♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.
♪ [music] ♪ Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." What do safety and selling have in common? More than you might think. Today's guest is the creator of what he calls a work-in-progress model of marketing for health and safety.
We'll explore how this model works, what safety professionals can learn from marketing, and some key marketing concepts that offer fresh insight into the role of a safety professional. Andrew Barret is the founder of Safety on Tap, a consultancy that specializes in the development and growth of health and safety leaders. It also enables capability and innovation in the health and safety field.
He supports organizations across multiple industries to enhance the safety of work, reduce safety clutter, and improve learning and operational performance. Andrew is the only specialist professional coach for health and safety professionals in Australia. He's regularly invited to speak at OHS conferences in keynote, workshop, discussion, and debate formats in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Andrew is also the host of the "Safety on Tap" podcast, where he and his guests talk about personal effectiveness, business strategy, people leadership, innovation, and creativity. He joins us today from Gawler River in South Australia. Welcome.
- [Andrew] Hi, Mary.
- Okay. So you've developed what you call a work-in-progress model of marketing for health and safety. Before we get into the model itself, I'm curious about what led you to make the connection between OHS work and marketing.
- Well, I'm a health and safety professional by training, call myself a reformed health and safety professional sometimes, which some people take as rude or offensive. But what it really means is just a reflection on my career that I was trained traditionally in most of the things that most health and safety professionals would be familiar with. And then when I started working, both in consulting and in in-house roles, because I've done both, I realized that the list of those things that didn't work were really, really difficult or created problems, just got longer and longer.
And I was in search of a longer list of things that might work a little bit better, might be a little bit more effective, get closer to this outcome of this thing that we call health and safety. And so that's been my professional experience. So that's led me to my work in coaching right now, which means that I get to work with lots and lots of other health and safety professionals.
And through that process, there was a couple of interesting things that emerged. They effectively gave me the insights about why those two concepts might be useful to bring together. So this is certainly not a model that is trying to be prescriptive to say the world is like this, and I've tried to simplify it for everyone and you should just follow the 10-step process. It's not that.
It's really grounded in the experience of health and safety professionals. So for example, many health and safety professionals say, I don't have enough influence, so I don't control the decisions of people and managers in my organization, and they don't listen to me. I don't have enough influence. Or we designed and developed a safety management system or a procedure or even some safety equipment, and it doesn't hit the mark.
They don't use it. It's nothing implemented. We have bad audit results, whatever it is. So we've got this disconnect between what our intention is in creating products and services, and then in how the people who are trying to help actually decide to use [inaudible]. So that's really where it all came from is this vast combination of health and safety professionals giving me tiny insights into their life and, in particular, their struggles, and then together, I was able to start to build this picture of marketing health and safety.
- So you kind of saw some themes emerging in what you were hearing over and over.
- Yeah, absolutely. And it also hearing those themes, a lot of the time they're on the problem side of the page. And so in terms of solutions, that's when I started to think, well, hang on a second, you are talking about a safety management system as a thing that everyone should know and like and use, but what if we thought about it as a product in the way that John sells us a product and we go online and we're excited about purchasing a product?
What does that look and sound like? What is the transaction we are looking? Who are your customers? Because there's lots of different customers we need to serve. So that's when I started to then have a look at what the existing marketing field can teach us about the way that they work with products and services. And then I just effectively laid marketing and sales concepts over the top of health and safety practice. And it's an interesting result.
- And I'll go back to a caveat you said earlier. It's not prescriptive. So you've defined a model when we were speaking before as a helpful way of understanding something. Who is this model most useful for? Is there a particular type of safety professional that will benefit more from this thinking, or is it more general than that?
- I hate to say that this is something for almost everyone because that's almost true, but I have this model in lots of different groups and lots of different scenarios. So small businesses with health and safety reps, you know, the person that drives the forklift, that's also a rep all the way through to, you know, the senior executive safety person in multinational 10,000-employee organizations.
So, it seems to be a useful model for everyone. And that's the point I suppose is that it's not prescriptive or specific, it's designed to help each individual reflect on their own circumstances and make sense of it to work out how they can.
- Okay. Well, okay. I'm sure listeners are getting curious now. So, let's get into the model itself. So the model you say is visual. Can you paint a picture, even though this is an audio format, for the audience of what the model looks like?
- Yeah, sure. I've represented this model in a couple of different ways. I started it as a bit of a cycle, and there is certainly a relationship between certain elements. So let's take the starting point, if you like, for most health and safety professionals. So let's imagine you get a new job and you walk in there and you don't yet know the answer to the question, but what are you going to spend your time doing?
And so as you figure that out, often what we do is we start to focus on products and services. So Mary, what do you think are some of the products and services that we offer in health and safety as professional?
- I didn't know you were going to ask the question. Well, your programs, right? Programs that you create would be products, services, would be kind of frameworks for how people work, I suppose.
