Saturday 21 December 2013

Be the difference

Bismillaa Hirrahmaa Nirraheem.

A few weeks ago, I was given a challenge to make my weekly safety report interesting. The report is a two pager PDF file, and for the past 22 months I've used a standard cover email of "Please see attached the HSSE Weekly Report for Week XX".

I have not changed the format of the report itself, as it is still useful and informative. The only difference I made was the cover email, to make it more interesting to read.

I love football. So does most of Bruneians and majority of our company's workforce, local and expat alike. So this is a common theme. There had been ongoing banter between fans of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City, and these teams made headlines at the back pages for their big wins or unusual results.

For my first cover email, I sent out the following:

To : All BSP Staff

From : BSP HSE via e-Bulletin

Dear Colleagues,Welcome to the 46th week edition of our HSSE Weekly Report.

Before you go and click the link to view the report, lets reflect to the greatest comeback in English football. And then we see the parallel with our journey.

Greatest comeback

Manchester United is the 20 times English league champions, and the current Premier League champions. Their amazing comeback – as a journey, was in 1996 during the 1995/96 season.

By the new year’s day 1996, Manchester United was 12 points behind league leaders Newcastle United, who was bookies favourite to win the Premier League championship during that season. Nearly half of Manchester United’s first team were young, inexperienced but talented players and they were written off at the beginning of the season with a famous comment "You'll never win anything with kids" (no prizes for guessing which club the commentator came from!).

The parallels

Huge, huge challenge currently in BSP on Safety, just like what United were facing after the New Years day 1996. We have Alex Fergusons in every Assets and Operations; we have Steve Bruce, Eric Cantona and Ryan Giggs in our front line and we have the Nevilles, Butt, Beckham and Solskjaer coming to the organisation – young and talented. All we need to reinforce is the strong belief that the dedication and hard work we put in will pay off eventually, towards achieving our Way of Being - Green Day: Creating an incident and injury free workplace.

This little change have made a difference, people are now beginning to read the reports. Soon I hope they will take the messages and share with everyone else, that safety is important, for them, for their families, for the community, and for the country.

Till my next post which I hope will not be too long from this, let's hope this new spark will create a continuous flame.

Wassalaam,

Azmi