#MondayMotivation

This image popped up in my LinkedIn feed last week. As my dear friend Dave Foy says, if you work as an OSH practitioner, no one will pat you on the back for making sure the emergency lighting is working today. If you work in businesses, charities or schools we justify, persuade, coach and sometimes have to get assertive. Its definitely tougher for smaller businesses. Everyone knows investing in people and their health is not just good for people but good for the bottom but the reality is modern businesses are constantly juggling a host of demands on their resources. This means what we do definitely involves climbing a mountain. On the good days when the sun is shining and we navigate some great foot holds it’s the best job in the world. On other days the slightest error, a wrong word and we slip back. Its especially hard when you get into a place where you just cant see the top. Then, the only thing to do can be to move back, down or across until you can get a new foot hold and see the summit again. There will definitely be knocks and scrapes on the way.

Just before Christmas I had the opportunity to present the IOSH No Time to Lose asbestos campaign to the Co-Op property supply chain in Manchester. Having worked for them in my 20’s and been extensively involved in their store refurbishment and development projects this was also personal. Back in the 90’s we were managing asbestos, especially before store refurbs, but there were not yet the requirements in place to actively look for it, record it and manage it like there is now. And actually the UK ban in 1999 didn’t come in until after I had moved on from this role. Back then we looked for it before we did work and labelled well but there were not yet IT systems or data bases to store large amounts of information. Electronic flow of information is something we take for granted now and means we can easily move around details on where ACM's are located. Back in the 90's we held hard copy files containing asbestos information in large steel cabinets and sharing meant moving paper or using a fax machine.

The Co-Op set me on a track. I enjoyed the fast pace of shopfit and store re-developments along with being challenged to design out risk, which included food safety risk too, and make OSH decisions on the move. We had a pretty slick team! I would later go on to do a lot more Construction Design Management work and stayed in property.

Myself and IOSH colleagues talked over how we could work with Co-Op property to promote NTTL across their whole supply chain. We went back last month to catch up with their progress and have recorded interviews to capture their insights on managing asbestos risk within an extensive multi-site operation for the campaign. We hope this will help other organisations with similar contractor networks so they might do the same. Going back to present to their Supply Chain again not only gave us the opportunity to talk about progress (and there has been a lot) but we got to speak to IOSH members and contractors large and small.

For me this has meant I have gone back, almost to my start. It has made me look back at the view from the mountain. I have gone on to support a host of property companies, small and large, along with their contractors in how they manage their asbestos risk. I have probably influenced asbestos risk management in millions of square feet of space. If ever there is a lesson on leaving organisations well this has also shown me how important this is too. It was great to chat with the Co-Op Property OSH team, headed up by Andrew Cavanagh, some of whom are doing almost exactly the same job at a similar age .

I just hadn’t stopped to reflect on the view and the journey. The climb has and is really tough but the view is pretty good.

Its the start of a new week and new month so what’s the view like from your mountain?