- Yep. There might be risk assessment.
- Did I pass? Risk assessment. Yeah. Yeah. That's a service.
- It could be putting requirements into a contract....safety requirements into a contract for contractors, if you're, say, in the construction industry or something like that. It could be audits development procedures. So, there's lots of these things that we do in health and safety. That's often where we start. We focus on the things. And so if we start there, we have to ask ourselves the question, well, how do we know whether the things are good?
And I think there's two parts to that question. And this hopefully starts to create the visual model in people's minds. You can't answer the question unless you look at, A, who are you trying to help and what problems do they have or are you trying to solve or what needs? And the second one is that if you think your products and services meet the wants or the needs of particular people, are they actually behaving in that way?
So are they transacting with whatever that is? So do people show up to your training? Are they excited about it? Do they tell other people about it? Are the ratings good for it? If you have a particular, say, risk assessment process that you ask crews to do before they start work, do they actually do it? What do they think about it?
Do they do it in the pickup truck beforehand, or do they actually do it on the job? Do they do it together, or is the one person on the crew, usually the less experienced person who fill out the paperwork for the week and whilst everyone is actually doing the work? So we have to interrogate those two things. How does the problem meet the product or service? And then are we actually seeing that transaction, that purchasing behavior, if you like?
- Yes. So you have to understand what good looks like if you want to know the ideal, right? To know if it works, you have to know what does works look like. Okay. So continue, I'm sure there's more.
- Yeah. So I mean, where should we go next? I suppose just before we move on from our products and services, we have to have a think about not just the things, so we as safety professionals have products and services. And other people in the organization, and we'll call them customers for the purpose of this, have problems and needs or [inaudible]. So, let's think about those two things.
So what types of customers, Mary, do you think that health and safety professionals serve in your organization?
- The people that they're trying to keep healthy and safe, but also the people who hold the purse strings and make the decisions about what kind of programs and resources and...
- Yeah. So, even that simple question when I talk to health and safety professionals, you get really interesting responses. In the first job that I had as a safety professional as a junior professional, I was told that my job was to protect the legal interests of the directors and executive of the company.
That was one of the explicit parts of my job, cover their butt, basically. And that's a very different type of approach to your work when you think about their problems and their needs, and then our products and services compared to, well, I'm helping the lady on the forklift, or packing the boxes, or digging the hole, or connecting the wires. Now, I think for most people, both of those groups are customers.
But even just asking that question in kind of a coaching sense gets people to think about, well, how do I operate? How do my products and services actually meet their needs? Are there conflicts associated with that? So a really good example of this is that often we think about managers and senior managers as the first customer and frontline people as the 2nd or 3rd or 5th or 10th.
So we say things like, well, you have to record this process that you do, let's imagine it's a check, or a risk assessment, or a pre-start, or a take five, or something like that, and you have to record it because we have to show the managers that you've done it. Now, that creates an interesting situation for us. I was about to use the word conflict.
Sometimes it creates conflict, but it certainly sends messages about, well, what does this organization think is important? We think that record keeping and showing other people who don't do the work, we think that's more important than the safety of the people who do the work. Can you see how that kind of unintentionally sets a priority about how people think this organization looks at health and safety?
- Yeah, for sure. It's yeah, being seen to be safe as opposed to focusing on being safe.
- If you think about Amazon, let's imagine you were going to buy a book off Amazon and you click the button, the buy now button, and they've done such a great job at making a seamless purchasing process. And then after you click the buy now button, it said, well, we're not ready to print your book yet because we're going to wait for the print run and someone's off sick and our economic situation isn't too good. So we might print it in a month's time, and maybe you'll get it another couple of weeks after that.
Imagine if that was the experience. It just doesn't make any sense, does it? And yet, I think in health and safety, when we think about it from a marketing point of view, we often come up with these nonsensical, unintended consequences of the work we do.
- I have some questions about...how you talked about customers, stakeholders, engagement, conversions, brand. I'm curious about how all of those layer, but I'm also curious about if you're creating these unintentional consequences, what then is the remedy for that?
So, you can answer whichever question you like first.
- Cool. Well, let's try and bring it to life with some examples. So we often talk about creating products and services in health and safety because we take an excluded opinion about that. So we say, well, OSHA standards says this, or the new ISO standard...you know, the international standard for health and safety is coming out.
So we'll just now put a strategy in place and we'll implement that. Now, that forgets the customer entirely. So what we are missing is an understanding of the context. Why does that make sense? Why does it strategically make sense to senior leaders? Why does it legally make sense? Why does it operationally make sense in terms of what else we've got going on in 2023 if that's what you want to add on to the plan?
And how is it going to help the people who are exposed to the risk, which is very much your point about those core customers in health and safety? So we talk then about, okay, well, we'll make sure that we consult with people now. Often we don't do nearly enough consultation with whoever it is that we're trying to help. And so what happens then is that we say something like, well, we wrote the procedure, we took it to the safety committee, they had no comments, and so then we've just had it approved, and now we're going to beat you with a stick through audits and all sorts of other things so that you have to now follow this new process.
