Shifting Safety to Personal, Professional and Business Benefits

Do you see safety as being important but engagement is lower than you desire?

Is the corporate narrative dominated by safety as a cost? Necessary but not a value?

It's way past the time to reframe that narrative.

Safety should be more than an investment to protect your people. People are every organisations' greatest source of adaptation and competitive advantage. Safety should be a path to grow personally, professionally and feed business performance.

If your safety philosophy is one of less bad, avoiding accidents, compliance and correction, then you're never going to reap the benefit that wellbeing delivers.

Get your safety philosophy right, and wellbeing drives performance beyond your imagination. Trust us?

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, I spoke about changing the narrative around safety. We also received the inaugural award for excellence in applied learning. OrgTree's holistic approach to wellbeing has proven to increase productivity, profitability, and safety performance. All business outcomes are positively impacted by how and why people engage.

It is entirely repeatable and entirely transferable.

Case Study:

Our holistic approach co-creates social wellbeing. Fostering an environment where the organization became very comfortable discussing and solving problems. We went beyond work teams to a whole organization approach, de-conflicting silos and connecting people's diverse knowledge and skills through a positive lens of "we need your help" followed by gratitude for the contribution and communicating the value add of collaboration.

Solving shared problems fixed relationships. As trust increased, creativity followed improving our capacity and resilience, people gained meaning from their contribution, belonging to something bigger than themselves.

We connected the entire organization to willingly pull together on shared purpose. For sure there were bumps in the road, not everyone was immediately happy, but momentum shifted the cultural narrative.

Emotions drew us together where previously they drove people apart. It became OK to work with prior adversaries, adversaries transformed into human beings with something to say, adding benefit. Ultimately collaboration feels much better than conflict as human beings are designed to trust, so when we find it we feel safe. And repeat, and repeat.

This helped us to deliver the best version of the company’s products and services to clients.

Initially, safety was seen as a necessary cost, important but not impactful on other business metrics, now we saw that better relationships drove better decisions and that improves safety and everything else.

When engagement was low, problems persisted. However, in just 2 years, we eradicated a decades long history of accidents, became 25% more profitable, and everyone felt great.

Clients became increasingly curious about the transformation, improving our reputation and leading to more work.

The award from CHOLearning was given for transforming a company culture through safety. The transformation took a company threatened with removal from supply chains for its safety record, to an international award winning industry leader. Proving that even in the Middle East, safety and wellbeing are paths to business success.

At the heart of this transformation were values such as inclusion, trust, dignity, and respect. These principles serve as the foundation and essential elements for both wellbeing and a successful, productive, profitable and safe business environment.

Metrics Matter too

One of the many challenges businesses face everywhere is what to measure that improves safety performance. What metrics can leaders use to influence behaviour, and what KPIs give a true reflection of performance.

We have the answer, tried and tested, and whilst the overall approach requires some changes in thinking, the metrics help you on the way. The illustration below is real data, but doesn't contain OrgTree's full suite of customisable metrics. Our metrics philosophy guides the creation of value through critical thinking, alignment of culture, capacity and strategy, and the ever important improvements in trust and beneficial communication, not from surveys, from your data!