エピソード

  • Can safety improve profitability? Lessons from The Power of Habit By Charles Duhigg

    Can safety improve profitability? Lessons from The Power of Habit By Charles Duhigg
    2023/04/19
    Victor [00:00:00]:Hey, and welcome to another episode of Ideas From Your Peers, where we explore strategies for improving workplace safety and building a culture of wellness. Now, predominantly, we do this by leveraging other people's ideas that they've used successfully in their industry, workplace, or anything in between. And today, we're doing that in a slightly different way. I wanted to explore a book that I've been reading recently, be called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig. It's a bit of a classic. And there was one chapter in particular that I wanted to discuss because it really highlighted how improvements in small things can have huge ramifications across organizations, particularly in our case, and safety practices. So, in chapter four, Duhig tells the story of Paul O'Neill, who became the CEO of Alcoa. And it was a struggling aluminium company in the 1980s.Victor [00:00:57]:And O'Neill's approach was to make workplace safety the top priority of the company. And funnily enough, was a decision that was met with a lot of scepticism and resistance. He spoke to all the shareholders and the investors when he first became the CEO and said that a lot of them were rushing out the doors to sell their stock, saying this guy had lost a plot because he wasn't talking about improving ROI or decreasing the cost of production. He was literally saying, we want to make safety the top priority. And he believed that creating a culture of safety was crucial to the success of the company. And one of the key ways that O'Neill created Changer Alcoa was through communication. Look, he did things like give out its phone number to employees. He encouraged them to report any safety issues or concerns directly to him if they weren't acted upon by their supervisor.Victor [00:01:57]:This approach massively empowered employees to take ownership of safety. But it also helped O'Neill to identify potential problems and come up with solutions. They did things like reaching out to the manager. The manager would then talk to their higher-up, and that higher-up would then report back to O'Neill, and they would look at different ways and different solutions that they could tackle. And I think this is really important for organizations where either people lower down potentially in the organization, for lack of a better word, may not feel the ability or the space to be able to speak up or things. Don't get escalated from, say, middle managers higher up for fear that it may be looked upon, that it's their fault that these things are happening. And it creates kind of a systemic process and culture within your organization where these things keep happening, and we're never sitting back to actually identify ways of remitting them. And O'Neill also emphasized the importance of communication and collaboration among employees.Victor [00:03:09]:So he encouraged everyone in the company to share ideas and suggestions for improving safety, regardless of their position or department. And this approach helped break down silos, like I was just mentioning, and create a culture of teamwork and shared responsibility for safety. So certain things like rather than moving big pots of molten hot aluminium across the floor, they restructured the supply chain. So it was a more logical sequence of production. And then, not only that, it was, like I say, empowering their staff to make their decisions. Even things as simple as painting poles and steps and things yellow to highlight potential hazards and all of these things. All of these little things. By prioritizing safety and communication, he was able to create what they mentioned in the book as a keystone habit.Victor [00:04:09]:And that has a positive impact on every aspect of the organization. As decision-makers in health and safety, talent acquisition, HR, and finance, we can learn a lot from this approach and focus on creating safety, a culture of improved safety, but also open communication within our organization. Often we think that it's the latest thing that we can implement in our organization. We often miss these lower-hanging fruits like open communication with our employees up and down the chain. And so what this led to was Alcoa becoming one of the most profitable companies and having the lowest that they really focused on that zero injury target and they had the lowest injury rates and in that industry as well, death fatalities across the country, and that's continued well on into the future. So from a fledgling business focusing on that one key aspect which I'm sure many of us are biased towards in the safety side of things. And rather than just thinking of it as a small cog, it can actually be a huge improvement within the organization to improve efficiencies and things like that. And then the flow on to profitability, which keeps the lights on.Victor [00:05:37]:So I hope you found this episode informative and helpful. Please share it with other people in the workplace safety space ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    7 分
  • A data-driven safer workplace with Tom Aune from Suremploy