That's not an uncommon and hopefully not unfair characterization of what happens. So, the intent is right, but the execution doesn't work. If you think about how Google does its customer experience, especially with digital products, it will take a device and it'll say, well, we want to create an app, for example. And even before they pick up a phone, they get a piece of paper and they draw a picture of a screen and they say, this is the first screen.
There are two buttons for you to select. Can you read what's on here? And we're not going to explain it to you, and you just pick which button you want to press. And then they hand them another piece of paper. And so it's a really low resolution, that's the kind of the terminology, you have to build anything fancy in order to work out how customers respond to what it is that you build. That is what really good consultation looks like.
That is what really good co-design looks like when you're trying to build a product or service that meets the needs of customers. At that point in time, people might be thinking, this is really complicated. I don't have time to do this. But my question is always, well, you spend a whole bunch of time and effort and angst and frustration and disappointment and tears at the back end when you're frustrated with people not following a really crappy process.
So there's this kind of product or service testing element to it as well, which goes well beyond just kind of standard consultation. So when we take any of these elements...so let's pick another example. Do you want to pick an example? Is there anything on the top of your mind? Well, how would this work with this [blah]?
- As you're saying it, I'm thinking of what I know about user research and the kinds of testing, you're right. Any good company that's building a digital product will have all kinds of testing. You wouldn't believe they'll A/B test one word on the button. You know, really, that's user-centric design, right?
That's what was coming to mind when you were saying that.
- Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the big objections that people often have with this is they say, yeah, but if we did that for everything, Andrew, we'd never get anything done. And that's probably true. A lot of safety functions are, you know, very heavily resourced. In fact, many of the listeners, I'm sure are the solo safe professional in their business. But that's not to say that you can't think about how this will work at a minimum viable level. So, a really good example is, let's say, for example, you're curious about safety processes that people will use in practice.
There's two ways that you could think about evaluating whether people just use the thing that you've created. One is you can ask them, you can observe, like you can go out and get direct information. But digitally, again, there's lots of cool things that people can do with very, very simple tools like Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint and things like that to see, well, how many people clicked on that link from your email?
How many people accessed that document over a period of time? At that point in time, then you can start to both gather some qualitative data and some quantitative data about the question that you're trying to answer in regards to that user experience, that customer experience.
- Okay. And you recommend doing both, I imagine?
- Well, I think they're just through suggestions, right? It really depends on your context. You know, so one of the best questions you can ask someone is in regards to the fit between products and services and how customers are behaving is you can say, if you had the choice, would you do this thing? So, just because someone is doing something, following a process, attending the training, or whatever, that doesn't mean that they're actually getting value out of it.
It doesn't mean that it meets their needs. So when you ask that question, you get a very, very difficult response. And so my argument is theoretically that we should head in the direction of saying, you don't have to do anything. We're going to give you a process that is so appropriate to your context, reflects your needs and desire that is co-designed with you that it'll be so good that you'll want to use it instead of having to use it.
Now, I appreciate that that doesn't always make sense in all contexts, but that's kind of the thought experiment that we want safety professionals to go through to kind of get uncomfortable and push the boundary.
- Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So let's move on to some of the other concepts. And one of them actually that fits pretty well is engagement. So backing up, in marketing terms, engagement can be a little bit nebulous. It's defined differently depending on what year are you talking about.
Even in, so say LinkedIn, you know, they've got engagement scores. Well, how do they measure that, right? It's the same for any social media. So in the context of health and safety, what does engagement mean?
- So the best answer that I got to this question only came to me last year. So I was talking to a senior executive about organizational learning because that's a particular area of focus for me in research. And we were talking about this question of engagement and he told the story that he came into a part of the organization, a very big one, where they had some real problems and they needed fixing up.
And one of those problems was low income. And he said to me, it's interesting how overcomplicate we make this engagement because if you've got a problem with engagement, then the solution is engagement. So instead of thinking about engagement as a thing, you can think about engagement as a doing word. So what does it mean for us to ask more questions, to be more patient, to involve more people, to get more feedback?
All of those things are forms of engagement as a doing word, as an activity, which then helps us actually increase engagement [inaudible]. And the interesting bit about that, that I've found in my work is when you combine that with the earlier uncomfortable question of, well, what if people got to choose whether they did it or not?
You've got an interesting opportunity with your change management program or your approach to change management. So it's very standard and I suppose logical that we would say, well, we have a new safety process training, whatever, audit program, and we're going to roll it out across our organization and we're going to do that over a period of time and we're just going to start at A and go through the Z, or whatever it is.
