A DAY IN THE LIFE OF...
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF...
Our new feature, A Day in the Life Of... this week introduces us to Lois Hubbard, Account Manager at K2 Media Services, who spends her days encouraging those in the industry to communicate more successfully about health and safety.
The smell of hot coffee wafted up from the cup I was holding as I walked through the BP offices in Milton Keynes. Like most people, it takes a cup or two to get me to full speed in the mornings and given that this was my first meeting with this particular client, I wanted to be on the ball. I didn’t get very far however, before somebody stopped me and popped a lid on my steaming beverage.
The BP employee explained: “It’s safer - if you trip it won’t scold you or anyone else.”
With a beaming smile she carried on with her day. This is the result of years of positive communication – there was no blame, no nervousness, and no form to be completed; just a friendly employee keeping a visitor safe. Health and safety managers across the country put together safe systems of work, risk assessments and safety schemes yet can’t seem to crack this skill – positive communication.
This surprises me given that health and safety teams are some of the most positive people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Communication for them isn’t about selling an idea or meeting a new target – it’s about keeping people safe so they can continue to work and do things they enjoy. So why does it so often translate as a sales pitch or a box-ticking, target-hitting exercise?
Antalis, now the largest paper distributor in Europe, has a very
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passionate health and safety team. They came to us with a plethora of innovative ways to communicate health and safety initiatives from interactive posters to personalised hazard observation pocket books. They had the full support of the board room that recognised that safety needs to be a priority; but every message they were looking to communicate seemed to lose its momentum once it was rolled out and they couldn’t understand why.
Within the manufacturing, construction and oil industry to name but a few, managers and supervisors seem to be promoted for their management and production skills, or their experience at the coalface. Rarely, are they promoted for their presentation of safety messages and in my experience many often struggle to present these ideas that are being handed down to them from the health and safety department. It was because messages were being lost that Antalis asked us to run a training session on the positive communication of health and safety.
Our training sessions run for half a day and can have between 5-10 attendees at a time. I would say that during these sessions health and safety is discussed for around 25% of the time. The rest focuses on how we put across positivity in what we are presenting. We find that the easiest way to train people to talk positively is to start with something they are already passionate about. During
our sessions we cover Liverpool City Football Club, Freshwater Tropical Fish, the life of Mohammed Ali and much more.
We assess how individuals come across in their presentations, what they most successfully got across and where they could improve in the future. All of our attendees finish their presentations feeling positive and infused. Then, when you ask them, can you transfer these skills and attitudes to health and safety communication? They say yes!
I attended a “Safety Conversations” training course last week at Hanson. The Senior Health and Safety Manager explained that it can take between 18 months and three years to implement an effective communication system with positivity as a focus, but it can take as little as three weeks for it to revert back to a negative communication style which ultimately leads to more unsafe behaviors and more accidents. He explained that some managers and supervisors won’t be able to change their styles, having come from decades of “blame culture” or sales focused behavior. You might lose them in the process.
As this course clearly illustrated - at the cost of saving lives and preventing accidents, positive communication is the only way forward.
www.k2mediaservices.com
www.tomorrowshs.com
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