    A data-driven safer workplace with Tom Aune from Suremploy
    2023/04/19
    Victor [00:00:00]:Hey everyone, and welcome to Ideas for Your Peers podcast. I'm Victor he Penny, your host, and today we're going to be exploring, I guess, some insights that we can gather before we even get people in the front door. And I'm sure we'll learn a lot more of the importance of that over today's episode. In today's episode, I got Tom owner, who's the founder and director of Shore Employee. Welcome to the show Tom.Tom [00:00:24]:Thank you very much.Victor [00:00:25]:So Tom, give us a little bit of a background, I guess both about yeah, I'm sure with like most business owners, their business and their actual themselves, the stories kind of intertwined, but give us a bit of a background about yourself and your employee.Tom [00:00:42]:Yeah. So I'm a physio. I used to own a couple of clinical practices on the New South Wales central coast and essentially did that for a number of years before coincidentally, I think, starting work with a local food manufacturer across from one of my clinics that eventually asked me to do some of their ergonomic and work health and safety related tasks. And long story short, they asked me to do pre employment screenings. Now, at the time I knew very little about pre employment screening and so we essentially went out about doing what I thought other providers were doing. And unfortunately, after a year or so, looking back at the data we'd gathered with this large, well known food manufacturer, there hadn't really been much impact in terms of injury reduction, let alone some of the other benefits that we're now seeing. And yeah, because there hadn't been any real improvement, I set about for the next six, seven, eight years coming up with methods that are different and would provide and have proven to provide much better outcomes in terms of injury reduction and as a probably unexpected outcome. Also, we're helping clients reduce their staff turnover quite significantly. So, yeah, in 2014 I sold the last of the clinics and just focused on pre employment screenings, which we've been doing nationally for a few years and more recently across the ditch as well in New Zealand. And, yeah, we now just focus on pre employment screening with a little bit of fitness for work as well for injured workers.Victor [00:02:55]:Cool. So, well, diving into this, I guess the premise of the show is Ideas from Your Peers. So a lot of the listeners out there will be looking and thinking, all right, what can I gain out of both the pre employment or the health and safety space? But I think if we take even a step further back, you mentioned that there was this period where I don't know, it kind of sounded like you were doing. Whether it was figure it out yourself or what everyone else was doing or a combination of the two, it wasn't really getting any results. It was more along following the process. And I think people listening to this definitely don't want to just follow what's previously been done, they want to innovate on it. Can you talk us through what that kind of process looked like? If that was kind of the case from when you finished working with us or had done this year or two with this organization, what did that process look like, the iterations to, I guess, where it may be now?Tom [00:03:58]:Yeah. So we started off doing literally what others were doing. I essentially copied what I could find and what I thought looked good. Now, that included essentially a paper based questionnaire, mainly with yes no answers, and there were quite a few of them, but in that methodology, really poor disclosure rates from applicants. And I guess what I found fairly early in the piece is that unlike, say, a patient coming to a physiotherapist with, say, a shoulder injury, they'll tell you how it happened. Now they can't lie on their side or reach overhead and they want you to fix it. But unlike that fairly open, honest dialogue in a physio clinic with pre employment screening, the candidate or applicant is motivated by quite a different scenario, and that is getting a job. They're not after help, they are literally trying to appear as healthy as possible. And so, yes, no answers in terms of asking about past medical history, we soon found was really one of the significant limitations of the traditional model. The next iteration was probably we've come to a different, entirely different questionnaire set much more recently, which we now call the Advanced Risk Profiler. But I think the next iteration from the original standard sort of model that we now, I guess, see as the old way was to start asking slightly less closed ended and more open ended questions in the actual interview with the candidate. So when we as physios would interview them, we'd ask slightly better questions. And we did, over time, get better and better outcomes. And then the big switch came about seven or eight years ago when we decided that by then we had well over 50,000 data sets and we started to look at what some of that ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    38 分
  • The Secret Sauce Behind Safer Workplaces

    The Secret Sauce Behind Safer Workplaces
    2023/04/19
    Victor [00:00:00]:Welcome to the ideas from your peers podcast. This is episode number one and let me just say thank you. I'm grateful that you've decided to tune in and I really want to make this worth your while. This episode is literally just setting the canvas for what is to come in future episodes. So we'll jump in. I'll give you a bit of a premise behind the show, how it came about and what you can expect and if you're in the right place to start off with. So however you got here, thank you and I look forward to sharing some of this quick background. About me.Victor [00:00:33]:My name is Victor Ahipeni. I'm a physiotherapist. I've been in the healthcare industry for close to 14 years and at the start of my career I worked in private practice and obviously that comes with a lot of rehabbing of injured general population. But it was a few years into my career I was introduced to the occupational health space. So initially through pre employment assessments, then job task analysis, and putting different injury prevention plans in place for different organizations. And that really sparked a bit of a passion on how can we avoid a lot of these injuries that are happening and what does this space look like as a whole? Now, when you've only got one person to learn off, you can take them with their knowledge and their expertise, but the more people that I've been able to speak to and learn from over the last decade, it's definitely helped accelerate my learnings, my knowledge, and in turn the benefits that you can offer to different organizations. And so the premise of this is to be able to create safer, more highly productive workplaces together. So hence the name ideas from your peers.Victor [00:01:54]:I know from Napoleon Hill, you may or may not have heard about one of his books, it's a classic called Think and Grow Rich. But one of the key premises or ideas from that is about the power of a mastermind. So the knowledge that you can get from a collective whole is greater than what you could ever have by yourself. And that's what I want to do. I want to be able to tap into what is working right now within our industry. And that's going to look from recruitment, pre employment, screening applicants in different ways both physically and mentally. How do we monitor our staff in the most effective ways to be able to have useful information and be able to act on that? And that may look at as a growing organization, how do you tap into the compliance side of things? How do you create a positive culture within your workplace? How do you identify a negative culture within your workplace? How do you implement change management, injury prevention, the mental health side of things, supporting workers, and then obviously, regardless of the amount of things you put in, there's still going to be injured workers and how do we support them? Of course I don't have the answers, hence I don't have all of the answers, hence the ideas from your peers. So I want to tap into some of the industries leading experts, people who have products to be able to support these different spaces and how they came about but also different organizations.Victor [00:03:29]:So internally what have they done that has been successful to turning around different areas that we just spoke about within their business? So that's really what the premise of this is about. I want to wrap it around themes whether it be a series on the physical side of things or the compliance side of things or the mental side of things supporting workers, cultural change, these different aspects that we can tap into to be able to altogether grow greater than we could ever by ourselves. Because if we are truly passionate and driven to create safer workplaces for the staff that we work with or that we hire, then sharing these ideas should be able to benefit everybody. This is definitely not a zero sum game. I know, having treated as a private practice physio in the past, the ramifications of having a worker's compensation injury patient come in your front door. Obviously, they come in all shapes and sizes, but the ramifications of them say, being off work and the effect that that can have when other people have to cover for them at work and pick up extra shifts. The cultural change that can happen with them, the stigma around it, the effect that it can have on their home life with their friends and their family, and even if they're touchwood. But in the cases where they actually can't return to work or to their previous job, the ramification that has on both themselves and the economy as a whole and I believe that there is enough knowledge and enough actionable insights tie it in to be able to have impact much greater than what some one person may be doing within their own particular organization.Victor [00:05:18]:So tune in. Feel free to subscribe. Feel free to reach out to me. There'll be links to get in touch with me below. If you're a potential guest or you know ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    7 分