5 minute read
Generation Y-ine Amy Richards
Generation Y-ine
Skiing, samba, sailing and safety
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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
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
understand why mistakes happen, and ensuring employees can fail safely. Amy says in past roles she has been involved in regimented processes that were expected but not necessarily effective. “Safety is not about ticking a box. It’s about adding real time value to your company, based on the premise of caring for your people and putting them at the heart of what you do.”
In 2017, Amy and Luke moved to New Zealand and she became Giesen’s first dedicated health and safety employee, determined to be “coach not commander” in helping empower people in the workplace.
That’s meant driving a lot of change in herself, which Amy kick-started with an 18-month coaching and leadership course. Her nomination in the New Zealand Workplace Health & Safety Awards was based on work from 2019, during which she had a focus on creativity, promotion and engagement in health and safety, to help embed it in company culture. The list of work done is far from tinderdry compliance, with “the light-hearted side of safety” on show instead. The programme included the Fit-24 health challenge, which involved giving up alcohol and resulted in the launch of Giesen 0% - Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc with its alcohol removed. There was also a Biggest Loser Competition, based on the weight loss TV series, a wellbeing colouring in competition, and the Safety at First Sight social media campaign, where staff created short safety videos, including operation winemaker Andrew Hawker giving safe lifting tips with the help of his toddler son. The year wrapped up with a 24-day visit from the Giesen Christmas Elf, who got up to some mischief and left health and safety poems in his wake.
Amy says it is all a far cry from fear and box ticking, and becoming a finalist in the competition has been a “real validation” of the effort she has made to shift her mindset – and that of others – when it comes to being well in the workplace. “Becoming a finalist also shows that you don’t need to be a large company to make a positive impact with health and safety,” she says. “Its about making the most of what you have.”
New Zealand has a long way to go in the maturation of a health and safety culture, but it has potential to lead the world, Amy says. “While we are behind right now, we have the advantage of looking at other jurisdictions and seeing what has worked and what hasn’t. We can dial that up and add our own flair to it. We owe it to all the people in this country who never made it home at night because of work.”
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