1. HEALTH & SAFETY IS BORING!

Let’s face it, Health & Safety is boring. But do organisations really have to make it such a chore? Communication is a core component of lean and effective organisations, yet the Health & Safety message often leaves the workforce frustrated, unheard and unexcited. When was the last time you engaged the workforce in a fun way?

2. IT’S ALL ABIOUT TICKING THE BOX!

Huge amounts of energy is focused on setting rules and then policing them according to legislation. While this is an important part, it is certainly NOT where the greatest inroads can be made – yet the drive to ‘cross t’s’ and ‘dot i’s’ has gradually taken over.

3. HEALTH & SAFETY DATA OVERLOAD!

As systems become more and more embedded in organisations, there is an increasing tendency to try to capture as much data as possible to try and prevent the next accident. What organisations don’t realise is that this continual ‘hamster wheel’ drives Health & Safety Practitioners behind their desk and away from the ‘coal face’. We are becoming more and more ‘data hungry’, but they are still having accidents. Meanwhile, operator levels in organisations are still being fed with complicated method statements and incompressible statistics.

4. WE ARE TRYING TO ‘FIX’ HEALTH & SAFETY!

80-95% of workplace accidents are behaviour-based. And yet most of H&S is focused on equipment, structural design, legislative compliance and accident investigation. The worst part is that when organisations finally focus on behaviour, they often implement peer observation tour programmes which drives more and more data collection and paper based systems. Meanwhile, they can’t deliver on their promises, and the workforce are often left with no feedback- leading to an attitude of mistrust.

5. HEALTH & SAFETY IS REACTIVE!

Most organisations from the top down might endorse the slogan ‘Safety First’ but simply do not value safety as a core value-added pillar to their business. In fact, the reality is that H&S often falls far behind productivity and sales. We are continuing to measure the output- the accident, the incident and most recently the behaviour. That is of course until an accident happens and it’s all hands on deck. What kind of message do you think this gives the workforce? The real underlying root cause of accidents is shaped by our ATTITUDE- our beliefs, our trust in the message and our values.

At SeaChange, we implement lean & practical tools all aimed at reducing your ‘People Risk’.

We believe:

• Pictures are better than words
• Habits are better than rules
• We need to treat people as part of the solution