torn guttering on a site they have never worked before carries more unknowns than a job they quoted and planned themselves.
On a normal re-roof or restoration, the roofer has usually walked the roof, checked the pitch, the tile or metal roof condition, the valleys and the access points before anyone climbs a ladder. On insurance work during a storm surge, several of those jobs can land in the same week, often through subbies or extra hands brought on to cope with the volume, and the time to properly scan the roof, the scaffold and the edge protection before work starts gets squeezed. That is the moment a roofing business is most exposed, and it is a capacity problem before it is a paperwork problem.
What are your health and safety duties as a roofing business owner in New Zealand?
As the owner of a roofing business you are a PCBU, a person conducting a business or undertaking, under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. According to Introduction to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, a PCBU must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and that other people such as customers or passers-by are not put at risk by the work. If you run your roofing business through a company, the officers who direct it must exercise due diligence to make sure those duties are actually being met, not just written down.
That duty extends to engaging your crew on safety, not just telling them the rules. WorkSafe, the regulator named on that page, expects a roofing business to ask for and consider workers' views on health and safety and to have an ongoing way for the crew to raise concerns, rather than a form signed once at induction and never looked at again. On most roofing jobs there is more than one PCBU involved: the roofer, a scaffolder, sometimes a principal contractor on a bigger job. The PCBUs working together guidance is clear that a roofing business cannot hand its duty to another PCBU on site and walk away from it; the duty still has to be managed to the extent the roofer can influence and control it.
What extra duties apply to height work, scaffold and edge protection on a roof?
Roofing work is height work, and WorkSafe's guidance on working at height in New Zealand sets out that construction and trades businesses, roofing specialists included, are PCBUs with duties to manage fall risk through the whole job, not just at the point someone steps onto the roof. Where there is more than one contractor on site, the Working on roofs good practice guidelines say the principal or lead contractor has to make sure there are adequate controls in place to stop workers falling from or through the roof, on top of the roofer's own duties as an employer.
Some roof work also falls under WorkSafe's rules on notifying particular hazardous work, and the roof restoration and maintenance page and the particular hazardous work page set out when scaffolding on a job needs to be notified, depending on the fall risk involved; the current detail sits on those pages rather than in memory. If a fall or another serious event does happen, the notifiable events quick guide sets out that the site has to be preserved until an inspector allows work to resume, and records of the event kept, so a roofing business needs a way to capture what happened properly, not from memory days later.
This is where the real number worth watching sits, and it is not a compliance score. It is how much of your induction, scaffold check and incident record is actually being written down on site, in the moment, against how much gets reconstructed afterwards because the crew was flat out. AI agents, software that does a job the way you would, with your own prices, wording and rules, can sit at exactly that point and hold the job open until the induction or the edge protection check is actually logged, instead of chasing the paperwork once the storm has passed. That is what data first coaching means: starting from what is actually happening on your jobs right now, not from a feeling about how safe things usually are.
Picture a roofer running two crews through a storm season surge, where site inductions live in one folder, incident records in another, and crew messages run through yet another app again. By the time anyone pulls it together, three more insurance jobs have come in and nobody can say for certain every new starter actually saw the hazards on that particular roof before they went up. One way owners in this position have dealt with it is building their own system around their jobs, one that pulls in the job information and brings the forms, the site-specific inductions, the incident register and the onboarding together in one place, instead of chasing five different apps once the rush has eased. AI agents don't replace the judgement a roofer builds from years on roofs, but they can take the paperwork that judgement produces and make sure it lands in the right place as the job happens, rather than being rebuilt from memory once the rush is over.
What about licensing for roof structure and weathertightness work?
Some of the work a roofing business does counts as restricted building work under the Building Act, which Building.govt.nz defines as work that's critical to making a home structurally sound and weathertight, and that work has to be designed and carried out by a Licensed Building Practitioner. According to the restricted building work page, this includes work to a home's roof structure, such as rafters, purlins and trusses, and roof or wall cladding systems that affect weathertightness.
For a roofer doing a straightforward re-roof, a flashing repair or a tile replacement, this may not come into play. For a full restoration that touches the roof structure or the cladding system, or the sarking and weathertightness layers underneath, it can mean the design and the work itself need to sit with, or be carried out by, a Licensed Building Practitioner. It is worth checking against your own scope of work on each job rather than assuming every re-roof sits the same side of that line, because the answer depends on what the job actually involves.
This is general information, not legal, tax or employment advice. Check your own situation with the body named here or a qualified adviser.
Where can you check the current rules?
- Working at height in New Zealand, PCBU duties for construction and trades, including roofing specialists, working at height.
- Introduction to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, the primary duty of care, officer duties and who WorkSafe is.
- Working on roofs - good practice guidelines, duties of employers, principals and lead contractors on roofing sites.
- What events need to be notified, what happens after a notifiable event and record-keeping duties.
- Restricted building work, when Licensed Building Practitioners must design and carry out roof structure and weathertightness work.
- PCBUs working together, how overlapping duties work when a roofer, scaffolder and principal are all on the same site.
- Particular hazardous work and roof restoration and maintenance, when roofing and scaffolding work needs to be notified to WorkSafe.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching looks at a roofing business's own capacity numbers before it looks at a safety checklist: how many crews, how much height work and how many new starters are coming on in the weeks around storm season, against what the business can actually induct and supervise properly. Greg Allan has said, “let's manage it by managing the capacity, especially your capacity”, because the pressure that leads to a rushed induction or a skipped edge protection check almost always starts upstream, in how the surge was planned for rather than reacted to. The Trade Business Intelligence reads a roofing business's own job and crew data alongside years of coaching trade businesses to find where that starts. The how is worked through inside the Academy, with members who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member.
Looking for a business coach who starts from your numbers? Roofer Business Coach or every answer for roofers.
