Break out of the one-to-one engagement box
We’ve delivered safety engagement programmes for over 20 years now, so we’ve had a lot of experience in how clients try to implement them. By far the most common implementation tends to be to teach people how to do random, one-to-one effective safety discussions.
Why? Well, it’s proven over the years to be the biggest gap in the safety improvement toolkit and it helps create remarkably strong safety cultures.
But if it’s the only way you implement safety engagement in your business, you’re definitely missing a trick. Especially because people trained in the skill may find it hard to ‘get out of the box’ and use their skills in other situations.
So here are my top six alternative settings for your employees to put their safety engagement skills to more powerful use:
- Induction – what better way to get past the usual apologies and get people thinking about risk the moment they’re on site
- Safety audit – find out some of the things that are not immediately obvious during a visual audit
- Team Brief – get the team to really think about the risks and focus on what they’re doing that day
- Behavioural safety observation – off the back of a traditional behavioural safety observation, have a go at exploring attitudes around a behaviour you’ve observed
- Incident Investigation – discover some of the other root causes that might have contributed to that accident
- Social media – try engaging in business-wide safety engagement, there’s never been a more effective way to influence so many other people!
About Mark Ormond
Managing Director
Mark is an experienced consultant and strategic leader with a background in information systems, culture and engagement. He has over a decade of experience partnering with a wide variety of large organisations internationally, helping them create more mature cultures and higher levels of engagement. Latterly this has been done as head of Tribe Culture Change, a consulting organisation formed from the partnership of Hill Solomon and JOMC, organisations with over 40 years collective experience in this area.