Executive Success: Finishing what Tana started

"If you're there with safety, you're there on everything else," says Contact Energy's Tania Palmer. Photo / Mark Mitchell

High-profile campaign took company only so far to safety.

Name: Tania Palmer
Role: General manager, health,
safety and environment
Employer: Contact Energy

On the face of it, Contact Energy looked to be nailing health and safety.

Former All Black Tana Umaga had fronted a hugely successful campaign asking the company's staff to "stay safe, mate" while on the job.

Its injury record had steadily improved and staff scored health and safety as a real strength.

But when Tania Palmer stepped into the role of general manager, health, safety and environment in 2013, she knew that health and safety at the power generator and retailer had gone off the boil.

The injury rate was starting to plateau and systems and procedures designed to protect staff were actually stifling health and safety efforts.

While the Umaga campaign had lifted awareness, bureaucracy was threatening to undermine the headway made, Palmer, 46, says.

"That's a really hard one because there's a sweet spot somewhere in there.

"If you go too far, actually you're less safe because you confuse people, you overwhelm them.

"Which one of the 20 documents do you actually want them to adhere to?"

But the reality was that between spinning turbines, power lines, LPG tankers, geothermal wells, on-the-road sales staff and calls from cranky customers, there were risks across the business.

One way to mitigate those risks was to create procedures.

Palmer needed to find that careful balance between stripping back the procedure while still keeping people safe.

Getting the shift right was about doing what she describes as experiments: big enough to make people feel uncomfortable but small enough that if it didn't work, it wouldn't have a massive effect across the organisation.

"Rather than convincing my colleagues that I needed a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of time to go out and do this big bang initiative, I just had to convince them to let me have some conversations with people at the sharp end and talk to them about it and then convince leaders to try a little change in their approach."

It's a classic culture change technique, admits Palmer, but it has worked so well that Contact had a 55 per cent improvement in its main safety indicator in the 2015 financial year and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is knocking on her door.

The first of Palmer's experiments saw her rejig the corporate health and safety functions, and caused some nervousness.

Instead of head office-based health and safety technical staff dictating initiatives, Palmer created new roles focused on engaging and communicating with health and safety experts on the ground within the business.

"What that allowed us to do was we used them a lot more, whereas previously in the rollout of corporate-type organisation-wide initiatives around health and safety, we haven't talked to them terribly much."

There was a shift in focus from counting incidents, which encouraged under-reporting, to looking more broadly at the capacity of the business to manage incidents and reduce the harm - something Palmer describes as successfully failing.

A survey conducted a year ago found executives gave themselves four out of five when asked if they dealt with incidents in a fair and reasonable way.

Staff, however, only marked them one out of five, which was a bit of a wake-up, says Palmer.

In the shadow of the Pike River Mine explosion, there is more emphasis on business leaders to understand and manage the risks in their business.

"As a director or as an executive you have a huge influence on the environment that your sharp end work in," says Palmer.

"You determine strategy, you influence funding, you influence what's important and what's a priority for the company.

"That shapes the environment so strongly but you can't understand the risks and the hazards and how well we're controlling them if you just look at data on a bit of paper in the boardroom." Palmer, who is also a director of Liquigas, says the data needs to be backed by getting out in the business - not a "royal visit", but talking to the staff on the job.

"Ask them stuff about what they're doing: are they tired? Are they stressed? Do they have what they need to do the job? Have they got the right tools and resources?

"Really get in and have chats with them." She says some directors are wary of getting too far into the business, "which is a valid concern because you don't want as a director to go out and look like you're interfering in the management of a business, but by golly, you can't understand the risks and controls without talking to people and hearing their stories."

Now Palmer is preparing for a time when she steps back as the need for her role diminishes.

"We talk about our journey to a generative safety culture and a lot of leaders in the business are telling me: gee, this isn't just about safety, this is just generative culture.

"If you're there with safety, you're there on everything else."