Empowering our people to drive safety

14/10/2021

Michelle Oberg’s approach to safety is all about empowering our people.

Rather than focusing solely on systems and procedures, Michelle applies her background in psychology to engage our people to help improve safety and performance results.

Instead than telling people what to do, her approach is to engage them and ask how to do it better.

“We employ capable and competent people – they should be part of solution, not part of the problem,” says Michelle, who is the Human Operational Performance Manager, in Downer’s Utilities business.

 “A lot of work has been done on engineering Critical Risk Controls, but it is still humans who make the decision. We should empower people to improve and make the right decisions.

“As an industry, our lag indicators have plateaued, so to get different results we need to try different things.”

With a focus on humanising safety, Michelle has proactively and collaboratively shifted Utilities’ approach to safety from purely traditional methods to one that includes progressive safety theories, ideas and applied.

The results speak for themselves – with our Utilities team recording both safety and operational improvements.

Michelle has also been rewarded for her work by winning the Best Individual Contribution to Work Health and Safety category in the Queensland Return to Work Awards 2021.

Michelle’s approach has been to develop, test, and implement a human-centred framework to improve organisational and safety performance in three core areas — enabled people, enabling systems, enabling leadership.

She has been able to apply her philosophy by engaging with all levels of the business, from the Senior Leadership Team to frontline workers, to make meaningful changes that have a sustained impact. Michelle’s approach allows for input, feedback, insights, knowledge, and expertise of our people to have an impact on the way workers view safety.

Some of the ways she achieved this was through:

• Discovery tour — to identify strengths and opportunities in the business
• Leadership sessions — to shift to a proactive approach to safety
• Safety workshops — to engage with staff
• Young worker professional development — to provide networking opportunities.

But that's not all that makes Michelle an industry leader in safety.

As her Downer colleagues tell us, “Michelle’s support in turning our culture from compliance-based to psychological-based safety cannot be underestimated. Without her assistance, we could not have achieved the improvements in our management and field attitudes to safety, the reduction in significant physical and mental health injuries, and the development of an amazing tool to interact with our remote workforce.”