Bouncing forward with safety culture
When we talk to leaders in high-risk industries, they often express their biggest fear is a workplace fatality, or worse, another workplace fatality.
While it’s not always the way, we do work with collaborators off the back of a worker fatality or significant injury. They may have been doing all the right things with safety, with all the right processes in place, but they’re ready to push further and try something new or different to boost engagement and ensure messages cut through and behaviour changes.
This is where we met Fletcher Building in early 2020.
One of New Zealand’s largest companies, and with a significant presence in Australia, Fletcher had experienced the worst kind of tragedy. Five fatalities in the space of nine months in their New Zealand businesses.
All five fatalities involved experienced employees doing something that wasn’t particularly complex. They found inattention was a common factor.
From these tragedies came an essential decision by executives to shift the safety culture. While they found safety processes were good, safety leadership needed to lift and shift.
They were looking to capture the hearts and minds of all employees by connecting them to the ‘why’ of safety – aiming for less ‘she’ll be right’ and more ‘wait, what if?’. Fletcher took the view that everyone in the business was loved by somebody, so they all needed to go above and beyond to make sure people made it home safe.
Through a filter of no BS, keeping it real and being authentic, Fletcher worked with Everyday Massive to create a safety culture program and frontline leadership program that, alongside their own internally built leadership program, have managed to shift the dial on engagement, and importantly reduce the Total Injury Frequency Rate by 53%.
It’s an impressive bounce forward for Fletcher, and we felt it was worth unpacking further as we consider how best to create safe and healthy work for all.
For our final SafeTea chat, Fletcher’s Learning and Organisational Development Manager Rita Slogrove spoke with Everyday Massive’s Elizabeth Tucker. Check out the highlights of their conversation.
If you need to shift the safety culture in your organisation, book a discovery call with us and let’s talk about what you’re trying to achieve. We’re guaranteed to have some ideas for how we can collaborate to create safe and healthy work for all.