And yet, what if we actually had a look at the change and we said, what we'll do is we'll find the people who say, yes, I want to do this because I think that there's value. And they start doing it. And then you start telling other people that they're doing it. And you say to them, when you want to choose to start doing it, you can start doing it and we're here to help, but we're not going to make you do it, but we are going to report on whether you're doing it or not.
That's it. So there's just transparency. We're not actually forcing anyone. So again, you look at this idea of saying, well, let's actually think about engagement, we'll respond to those who engage with us, and then we get good feedback and good co-design and good process and it's kind of a very positive loop, an affirmative loop that you go through and you really quickly come up with stuff that's very nice, simpler, elegant, and user friendly.
And then the change starts to spread through the organization because ultimately, no one wants to make a lag. No one wants to be business unit or the site or the manager or the project team that isn't getting on board the ship getting on board program. So again, I've seen that work in lots of organizations where they're prepared to let go of pretending that you can do a planned management change and it always works because the research says it doesn't, it never does.
The failure rate is super, super high, especially for big and complex organizations. And so instead, let's actually take this more customer-centric approach and let the change be a little bit more emergent, and you get engagement at the beginning and then engagement also feeds the process as well. Does that make sense?
- It does. And I think a really valuable piece of information too would be finding...so there's always that first wave of early adopters, right? People who are eager to try something new. But the second wave and the third and the fourth, if you ask what changed your mind, or what would have to change that could change your mind, I think that would be useful information. And the other thing I'm thinking about is the difference between a customer and a stakeholder.
So do you want to talk about that a little bit?
- Yeah. Well, what do you think the difference is just without going to dictionary, what do you intuitively think the difference might be?
- Well, the customer is someone that you want to do something, take an action. We call that conversion in marketing. A stakeholder is someone who has skin in the game. Someone that...it's hard...in my mind, I'm like, "It's a stakeholder." It's someone who has to gain or to lose from whatever change is happening.
- Yeah. Yeah. So I hope this wasn't too much of a trick, Mary, that the answer really depends on people's context because the word customer and the word stakeholder mean different things to different organizations. So that's the first thought, the part of the answer. When I think about it, I very rarely use the word stakeholder because when you look through the frame of this marketing lens, we can say there's always a customer who we're trying to serve.
So the product or service either needs people who are going to give input, so they're people to be consulted but they might not be implementing the process, for example, they're still a customer because they still have needs that need to be met in some way, shape, or form. And the critical thing that defines a customer is they are a person who is going to engage in some form of transaction or engagement with the product or service. So that might be an approval or it might be, let's say, your health and safety program.
Well, we've got a big program that's going to roll out. We have senior managers who are largely not going to be doing the doing of the program, that they're going to be receiving data and reporting out of that. The data and reporting is a product or service that comes out of the program to which those senior managers are a customer.
So I tend to think that if a stakeholder...if you think a stakeholder is important enough, it almost outweighs a customer in the sense that you can fit them into this model. Product or service or multiple of those that meet one or more of their needs or wants, and that we want to see them engaging in some kind of transaction with them. Whether that's consuming information, giving us input, taking action, addressing failures or gaps, whatever it might be.
There's always a transaction that we're trying to engage a customer in because if they're not engaging in the transactions, in marketing speak, they're called a prospect or a lead. They're not in your book of business. You don't have a dollar from them. And at that point, they're a different kind of person. You still need to work on them actually getting to the transaction so that you can move them from being a potential customer to an actual customer.
- And that's the conversion, whatever...
- Yeah.
- Yeah. Whatever action it is they need to take. You mentioned earlier something when we last spoke about service. So what is the meaning of service in this context, being of service?
- This is such a good question. You know, when I use the word service, let's say, for example, we think about a health service, a hospital, emergency room as a health service, or when you go to the supermarket. When there was a checkout person who would process your grocery, that's different as a service to when you have a self-checkout, where there's just a computer screen and you do your own scanning.
In health and safety when we talk about services, most professionals get really confused, get stuck about what kind of service we're trying to create. I think it's one of the biggest opportunities for health and safety professionals because it goes beyond just the products. Like I said, we get stuck on the program, the procedure, the training, the tangible object, but we don't really think about what it means to serve other people.
Now, I get a surprising amount of pushback from people when I move from service as an activity to serving as a mode of operating or an attitude or professional attitude because people then go, "Oh, well, I'm not a servant. I'm not here to serve people."
I think it creates a power distance. Now, those work are all very, very similar, but I think the mindset needs to be that a business can run, whether you are in government, whether you are a non-for-profit, or whether you are in a for-profit business, that they can exist without us. And so if they can exist without us, then it's really important that we are clear on how we serve that, how we serve that.
And so at that point in time, then you can say, "Okay, well, what does good customer service look like?" So let me ask you this, Mary, what's the best example of customer service you can think of over your holiday period over the last couple of weeks? Is there anything that comes to mind?
- Oh, gosh. No. But yeah, we've...
