Safety on Tap

"Help me get people engaged". "No one is engaged with health and safety". "Engagement around here is pretty low". Requests like this and their variations are some of the most common things people come to me for help with. Health and safety have an engagement problem, but it's not limited to that. Gallup says only 36% of workers in the US are engaged at work. And no one agrees on how we define engagement in any case. What do we do?

Kym Bancroft is an organisational psychologist turned health and safety executive, who was the head of Health and Safety at Urban Utilities. Urban Utilities is a water and sewage utility supplying 1.4 million people with clean water and flushing toilets in South-East Queensland in Australia. With thousands of employees and contractors, a high risk work environment and network to build, operate and maintain, Kym led the health and safety transformation at Urban Utilities between 2017 and 2021.

This is my live keynote speech delivered at the Safeguard 2019 Conference. The theme of the conference was Dare to Disrupt. That was an idea which I respectfully disagreed with and explained why in the opening keynote when I encouraged the audience, and you, to go disrupt yourself.

I don't think this interview needs much introduction, except to say one thing: if you are inclined to turn off because the words innovation or entrepreneurialism seem too fluffy or not relevant to you, stick with this: you'll be surprised like I was.

Here's today's guest, Liz Jackson:

I, like you, have been spending a lot of time in the same workplace for a while now, my home office. And yet despite the amount of time I spend here, it was only recently that something struck me when I saw things that had been there the whole time but hadn't recognised for what they are. My space, and probably yours, are filled with theatre props - the things which bring our professional performance to life.

Rory Gallagher is the Asia Pacific Director of the Behavioural Insights Team, and a founding member of it's parent organisation within the British Government. This work as always fascinated me, ever since I read the book Nudge, based on Nobel Prize winning work by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.

Have you ever thought, 'well that person's response or behaviour or inion surprised me, because it didn't seem logical or rational?'. That curiosity is at the heart of this idea that heaps of government policy, regulation and regulatory activity, system design and economic theory is based on flawed assumptions about humans and behaviour. Sound familiar, health and safety?

This is a juicy episode, I hope you squeeze lots from it, here's Rory Gallagher:

It's hard to focus on things that we can't see, that aren't visible to us. It doesn't mean they aren't there, it's just that they aren't visible to us.

Having empathy for others, and appreciating that they have a perspective and experience which is 100% valid for them, can be a difficult thing to comprehend, let alone practice.

What's the risk when we use an ISO standard approach to health and safety? That we miss the point entirely. Decades of experience have revealed what happens when standards compliance and its activities become the goal, instead of the goals of actual health and actual safety the ISO standard was meant to enable. Oh, and by the way, we're going to blow the idea of new views of safety out of the water too.

Today's partner in conversation Jeremy Scrivens sort of defies description, and definitely defies categorisation. Jeremy helps leaders and organisations enable the future of work - which he labels being an Appreciative Futurist. In the way I'm described as a reformed health and safety professional, Jeremy might be a reformed HR professional. But soooo much more.

"Tried it before, and it didn't work"

These are the words that we have all said to dismiss something out of hand, to reject a very broad or general idea or approach or suggestion .

We can choose our words better, which means everyone learns more and is more informed about our experience.

Brenton Harrison shared some thoughts publicly about the extremes of new views and traditional views of safety. Here's Brenton sharing his thoughts with you.