July 2009 Safety Message:

Our People – and Our Most Important Asset

Our employees can become more committed if they have a voice in establishing work goals and controlling safety. Today’s workforce want to contribute to worthwhile objectives and they want to be part of a mission and a business that carries core guiding principles and values to empower, encourage, inspire and motivate them to be their best. We need to manage by principle rather than enforcement and long lists of rules and regulations.

Through employee empowerment and having our workers engaged, we have combined the decision making process. Our primary focus is employee behaviour and attitude change. We must acknowledge our employees can perform the job safely provided they receive the proper training. Setting our targets high (zero harm) and management expecting (holding accountable and we are all responsible) high achievements in safety may have a better and far reaching effect on our workforce employees in terms of safety and subsequent production.

Safety must be considered a human value versus a priority. We need to ensure there is no conflict between safety and production. If we value safety, and values outrank priorities, then all tasks will be performed safely. Through good management, the choice between safety and production should not exist.

As we move forward our continued approach must not deviate from the human element (our people). Our focus in our efforts towards safety improvements must be our people. How well we train (coach and mentor), educate (invest) and how we treat (care) our people is far more important than the actual work itself and these will help us achieve the results we expect in safety today.

We need to continue to foster personal ownership and ensuring our employees buy in to the safety culture and perhaps one day every employee in this company and across all our projects will say “I am responsible for safety” and “I am accountable”.