- Bad customer service.
- Pardon?
- Bad customer service.
- I haven't much engaged in...well, okay, bad customer service. Okay. So we do an online grocery order, which we then pick up. And sometimes they don't have the things that I've specifically asked for, right? And you do have an option to check whether, is it okay if they make a substitution or is it not. And, you know, I asked for a particular type of orange.
I said, "Don't substitute. This is the only kind that I want." And I got a different one. And it's silly, but it sticks in my mind because I really wanted to try this new kind of orange that I'd never had before. Anyway, and they gave me just a standard naval orange. It is not worth it. So this is an interesting point too, is that so to me they're not being transparent. They haven't done their job well.
They've taken my money for something I didn't want.
- Yes.
- However, it's just an orange. Two oranges in this case. Two oranges. So the thing it brings me to is that I'm not going to confront, complain, or worry about it. And that I think is a scary thing in marketing when your customers are not satisfied and also not engaged enough to bother to tell you why.
- Yeah. It's one of the biggest problems because it's hidden and it's really, really hard to discover. So good service, bad service. Coming back to your question about what service actually looks like. There are a couple of things that I've picked up out of your story, which was that you had an expectation and not only did they not meet your expectation, they kind of did the opposite. So, we had substitution as an option or don't substitute.
You said don't substitute and they still substituted. Great irony in that, I think, in the sense that as a customer, you don't feel listened to. Now, without us blowing the orange example too far out of proportion, let's have a think about what that sounds like in health and safety. So if we say that the most important thing in health and safety is looking after the people who do the work, and so that they know that we care for them and that we want them to go home safely.
Then that is a question that we can use to frame what products and services are actually really helping. So do we care about you is a really good question. Well, do you feel like we care about you in X, Y, or Z? And so it's not unusual then that you can unravel that picture really, really quickly. So, if we say, well, it's really important that workers on, say, a big construction project go through an induction.
And so now these days, reputable companies will have inductions, which means that the client has an induction, the head contractor has an induction, the subcontractor has their own induction. And then there may be some other type of induction that's required depending on what's going on in the day. And sometimes those things overlap and sometimes they don't. And so then you have people who say, I was there to do a two-hour job and the inductions took four hours.
And so at that point in time, you've got a picture, kind of like your orange scenario of was this the kind of service that we want to offer. Now that starts to move into the territory of what the research talks about as safety. And there's some interesting stuff that, you know, you can use to start to unpick those kinds of challenges. But this question of services, well, how do we want to serve people?
How can we make sure that we put their needs first and are their needs being met? So, again, this is the basic marketing concept, which is, you know, is there a fit between what we are doing and what people say they want [inaudible]? And is there behavior reflecting that or feedback?
- What would you like listeners to take away from this? Like, what do you think would be the most useful way or maybe questions they could ask themselves in relating this to their own context?
- Cool. Okay. So I'm going to go through a specific list of points and they might pick a starting point, any of these starting points. And it doesn't really matter because it's going to be a useful discussion. So the first one is, where do you begin your work in health and safety? So do you go straight to I'm going to build a process, I'm going to build a program, I'm going to write a training, I'm going to type out a PowerPoint, or do you start by saying, who are my customers and what are their wants and needs?
You have a very, very different outcome, even when you start from those two different starting points. What that means is that you may have to let go of, or at least hold a little less tightly the products and services that we currently do in health and safety because if we're thinking about the starting point being the customers and their what's and their needs, we learn a whole lot more that
[inaudible 00:32:08] might look a little bit different. So that's the first one. Who are my customers and what are their problems or desires? Wants or needs? How do my solutions, my products or services fit with those wants or needs? So the fit is important because if the fit isn't there, then your transactions are going to be difficult.
You're going to be forcing people using KPIs and threats and big sticks instead of actually having people say, you know what? This makes sense. It's on point. It's not too complicated. I understand it. It's in a language I can understand. And then you'll see transactions happening.
The transaction might be, come to the training, fill out the process, give us your feedback, etc. Sorry, go ahead.
- What about a case where there isn't a fit because there's a requirement from outside? So, there's a regulatory requirement that the health and safety professional as part of their job has to ensure that everyone wears this particular kind of glove...or I don't know. Yeah.
So maybe there isn't a fit, right? There isn't a natural fit. How do you create that fit or do you?
- Well, you can't...this is not a magic process. So I'm thinking of a specific example where we had this discussion with an electrical power distributor. So they're not the guys that generate the electricity. They're the ones that get it from the big towers to the small towers to your house. And so they're often working on power poles in bucket trucks and sometimes climbing poles, let's say, these days.
And they're very close to these high voltage or low voltage conductors. And so they have a bunch of PPE which includes some very big, very thick insulated gloves. And they're insulated not just from physical abrasion, but from electrical conductivity. And so this piece of work we did with these electrical linesmen. I said, what's the most difficult part about your job or where you feel most conflicted?
