Health and Safety - are we planting seeds or growing forests?

Twelve years ago, I left behind a career in communications (or so I thought), to become a leadership trainer for health and safety in a large global organisation.

I was only delivering training, but it didn’t take long for me to realise how important my role was, as something I said from the front of the room could influence someone to do something that could quite literally save a life.?

Gradually, and drawing on my previous communications experience, I discovered ways to get people interested in health and safety and doing things differently as a result.? It was extremely rewarding!? You know that feeling when you say something that resonates with someone in the room, and they don’t even have to tell you, because you can see it in their eyes.?

And I must confess, I caught the bug.? The health and safety engagement bug.? ?I frequently recalled the best friend I lost aged 21 through a car accident and not wearing a seat belt, and whilst I couldn’t bring her back, I could absolutely influence others to put their seat belts on.? And I did.?

But the more I did it, the more I wanted.? I didn’t just want to engage one person in health and safety, I wanted to engage the entire organisation.? Imagine how many lives that might save! But I had no idea how to do it!? I didn’t know how to scale it up!

The obvious way was to run more training sessions, but no matter how hard I worked, I noticed that a few weeks after the initial flurry of excitement, people went back to their normal ways of working, which sometimes meant safety getting forgotten.?

As time went on, I realised that the key to company-wide engagement in health and safety was not only about inspiring more people but inspiring more people for longer.? Because if the new behaviours weren’t part of the day job, and the business priorities, they just wouldn’t last!

So I set about finding a way to integrate this new found engagement in health and safety into people’s day jobs, into business processes, so that once their interest was piqued, and they knew what they needed to do, there was an outlet for them, a channel, that allowed them to practise good health and safety, without having to do anything extra to their day job, and without having to think about it too much.?

I needed a way to make health and safety easy, relevant, simple, and fun, because this was how I was going to make it stick and stick around.

This conundrum stuck in my head for a long time, and I took it into another organisation, and another.

Eventually the pieces in the jigsaw all came together, when I started mapping all the potential touchpoints for health and safety engagement across the organisation, so that we could embed engagement opportunities in there, and make that engagement sustainable.?

And I don’t mean touchpoints for rules, procedures, and standards, I mean touchpoints for inspiring health and safety messages, for leadership behaviours, for safety habits, for safety stories and conversations.? The stuff that people really enjoy doing, makes them want to get more involved, and makes them cross silos to collaborate with other parts of the business.

This work became a framework for integrating health and safety engagement into the business and transforming it in the process - a framework called Build, Buzz, Bake?, where you build the foundations for engagement, create a buzz around it, and then bake it into the organisation.?

I published the framework and its underlying philosophy in ‘People Power – Transform your Business in the Era of Safety and Wellbeing’ in 2021, with the dream that organisations all over the world would use it to keep their people not only safe, but also engaged!

So that when employees say, “we’ve always done it this way”, they mean the safe way, not the corner-cutting way, because good health and safety is a habit, and the people really own it.?

So much so, in fact, that health and safety is no longer a back-office compliance function, but a thriving movement at the heart of business performance.

It’s one thing to plant a seed, but quite another to grow a forest.

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