My niece won’t tie her shoes… Not can’t tie her shoes… Just won’t.

She should. She knows she should. She’s clever. She knows that if she doesn’t she’ll trip on the laces, she’ll hit the ground with a bump, she’ll hurt herself and she’ll be inconsolable for the rest of the night... All information that she has been equipped with many times and fully understands.

Bargain with her, scold her, show her how for the 90th time, reason with her, threaten her, bribe her, all methods which yield positive results… Once. Rest assured the next time you tell her to put her shoes on she’ll reset to factory settings, mash her feet into a pair (which may or may not match) and run out the door into the street with her shoestrings flapping away with intent to harm.

Of course, it will only take her to fall once before she gets her act together. The experience of physically hitting the deck and the memory imprinted onto her from the event will serve as an embarrassing reminder to loop, swoop and pull before going anywhere from now on. But who benefits from this? Who does this help? Yeah, you will get a chance to laugh in the face of a 7-year-old with a smug grin saying ‘Didn’t uncle Bob tell you that would happen?’ but you will still have to sweep up the pieces of shattered pride from the pavement.

So what’s to be done?...

Let’s be honest here though, she hasn’t fallen. She might never fall.

Does that mean that we should just sit with crossed fingers and if the worst happens clean up the mess and then wait for it to happen all over again? Prevention has always been better than cure has it not? Isn’t that what we all want? Bad things NOT to happen?

The problem is that preventions are always whispers and cures are always shouts from the rooftops of hindsight.

I recall some worldly advice from my late grandfather after an argument with my utterly indefatigable grandmother. ‘Fight the fights you can win, Boab’. Accidents, by their very nature, are going to happen. As sure as taxes and an X Factor Christmas number 1. If you lump them all together and try and stop every single one from happening then you will likely spend the rest of your days inside a padded room. What I think we should focus on and invest in is trying to eradicate the preventable ones. The ones where the safety of those we care about is directly in our hands. The ones for which we bear the greatest responsibility.

How the bloody hell do we do that?...

Get creative!

Promote health and safety culture in the same way you would if your niece was on Britain’s Got Talent as part of a glittery dance troupe. Tell everybody about it, talk about it all the time, invite feedback, ask for an opinion, accept criticism, get creative.

Fire drill not up to speed? Get creative… Review your procedure and sanity check it. Is this the best way? The safest way? Or is it just the way the last guy who sat at my desk did it? Phone the Fire Service, get them to come out and review your processes and suggest improvements, they will be more than happy to guide you. Make a poster of the plan and be sure to include a map of the route, pictures of the assembly points and put it up everywhere! On the notice board, in the corridor, in the tea room, on the stairs, email, intranet, everywhere. Make the information impossible to ignore and impossible to misunderstand.  

That is just one example which can be transferred across a wide scope of environments. It is up to you how you wish your message to come across and to show your colleagues, employees and peers how seriously you take their safety and wellbeing. With such widespread access to health and safety information and examples of good practice a mere internet search away there is no excuse for lacklustre and beige campaigns.

Cut your material into little pieces like I do with my turkey dinosaurs...

Hand-held, bite-sized nuggets of 100% pure information stickier than my niece’s hands after her pudding. More than once I have been inducted into a new working environment and been given a 6 page, Arial black, font size 10 health and safety handout to ‘make my way through’. Did I read it? Yeah, of course I did. Could I tell you anything about it the next day? No. Is that good enough? No, it's lazy. It’s uninspiring. It’s a health and safety risk in itself!

Whenever I start a new project, the first and biggest hurdle I have to get over is how do I get people to give a monkey's about this. Everybody knows better, everybody thinks it’ll never be them, everybody knows which corners to cut.

‘I’m too savvy’, ‘only dafties have accidents’, ‘Do you know how long I have been doing it this way?’, ‘this way’s quicker’.

People hear the term health and safety and switch off quicker than I do when I hear that Love Island is coming on next. But, just like little miss flappy laces, it’s all smiles and giggles until you come home with a skint knee and an ice cream sprinkled with gravel.

So…

Fight the fights you can win, get creative and make people listen and take care.

Robert

WABT