Safetree launches new Growing our Safety Culture initiative

Fiona’s blog: Help creating a workplace culture that supports success and good health and safety

I am very pleased to be launching Safetree's new Growing our Safety Culture programme. This programme helps businesses build a workplace culture that supports successful work and good health and safety outcomes. The programme can be used with crews to improve attitudes and practices. It helps build stronger relationships within the crew by improving things like communication, engagement and reporting. These are all areas that have been identified by crews as crucial to having a good day at work. Importantly, this programme can also be used by forest owners and managers to help them understand how their behaviour might be supporting or hindering safety onsite. The Growing our Safety Culture programme builds on the Safety Culture tree initiative created some years ago by a partnership of government and industry. The original concepts have been updated and packaged into a programme that provides support to put them into practice. The programme has also been tested with several forestry operators to ensure it is fit for purpose. I'm pleased to say that feedback from this testing has been very positive. In fact one company, Timberlands, found the programme so effective it has decided to run it with all its teams - including the board of directors. I would encourage everyone working in forestry to think about how they can improve the culture in their teams and supply chains. Take a look at some of the resources from the programme and use them to ‘take a pulse check’ of your safety culture. If you find them useful, you can get in touch with us to find out more about doing the programme. There will be an opportunity to learn more about the programme from one of the people who helped create it, safety culture expert Dr Hillary Bennett. She will speak at free workshops Safetree is running in Rotorua on August 9. See the Growing our Safety Culture programme resources See more about the programme

More about the Growing our Safety Culture programme

This programme helps you understand the true state of health and safety in your business. It helps you harness the expertise in your teams to make improvements. It also enables you to reap the wider business benefits of having more motivated teams. The programme was developed for the New Zealand forestry industry by a safety culture expert, in partnership with industry. It was tested with big and small operators before being launched. The programme involves:

• A team assessment to uncover what’s really going on with health and safety
• A report-back on the results of the assessment that highlights what’s going well and what can be improved
• A feedback session to identify ways to make improvements and develop action plans.

The programme is not an audit. It’s about identifying practices that support or undermine health and safety, then supporting team members to come up with improvements.

What others say of the programme: “We saw the FISC safety culture program as a great mechanism to initiate and develop our safety dialogue.” Robert Green, CEO, Timberlands Limited

See a case study on how improving Safety Culture benefited Port Blakely

Safetree workshops on Culture, Wellbeing, Learning – 9 August, Rotorua

Everyone in forestry is invited to these three free workshops being held as part of the Forest Industry Conference. They cover:

• Wellbeing and health – with Dr Tom Mulholland
• Growing our Safety Culture – with Dr Hillary Bennett
• Learning Reviews, a new approach to incident investigations - with Human Factors scientist Brionny Hooper, from Scion.

Find out more about these events RSVP to info@safetree.nz (including name of workshop you will attend and how many attendees)