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How can strategic creativity improve health and safety engagement?
There’s a culture shift happening when it comes to the health & safety industry. While, for decades, it’s been an essential part of the workplace, it’s also been seen as a little…dry. Rules are there for everyone’s safety, of course – but people are discovering there’s a better way to ensure we all follow them…
In every factory and worksite across the UK, we can all relive the H&S induction. We have our hi-vis and boots, hats and safety goggles are on the wall, arrayed like Laser Quest packs. (Is Laser Quest still a thing? Nonetheless…) Cue the video, filmed on the office camcorder, showing a scene where one worker distractedly waves at a colleague before running another over with his forklift. We pause: “Now, can anyone tell me what went wrong in that scenario?”
There’s no question that health & safety is one of the most essential factors in working life. Everyone who goes to work should get home safe, and every employer has a duty of care to their people. These things are deservedly taken seriously. But that doesn’t mean our approach to the discipline needs to be eternally po-faced; a checkbox-ticking exercise constantly badgering people, “Have you done this, that and the other?”
Because humans are, by evolution, a lazy species. And us Brits are a contrary subset. There isn’t a queue we haven’t seen that we wanted to join the back of, yet tell us what to do and our monocles explode in outrage. (Which definitely isn’t safe, also.) We don’t want to be dictated to. So, don’t necessarily tell us what to do; make it matter to us.
Falling in love with behaviour-based safety
There’s a lot of good to be said about behaviour-based safety (BBS). Top of the list is its goal: preventing LTIs (lost-time injuries to you and me), and keeping people safe. But the way it approaches this is not seeking to guide or avert actions; it’s about instilling behaviours that drive safer decision-making up the cognitive and behavioural chain. Safety has to become simultaneously a first principle and second nature.
All of which means an educational, dated, safety induction video is no longer enough. We need to inspire people. We need to instil pride in their role in being part of something bigger: keeping themselves and their coworkers and friends safe, and free to get home to what matters most to them.
After all, working to the logic formula we’ve absolutely not just made up, ‘engaged workforce = organisational success’, it’s clear that the very future and performance of a business can be traced right down, at the core, to having a safe, engaged and inspired team making it all possible. And this is where the question of creativity creeps in…
Putting the (non-combustible) spark into the safety scheme.
Our lazy monkey brains are famously selective in terms of memory. We remember what we want to. Nobody will recall 1997’s staged forklift video (unless it was especially graphic…). Give people the means and material that inspire them to become the hero their workplace needs, as well as the one it deserves right now, and they won’t just remember. They’ll share it. They’ll talk about it. They’ll make safer decisions by nature, and before you know it, you’ll have an army of Safety Batmen (actually, not a good H&S role model – we might need to rethink this metaphor).
At least, that’s the approach we’ve been taking with some of our own clients. For Sika, with its exemplary safety record of course, we turned long-established and little-listened-to H&S materials into a campaign rallying its Homecoming Heroes to answer the call. While, for safety wear specialist Arco, we relaunched its TROJAN range as performance workwear that (safely, mind) harnesses comfort and performance to engineer moments of mastery.
It’s all because of this culture shift. We need rules, otherwise the whole thing erupts into chaos, which is highly unsafe, evidently. But if marketers and brand folk can inject a little creativity into the world of health & safety, in just the right way, we can make the world a safer place and have some fun along the way.
Talk Creative Safety
Need to bring your health & safety communications kicking and screaming (with clearly demarcated lines so as to avoid injury) into the late 2020s?