Ep203: Stop talking about health and safety, with Rob Kirkwood

Safety on Tap

Why on earth would you remove the words health and safety, in order to improve health and safety?

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap.

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

My guest today is Rob Kirkwood. Rob is a health and safety professional with some pretty cool work experiences including as an alpine guide, industrial abseiler, a fisheries ranger and spent a few years working in Antarctica.

But what I think is most cool about Rob's work, is that he's figuring out how to improve health and safety by removing those words from his company's vocabulary. How's that make sense, I hear you wonder? Well, Rob will fill you in, but it starts with his realisation that there was just too much bad stuff associated with the words health and safety, and on the flip side a huge opportunity to refocus his leaders and people on organisational performance.