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Generation Y-ine Skiing, samba, sailing and safety SOPHIE PREECE
SOME PEOPLE assume Amy Richards’ life is “pretty boring”, in keeping with her job description. Giesen’s senior health and safety advisor surely wouldn’t have skied neckhigh powder on black diamond trails in Japan, for example, or crewed a boat down Australia’s coastline. Nor would she have danced the Samba on a float in Rio’s Sambadrome in 2018, amid a crowd of 90,000. “People think we are really risk averse,” laughs the former ski instructor, whale watching tour guide and seahorse breeder, who is currently forging plans to sail around the world. That’s just one of the many incorrect assumptions she faces in a new era of workplace wellness. “Effective health and safety is so much more than procedures, compliance, and checklists,” says the passionate purveyor of carebased infrastructure in the workplace, and one of three finalists in the Practitioner of the Year category of the New Zealand Workplace Health & Safety Awards. “It’s about understanding how work is done, empowering and engaging staff, knowing what activities have value, and measuring what matters.” Raised in Taupo, Amy studied biological science at Canterbury University, then followed her passion to train as a ski instructor, before four back-to-back winter seasons in New Zealand, Japan and Canada. Fifteen years on, in a role dedicated to employee care, she can’t recall anyone mentioning health and safety to ski instructors on any of the fields. By 2007 Amy was craving a summer, so moved to Hervey Bay in Australia for a season on a whale watching boat, catching the “amazing” humpback whale migration. She met her now-husband Luke Hodgson there, and shelved plans to return to Japan’s ski season, instead crewing the boat back to Melbourne, and getting a job in a lab making home testing kits for grape growers on the Mornington Peninsular. That “taster” of the wine industry was soon replaced with marine work, starting with a public aquarium in Tasmania, where they also bred seahorses and sea dragons for use in university studies. In 2009, Amy moved to an aquarium technician role at a regenerative medicine institute at Monash University in 26 / Winepress September 2020
“People think we are really risk averse.” Amy Richards Melbourne, “which is like being a cellar hand for fish”. As the facility was new, she was given the task of implementing the university’s health and safety procedures, opening a whole new career path. When Amy and Luke decided to move to Darwin, with no aquarium work on the horizon, she called on her new skill set, working as a health and safety administrator for a large construction project. In that role, as well as others in civil construction, dredging, maritime logistics, and oil and gas, she found health and safety was largely based on fear. “Historically and in my experience, it has been about looking for what goes wrong, or who is doing the wrong thing, and then disciplining that person.” That can lead to employees being “terrified” of a misstep, so that while the surface shows compliance, the reality is simply a culture of secrecy and non-reporting, Amy says. She has welcomed the development of Safety II in recent years, with its focus on caring for people, working to