And this is what they did. And I'm going to show you for the video. They went...so, two gloves, hand under the arm, and then pull it out because they had to use fine motor control, keep you up [inaudible]. So at that point in time, we had a really clear conflict between data that they had been given and their actual experience of getting the job done.
Now, I know that in Australia, it would be a very rare circumstance where that would happen because it's very unusual that there would be that level of prescription that it would be wildly inappropriate. Although it does happen. In the US, I know the legislation is far more prescriptive. That probably happen more often. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that if you go through this process and you're engaging people with the language of the product and the service and the fit and the transaction and are we getting what we want, then you can have a more constructive conversation with your leaders, your decision-makers, and the people who do the work about alternative ways to work on it.
Because ultimately, like I said, this is not magic. So we can't make the legislative requirement go away, and we probably can't change the process right now, but certainly, we can work on the problem together. And that is the core of what matters.
- I guess at the very least you would further define the issue and understand that dexterity is the issue. You know, they're not following this because they're being oppositional. There's a very practical reason for them not wanting to be wearing these.
- Yeah. Yeah. And the other interesting thing too is that if you want to open up this conversation, because again, this model doesn't give you answers, it opens up the conversation to arrive at the answers with your people. So if you think about that example of they're doing up and up but they're taking off of the, which is a total [inaudible], then you can say, is the behavior here reflecting a conversion, a transaction that is more innate of operations, productivity, or is it more [inaudible]?
So you can say that the motivation or the accountability or the context means that we actually prioritize operations of the safety [inaudible]. And again, that's not a judgment. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong, good or bad, but it's interesting if what we're trying to do is to have safe operations together.
- Right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So I interrupted you about questions that safety managers can ask. So please go on because that's kind of the meat.
- So, when we talk about marketing, often people think, oh, cool, this is going to help me write a better email or newsletter or safety email or something on the intranet or something like that. That is just one communications channel that fits within the overall marketing picture. And I certainly help people craft better communications as one part of their marketing of this, but you're not marketing health and safety.
You're marketing a specific product and service for a specific customer with a specific [inaudible 00:37:19]. And so you need all of those other pieces that we've talked about in order to work out what you're going to say and how you're going to say it, and is the communication channel appropriate? One of the most underutilized communication channels in organizations is SMS, is regular text messages because we say, "Oh, well, we communicate via email except most of the people in the field don't have emails."
So there you go, wow, we're in a tricky position now. But then when you discover that there are really effective crews and really effective communication going on, you'll find that they've got their own WhatsApp group or something like that. So they've come up with informal communication that gives you an opportunity to get those messages to people about products and services. So marketing isn't just about the message that that's another one, sometimes it takes time.
So one thing that marketing tells us is that when a new product or service comes out, often it takes a number of different repeat exposures to either the brand or the offer, the solution, before they make a decision about it. So just because they haven't engaged yet, doesn't mean that they're not going in the right direction.
So a little bit of patience helps here and repetition is important. Now, that's not shoving things down people's throats, but patiently, curiously, respectfully giving people stuff that's helpful because remember, we're trying to have a fit between what we're offering and what their wants and needs are. Means that you're better...you're more likely to get to a conversion, get to a transaction. Another one is make sure you are understanding, or tracking, or paying attention to what conversion or transaction looks like.
So like we said, is it access to information? Is it filling out a process? Is it attending training and telling other people about it? Or, you know, saying about whether they're going to use it on their job. If you come up with a new piece of equipment or safety protection or something like that, is it being used? Like, how many times on a shift is it being used?
Even on basic numbers, you can get or you can ask others to [inaudible] that help you answer the question of, are we getting good conversion out of our products and services? And then finally, probably two things that sit underneath this that we haven't really talked about so much just yet is what does customer service or support like? So, as a function, I think often what we do is we create products and services.
We don't think about the customers or their wants or needs and we shove it into the business and then there's very little support after that. We just hit them with a stick. We wonder why they're not liking safety, engaging with us, and doing what the process is. So we have to have to think about, well, what does support or service look like? And that could mean different things for different people.
So on a construction site, we know that the riskiest times are at the beginning and at the end. And so if we want to have a safety service that is providing customer service, then we need to have more resources or at least, you know, greater levels of support at those operational phases.
And there's probably similar examples for things like in manufacturing when there's a shutdown. You know, we need lots of eyeballs and lots of support, lots of hours of support. So we need to have a model for that. So your safety strategy isn't just your safety program or system, we need to think about, well, when and who needs our services and our support. Often we think about support in the context of incident response. So, you know, is there a phone number to call?
Do we know confidently that anyone at any point in time can get someone who will be able to guide them through the immediate steps in response to an incident? You know, that's a service question, support question. And then finally, feedback is really important. And this is the piece about not just doing the design of your services and products, but taking a step back and saying, well, how are we going more broadly?
