Speaker: Scott McMillan, Director of Safety, Melbourne Park
Modernising and simplifying safety
If you are looking for ways to improve your safety presence and processes, Scott McMillan delivered some great advice and suggestions in his presentation.
It was information-packed and thoroughly engaging due to his rich experience in different workplaces and situations. He is currently Director of Safety at Melbourne Park, a site which contains six huge venues for elite sports, concerts and major entertainment events. Before a career in safety, he worked as an electrician and instrumentation technician in a range of places, including Antarctica!
Supported by examples, videos and illustrations, Scott’s talk offered some useful and fresh perspectives on how to approach and manage safety. Importantly, it also showed how to adopt emerging technologies when preparing safety information and training, making them more accessible. His first advice was to establish a strong safety brand in your workplace: the message is to make it all about the work and meet your audience where they are.
There were some good basic tips and ideas on safety communications, as well as the eye-opening statistic from studies that show around 44% of adult Australians are not operationally literate. Therefore, it is crucial to present material that people both want to, and are able to, read. There was also some fantastic advice on how to make board papers pack a bigger punch.
Scott emphasised the importance of decluttering safety, to prioritise and distil what can amount to many dozens of safety procedures, hundreds of pages and countless thousands of words, often written in language and references that are a challenge to follow.
Some take-home messages from Scott's impressive presentation were: make your system easy to use, not easy to audit; fix the work, and safety will happen; chase safety in isolation and you will get paperwork, not results.
As a complement to Scott's talk, financial members may like to re-visit the presentation by John Ansley from Knowby in October last year: AI know-how and OHS (log in first).
View Presentation & Full Event Video
members only, please login first.
