Positive Safety – Conversation Corner

Conversation Corner – Another Positive Safety Story

Well I’m on a bit of a high right now………just witnessed a group of real safety people jump in and totally shutdown a safety spud head debate on LinkedIn and now this positive story comes in from Rob Sams in response to this article: Isn’t Safety Supposed to be a Positive Thing

James Ellis and I do work for Harris Farm Markets, a family owned fruit and veg retailer in NSW. They recently held their Employee Conference which runs over 4 days. This allows as many of the 1400 employees as possible to come along to one of their days.

The whole focus of the conference is sharing, learning and getting to ‘know’ people.

The conference is run like a trade show with suppliers and internal departments each having stalls where the employees can come around and chat, share ideas, experiences and ask questions.

People get to touch, feel, smell and taste the products which is great.

We were asked to host a ‘safety’ stall. So after a great conversation one night with the gang from Cohort 2 from the Post Grad course in Social Psychology, we came up with the idea of Conversation Corner.

James and I made coffee for people each day, it was a great way to start a conversation. We had no Agenda, we had no forms, no lectures, no PowerPoints, just great conversations. People shared loads of things including ideas of how to improve safety and some even reported injuries. Some, just chatted about how good a day they were having. Funny how ‘safety’ can be a topic of conversation, when you don’t call it ‘safety’.

It was an awesome week!

Cheers,

ROBERT SAMS

Director

P:    0424 037 112

E:     robert@dolphyn.com.au

W:   dolphyn.com.au

M:    PO Box 994, Newcastle NSW 2300

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Rob Sams

Owner at Dolphyn

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Rob is an experienced safety and people professional, having worked in a broad range of industries and work environments, including manufacturing, professional services (building and facilities maintenance), healthcare, transport, automotive, sales and marketing. He is a passionate leader who enjoys supporting people and organizations through periods of change. Rob specializes in making the challenges of risk and safety more understandable in the workplace. He uses his substantial skills and formal training in leadership, social psychology of risk and coaching to help organizations understand how to better manage people, risk and performance. Rob builds relationships and "scaffolds" people development and change so that organizations can achieve the meaningful goals they set for themselves. While Rob has specialist knowledge in systems, his passion is in making systems useable for people and organizations. In many ways, Rob is a translator; he interprets the complex language of processes, regulations and legislation into meaningful and practical tasks. Rob uses his knowledge of social psychology to help people and organizations filter the many pressures they are made anxious about by regulators and various media. He is able to bring the many complexities of systems demands down to earth to a relevant and practical level.