What do people think about this? If you think about brands, this is more of a brand question that people get excited about Nike and what Nike believes in and what it stands for. People don't get excited about Hilton Hotels because they're just hotels and they're not really differentiated from Marriot or anyone.
And so if you think about that from a branding point of view, what is it like to be either a solo safety person or a safety function where our customers think that we're great, supportive, they'd miss us if we were gone, or they think we're a policeman that we get in the way, you know, that we have to bug them in order to get their attention as opposed to them calling us and saying, hey, can you come along to this meeting?
Can you give us something? Can you look at this contract? Can you look at this design? So there's a bunch of back loops that you can potentially put into this marketing process as well. I know that was really quick. How does that sound to you, Mary? You know what?
It sounds a lot like is systems design as well. You know, you're designing the system, but in this case or in this discussion, design is really the focus, right? It's not throwing something together and shoving it at people. It is designing or co-designing I think was the term that you used. Yeah. So, that's what occurs to me when you're saying that.
- Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's interesting because when you talk to safety professionals about systems thinking or design, sometimes it's a complicated, difficult concept to get. But this model I've found...I've tested it and it works really well. And I might tell you a quick story if you like.
It involves tiers, the tiers of the safety profession. Actually, there's two stories. They're related. So in one workshop, we go through this process and we kind of paint a picture, we put it up on the board and I let the group decide where they want to go first. And we start to peel back the layers of this model. And it's all using their context and their example. So the reason why this model is so good is because it's pressure tested by real professionals.
So I don't know what they're going to say to me when they're like, "Well, Andrew, what about this situation?" And they kind of almost poke me in the chest and I say, great, let's [inaudible]. And I love your question there. I've never had the question before about now what if there's a legal requirement and it doesn't fit? So that's helping. So anyway, so I'm in this workshop and someone says, so I've got this time with our executive team and it's been pretty difficult for me to get time with them.
And so it's great progress, but I need to work out how I'm going to spend the time with them. So I'm thinking about this marketing model, here's my ideas. So they're starting on the right-hand side of the diagram, which is the products and the service within the 90 minutes. And I said, great, so there are your ideas. How do you think that that fits with your customer's wants or needs? And I asked very simple question, which is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you've got it right?
And he said, "Oh, 5." And I'm like, "Great, time to get on the phone." So in this workshop, I say, get on the phone, you've identified who the key stakeholders is. In this case, it was the CEO. And I said, "Call the CEO." And you've got a minute to explain it to them. It doesn't take that long.
And just say, "Do you think that this will meet your needs and the needs of exec in the 90 minutes?" And he came back into the room and he looked like a ghost. And he said, "Oh my God, I cannot believe how thoroughly wrong I was." I was going in and he was emphatic about going totally in the wrong direction, would've absolutely stuffed it up.
And so with one simple conversation about the concept of the service he was trying to offer and the wants and needs of the customers, he was able to calibrate what they were going to do in that session and had a great time as a result. And in that same workshop, his name was Mark, another lady called Leanne was in tears at the prospect of having to actually validate what they thought at the prospect of being wrong.
And so I suppose the big takeaway out of that story is that as professionals, we are proud of what we do. And there's no doubt that we have unique and specific and valuable knowledge to add to our organizations. That this isn't about being right or wrong, this is about actually getting results. And so when you follow this model, when you understand your customers, have a good seat between your product and services, and you're seeing the transactions happen and you're adjusting when it's not happening, then that's the best way of being right in the world.
And you didn't have to have the solution in the first place.
- That brings me to one...it's not the last question, but you said that this is a work in progress. Personally, I think all models are. But are there areas or original ideas, places that you started with this model, and then as you said, you pressure tested it where it didn't stand up to the pressure and where changes needed to be made?
- Yep. Absolutely. I certainly, as I said, I started with this as just a straight cycle, like a circle that starts at one point and goes around to the end. So one of the things in trusting the concepts and how they relate to each other is I realized that it was far too linear because the circle is just a straight line that's joined together at each end. And so now the model is a little bit more convoluted, where it's a little bit like a snakes and ladders game where you kind of have a starting point, sometimes you go down and sometimes you go up.
So the relationship between the items or the concepts we've talked about and the way that I represent them and communicate them is certainly one of the things that's changed. I earlier on didn't...so if you think about a customer as an object, so I need your feedback and I'm going to ask you specific questions and then I'm going to take that feedback and I'm going to do something with it.
That's very different from...and a lot of customer surveys are like that. I'm sure you felt a bit ignored and unseen when you got that orange that you weren't looking for, despite the fact [inaudible] with them using their process of that grocery store. And so instead of thinking about customers as objects that we need to just get information out, we absolutely have to think about them as subjects.
And this is a philosophical perspective. We need to think about the relationship that we have with them. That ties in with things like trust, like Clive Lloyd has talked about on the podcast before. So what does it mean for us to actually build trust and have a relationship with these key customers? You can't have a relationship with all of our field workers.
