Let’s make safety information more interesting in 2017

During 2017, I want to see the status of safety being lifted up. Often the reality is that safety is seen as a drag that makes things more complicated. One reason for the negative feeling is the way safety is communicated, or stuffed to people’s face. If organizations want to engage people in safety, safety information needs to bring value and give more positive than negative feelings. Information needs to be much more interesting.

We aim to solve safety management problems step by step. In my opinions, there’s three main issues to be solved in order to make safety information more interesting:

1. Information needs to be more personal
2. Information needs to be more timely
3. People need to be able to affect and react to the safety information

To make safety communication more interesting to me, I want it to affect where I get emails or notifications. In addition, I would like to choose when and where I can view the information. As an example, last summer I received an emergency warning via TV about a bear that was spotted over 300 km away from my location. It’s exactly the same within a large global organization – not all important stuff are relevant to us all.

When I look into the information in more detail, I want it be personal and more relevant to me in terms of location, interest and my own preferences. It means that I want to affect directly to the information flow that I receive. In the old world, it has been either a safety manager or some other distant person that makes the decisions for me about what would be relevant to me and what safety information I should see. Often this approach is doomed to failure when people get irrelevant updates about whatever incidents or regulations.

The latest release to NordSafety is about giving people a chance to affect to safety information flow.  NordSafety users can now choose from which processes they get notification emails. They can subscribe to status changes or just decide to follow all new near miss reports from their own site. If a person prefers, it’s also possible to unsubscribe from all emails. That too, is a choice that must be possible, even though we hope it won’t happen very much. It’s a big deal for many of us who are flooded with irrelevant emails already.

Last year I wrote about how boring safety information was. Now, I sincerely hope that the year 2017 will make safety more engaging, and through more interesting safety information, more and more leaders will be able to lift the status of safety in their organizations.