HSE Community Insights - Rebecca Crompton

Rebecca is currently working with BSA as Group Manager for Safety. She enjoys working closely with the Operational Teams whilst leading a collaborative Safety Team, through a focus on simple, effective Safety systems and critical risk controls - to ultimately ensure people get home safe.

The changing nature of workplaces across Australia as a result of COVID-19 presents an emerging risk of mental health and wellbeing, specifically psychological risks. As we continue to understand the impact of Covid-19 on the wellbeing of our people, Safety Professionals need to stay in front as best we can to understand the tangible long term effects of the changes to the way we work and how that impacts re people at work. The challenge will be addressing this emerging risk based on factual and tangible information on the business impacts with solutions developed in partnership with highly capable mental health and wellbeing specialists. A key risk is that everyone becomes Health and Wellbeing specialists overnight! 

A key opportunity as a Safety Professional in the ever changing work environment will always be driving highly engaging safety programs that are aligned with Operational priorities and that resonate and are closely aligned with the voice of the worker – driving people to just do safety for them. 

A big opportunity in the safety space is driving and utilising Technology as a safety enabler – facilitating simple, easy and safe choices for workers onsite or in the field. This in turn should provide more information and data to enable Safety professionals to focus on the metrics that matter and that will make a difference to the safety performance of any business. 

What are the top 3 capabilities required in your view for success in the future? 

A top capability to be successful has to be strong collaboration, coaching and leadership skills through understanding what the business needs so you can appropriately align initiatives or programs. 

Secondly having a strong capability through focusing on the metrics that matter – critical risk controls, underpinned by a strong approach to Risk Management. 

Lastly, being able to think longer term or with the end in mind is a capability required of any Safety Manager / Leader - you can’t have tunnel vision or an ego when it comes to Safety. Ultimately having a high level of self-awareness as a Safety Leader on the impacts of programs / initiatives to wider groups of internal and external people will assist with driving the improvements to safety performance. 

Reflecting back on my career so far, there are many situations where I cringe and think I could have handled it better but I am thankful for those moments as they have contributed to my experience and leadership style today. I have been fortunate enough to have exposure across many areas of business, which has helped me have a holistic view across a business. 

There have been pockets of time where I have been out of the Safety space doing other projects or working in other functions, but I now feel like I have the opportunity again to think about what is happening in the industry, network, invest time and hopefully give something back along the way! 

What is innovative about the organisation you are working for? 

A key value at BSA is centred around innovation, we have delivered projects where we have completely changed the work methodology operationally which reduced time and risk to people onsite, driven by the Operations Team to reduce risk and deliver efficiency to our Customers. 

The business is now working on accelerating the deployment of new in field service management technology, a large portion of our Business are work orders / ticketed work so this program is focussing efforts on delivering a technology solution that provides greater visibility of our people and an innovative solution for our Customers.