Today I’m chatting with Sally McMahon. This episode is made possible by Safety on Tap Connected the world’s first professional growth accelerator for health and safety professionals.
If you are invested in your own development and improvement and not just happy with ambling along in your career, this is right for you. For the price of about 3 coffee’s a week, you can accelerate your development and your effectiveness with access to an amazing learning community, educational content like you’ve never been taught before, and you get 1:1 online coaching with me – your personal coach to help you accelerate your growth. This combination of development support would usually be out of reach of most health and safety professionals, which is the very reason why we developed it – so it would be within your reach. If you want to know more, hop into your browser now and type safetyontap.com/connected. Once you are there you can hop on our no-obligation waiting list so over a few email I can fill you in on how it all works to see if it’s right for you. That’s safetyontap.com/connected

Sally McMahon first said hello to me when she sent a message saying ‘Loving listening to your podcast, love your people-centred approach’. You’ll figure out that we have that in common not least of which because her title at Fit for Work Australia is the Chief Health Evangelist. Sally is also the creator and host of only podcast I know of in the world focussed just on work health, safety and wellness, the Fit for Work Podcast. But as you’ll hear in the interview, Sal is far from a zealot – she knows her stuff, she gets into the business case straight up, there isn’t any fluff about it yet she has an infectious passion for better people and great workplaces.

Sally will be sharing her insights and practical tips to create a dream workplace at the 2018 Safetyscape convention, part of the new events offering from the Safety Institute of Australia on from the 22nd to 24th of May in Melbourne. The inaugural #SAFETYSCAPE Convention will enable an array of organisations to assemble as the largest gathering of Health & Safety Industry professionals across a program of events, workshops, forums and the Safety Institute of Australia’s own two day National Health & Safety Conference: In Practice along with the Workplace Health & Safety Show. But don’t forget, as I’ve been saying for a while – most of your learning and in turn performance will come from social and experiential learning – so whilst the knowledge you will gain will be great, it’s even better to meet new peers and strengthen relationships with your network, share stories and reflections from your own experience.
Visit safetyscape.com.au to find out more and get your ticket.

Here we go:


 

If you need to DIY a bit more health and wellness capability for yourself, and give it a boost in your organisation, check out Sally’s excellent podcast which you can find anywhere you listen to mine, and of course there’s the audio and a boatload more at fitforworkaustralia.com.au

Here’s my three takeaways from that chat with Sally:

Takeaway #1: Know the business case, use the business case, be the business case for health and wellness! Sally jumped right out of the gates with some pretty compelling figures. Two that stood out were the productivity of physical workers with 5 cardiovascular risk factors (half as productive as those with only 2) and Sal later shared with me the ROI on mental health initiatives, more than double your return. If you aren’t proactively leading something in this space, you aren’t just not managing a risk, the business is effectively loosing money without it.

Takeaway #2: Sally and I often talk about the need for us to create options for people to choose – done-for-you, done-with-you, and do-it-yourself, like we did just now. I love that Sal had a good spread of these in the interview, anyone can start with the DIY steps without any excuses, but some of you with bigger organisations and budgets may get help, in the form of specialist health advisors or even employing people with a health background to lead the strategy. Knowing what you can do to get started, and when to get help, is a great attribute of an action-oriented leader.

Takeaway #3: This is an in-between the lines lesson for me, and it goes to the way Sally has put together her conference presentation and the tips she shared today. Sally is without a doubt accomplished to give advise about creating workplaces for improved health and wellness – that’s her speciality, her profession. But instead of just giving Sally’s point of view, she has curated the best of the best from her podcast guests to share even bigger, deeper and arguably better insights. Dave Wild from episdoe 66 talked about this as super-human intelligence – learning from one person alone can be great, from many is better. Social and experiential learning at it’s best, what a great lesson for Sally to teach us.

I’d love to hear from you, let me know what your favourite episode is, what you’ve taken action on, or what I can do better. Send me an email or hit me up on Linkedin.

As promised, Sally has shared her excellent Ageless Workplace Toolkit  a punchy resource to help you embrace the changing demographics of the workforce.

We also discussed the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) which Sally has found helpful, which you can learn more about here and here, and The Wellness Wise Practitioners programs offered by the Wellness Wise Academy.  

And you can also download my personal hand-written reflection notes, a reflection template you can use to boost the learning you get from listening, and the full transcript of this episode! Grab any and all of these resources simply by popping your details down below.

Thanks so much for listening, I really appreciate you being part of the learning journey. 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!

Here’s your FREE download of:
– my handwritten notes, PLUS a reflection template for you to use for this episode.
AND
– The full transcript of this episode.

I’ll also send you the links to all the available back-catalogue of reflection templates and transcripts so you can access these at any time.