Strategies for Building an Award-Winning Work Health and Safety Program
Last week BlueScope won The Australian Institute of Health & Safety Australian Work Health and Safety Award for Best WHS Learning and Development Program for 2024. Resilience Health and Safety was the company who created the winning program. It's a great end result, I’m especially proud of the co-design process, where we built the program with BlueScope leaders, for BlueScope leaders. This was a strategic collaboration between over 700 steel makers, a brave leadership team, two amazing academics (Dr. Tristan Casey and Peter Caputi) a group of geeky health practitioners, excited and empowered safety professionals, leadership and change consultants, and an admin and data team that was second to none.
What is the Empowering Health and Safety Program?
This program is a safety leadership program which empowers frontline leaders to challenge the way they think about safety through the lenses of human and organisational performance, safety II and resilience engineering. It is not a shelf program or a product, it is a living and breathing collaborative relationship between people invested in building capacity in real workplaces.
We're giving you the secret sauce, the three hot tips to build your own award winning program.
Partner with smart people who have deep expertise you can draw on. This will give you the best leg up and help you avoid working on something that is already outdated. Don't rely on the internet, large language models or existing safety products and programs to tell you what is best practice. Typically what is already published as shelf products is out of date. We utilised academics, safety professionals, and a steering group to guide the design.
Codesign with the end user. This is critical. Who is the end user, what are their needs and desires, what does good look like for them? What are their experiences in the context of real work? Make sure you not only consult with the workforce but engage them in the solution design from the very beginning. You will end up with a far more credible, relevant and empowering solution with engagement from the start.
Meaningfully measure the impact and determine these measures in the design phase. Determine what success looks like early and create your evaluation design We used the Kirkpatrick Model of Training Evaluation, a globally recognised method of evaluating the results of training and learning programs. It assesses both formal and informal training methods and rates them against four levels of criteria: reaction, learning, behaviour, and results. Use the minimum amount of metrics to measure impact. Try and use measures which are meaningful to the end user but also meet the expectations of the "client" who is essentially who is paying for the program.
If you need more direction, we would love to help. Reach out for a free 1:1 discovery session.
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