Ep070: Finding the H, and where to start with wellness, with Nat Boehm

Today I’m joined by Natalie Boehm, the Health and Wellness Manager at Snowy Hydro, Australia’s largest hydro-electricity generator, supplying almost 40% of Australia’s renewable electricity. With operations spanning three states and some pretty remote areas, Snowy is a pretty unique kind of business.

Nat will be speaking at the 2018 OHS Leaders Summit which is being held on the 7th and 8th March in the Gold Coast on the topic of health and wellness and the all important question of how to decide what to focus on. The OHS Leaders Summit is the only event in Australia specifically designed for the Group Heads of health, safety and wellbeing. It offers a unique combination of standout speakers, industry thought leaders, networking and personalised meetings with the leading suppliers of products and services, meaning you can leverage the best of what’s out there to help your health, safety and wellbeing programs succeed. Visit ohsleaders.com.au to find out more and get your seat – spots are limited.

Here’s Natalie:

Some people suggest I don’t ask tough enough questions. I dug deeper on that today, did I create some discomfort for you? I’d love to hear what you thought.

Before my takeaways, I wanted to talk about name calling. Some people recently have started calling me names, but in a good way. Two of them are innovative, and pioneering. I’m not big on fancy adjectives, but it does give me some insight into how people perceive my mission and how I go about it. One of the things I like to do, is break the pattern, to help people see what new & different might look like when it comes to you and your teams performance. If you have an annual strategy session, planning days, internal conferences, professional development workshops, or if you have none of these but want some help to boost the effectiveness of your team, I’ve got plenty of value to offer, and guarantee it will not be your standard boring presentation, training or workshop. If you are ready to move away from your status quo to something better, send me an email, andrew@safetyontap.com and let’s see what we can do together.

Here’s my takeaways from that chat with Nat Boehm:

Takeaway #1: Where’s the H in your health and safety practice? I might have sounded critical when we were discussing the absent H, believe me I’m not, I am one of those health and safety people who has been traditionally biased towards safety, because that’s what I was more familiar, more confident, and more competent in. The role of a leader is not to do everything yourself, but to lead the people who can do what they are best at. So if health is not your strong point, and it needs a boost in your organisation, be a leader by working on executive support, and either delegating the doing to specialists, or developing that capability internally.

Takeaway #2: Are the humans at the centre of what you do? Traditional health and safety, and arguably traditional approaches to work, try and standardise & systematise everything, which means the humans aren’t seen, heard, and treated as individuals. It’s a bit of a paradox that we need standardising and systematising, but your job as a leader is to preserve the focus on individuals humans too.

Takeaway #3: Data helps decisions. Again this might seem like a paradox when we talk about preserving focus on individuals, but having qualitative and quantitative data about the health of the workforce overall helps you identify your priorities, to engage your organisations leaders and to get the resources required to make a measurable impact on the health of your workforce. I still see well meaning fruit bowls and stock-standard EAP programs all over the place, which help us feel like we’re doing something, but are usually as effective as painting everything at your workplace in safety yellow or orange. We can do better than that. Data helps decisions.

Until next time, what’s the one thing you’ll do to take positive, effective or rewarding action, to grow yourself, and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Seeya!