New Year’s Resolution

If you’ve invested time, effort and a fair slice of the SHE budget delivering training but are feeling a bit frustrated because although awareness levels are up improvements are hard to realise and getting people to be proactive is harder still – then we’d like to suggest a New Year’s Resolution for 2018!

Now we realise, for many people, the end of October is far too early to be talking about XMas let alone the New Year – but if you’re the person or team planning post-holiday Back to Work sessions, you’ve got half an eye on January anyway.  So this got us thinking – isn’t this a real opportunity to do something different once teams are back on site after the holidays and, at the same time, kick-off 2018 in a way that starts to accelerate the return on investment for the safety training you’ve already done?

In many ways finding something different to do for your Back to Work sessions (so they still engage, energise and don’t feel like ground-hog day) and trying to ensure your ongoing SHE training delivers sustainable change and improvement might feel like very different problems.  But it occurs to us here at 2macs, that one of the approaches we’ve been developing with some of our clients might just kill two birds with one stone so we thought it was worth sharing!

The Taskforce Challenge has been developed as a way of activating front-line teams in a way that makes use of the safety training people have already had, engages the rest of the workforce and gets ‘boots on the ground’ solving problems so people are making changes rather than talking about issues.  It’s proved a great way of energising the team and making a difference on some of those niggling challenges like housekeeping and whilst it works at any time of year, but is a great way to structure your January Back to Work sessions.

So our advice is don’t get someone in to present some inspirational words to the teams as they return from the festivities; posters, slogans and effervescent presenters have their place – but how much difference to they make and for how long?  Instead get boots-on-the-ground solving practical problems, but in structured way so people can both understand what they are doing in the broader context of a safety improvement plan, and can replicate the approach going forward.

 If you’d like to talk through how to make “getting the teams to be proactive and actually tackle the niggles and problems that haven’t away” your New Year’s Resolution for 2018, then get in touch.

But regardless of whether you need our help and support or not, we’d urge every business that undertakes this kind of activity each year, not to miss this opportunity to do something different that has an impact way beyond the early weeks of 2018… you wouldn’t want this to go the way of all those other New Year’s Resolutions would you?!