That's impractical in most organizations. So then you have to ask yourself, well, what do I want that relationship to look and sound like? Is that something that my field advisors need to have, or do we just need to have a reputation even though they don't know my name? But anything that's associated with safety is nice and useful and helpful. Easy to understand.
People listen when we give feedback, that's a brand question. But that contributes to the relationship they have with the safety people or the safety function. So relationship's definitely one. Definitely, I continue to play around with the concept of both the transaction or the conversion and what I call fulfillment.
So it's easy to say you didn't get your orange because you said no substitute. And one final area of the model that I continue to wrestle with is the concepts of the transaction or the conversion. So that's did they fill out the process? Did they come to the training, whatever it is? And this idea of fulfillment.
So fulfillment is, so if we use the Amazon example, we click a button and they print a book or they have something physically in a warehouse and then they put it in a box and put it on the pallet, and put it in a truck, and then it comes to our home. So this idea of fulfillment really ties in with what does service delivery look like in safety? So, you know, a really good example of where I think fulfillment in safety isn't very good is that like we know that if we go upstream in our planning and design processes, we get better safety outcomes.
So that's in physical design, but it's also in things like strategy and, say, mergers and acquisitions in large businesses, or commercial aspects like if we are going to be engaging in new contracts or big tenders.
You know, all of those things, they're at the blunt end. It's not where the tools and the electricity and the hazards are, but we could actually have huge impact for various methods at those upstream areas. And I think in some sense, yeah, fulfillment of service delivery. So we might say we have a procedure in our program that says we need to do a safety and design review, for example, but I very rarely see that done well.
And I think in part that's because we don't fulfill that properly as professionals. So if design or contracts or tenders or whatever is really important, do you have a role dedicated to that in your organization? I think that's a big area that I continue to wrestle with and I think is a massive opportunity.
- Interesting. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I have some questions that I ask every guest at the end. So this one's the University of Andrew. If you were to develop training for tomorrow's safety professionals, what human relationship or core skills do you think would be the most important to teach?
- I think it's got to be something around humans and relationships. So not psychology, but maybe drawing on psychology. I think we need to learn more about empathy. I think we need to learn more about anthropology in terms of how humans have evolved and interact with each other.
I think we need to learn more about comedy and how human needs to play a part. I think, especially in the health and safety game, we need to know more about the human aspects of death and injury. We treat those things like statistics as opposed to a human experience. So I don't know what that discipline is. I think it's pretty multi-disciplinary, but I think in the University of Andrew, it would be understanding and engaging with humans and relationships.
- Wow, that's a tall order, but I think it's badly needed. Badly needed. If you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career, what is one piece of advice that you might give to yourself?
- You don't have to be right. And you need to be more curious. Those two pieces...or sorry, the opposite of those two pieces caused no end of stress and anxiety to me early on in my career because I really misunderstood what my job was and I was told to have the answers and tell people what to do.
And that just has proven lot to be useful in my experience.
- I think I can say, you know, people who are listening to the podcast are curious, so that's a good thing. How can our listeners learn more about some of the topics that we talked about today? Are there any particular books or resources that you would recommend?
- Well, a selfless plug, the "Safety on Tap" podcast is the podcast that I host. And I use that podcast as a way to explore some of these concepts with guests, as well as my own reflections. So it's really cool in the sense that we get to have interesting, curious, open conversations, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes there's disagreement, which is great learning and I think very important for professionals.
But my personal reflections where it's me sharing insights out of my work and my experience, it's a little bit voyeuristic. So you kind of get to take a peek into like a fly on the wall and take a peek into the experiences of other health and safety professionals I get to work with. So I think that's a pretty cool resource.
In terms of marketing and sales-related stuff, there are so many experts out there talking about it. It's not funny, but two that I really like. One is Dan Pink, and he wrote a book called "To Sell is Human" that is very aligned with a number of the concepts that I'm talking about here.
And the basic idea is that we're all in sales. And the second one is Seth Godin, and he wrote a book called "This Is Marketing." Anything he creates is amazing, I think, but book, "This Is Marketing" is really a book about changemakers, and I think that's the business that we're in, we're changemakers.
- And if our listeners want to reach out to you or find you on the web, how should they do that?
- So you can go to my website and there's ways to get in touch with me there. But otherwise, it's probably easier for a lot of people if you're on LinkedIn just connect with me on LinkedIn. I have no robots or no staff members doing any of that. I love conversing with people on LinkedIn, so I'd love to have people reach out.
- Great. Well, that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us, Andrew.
- Thank you. It's been awesome.
- And thanks to our listeners. As of the day we're recording this episode, we've had over 12,000 downloads and we couldn't do it without your support. And speaking of support, I would like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team, the engine that powers this train and keeps it on track. Bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.
Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.
