Contech has been recognised for ten years of membership of the Business Leaders’ Health & Safety Forum. Paul Wymer was Managing Director when Contech joined in 2016. We asked him to look back on why the company joined, what happened next and what he thinks differently about today. 

When we joined the Business Leaders’ Health & Safety Forum in 2016, we thought we were going pretty well.

Contech had always aimed to perform to a high standard in the work we did, and that extended to workplace safety and looking after our people. We had systems and processes in place, we took them seriously and, from where we were sitting, we genuinely felt we were taking a responsible approach. We knew there would always be room to improve, but I don’t remember us thinking there was some great problem we needed to fix.

We’d heard about the Forum and decided to attend its Mid-Year CEO Summit in 2016 to find out a bit more about it. I remember being in a room full of CEOs talking very openly about their experiences with workplace safety. They weren’t just discussing the things they’d done well. People talked about what hadn’t worked, the challenges they were dealing with and the things they were still trying to get right.

It was quite refreshing, really. When you hear other organisations talking like that, you realise very quickly that everyone is dealing with many of the same challenges. You also start comparing what you’re hearing with what you’re doing yourself and wondering whether there might be a better way.

I think that was what appealed to us about the Forum. It wasn’t a group of people pretending they’d solved health and safety. It was a group of senior leaders prepared to share their experiences and learn from each other, and we could take those experiences back to Contech and work out what was useful for us.

Over the years that exposure to other organisations has helped us look at our own business differently. Sometimes you hear about something somebody else has done particularly well and think about how you might apply it yourself. Just as usefully, you hear about something that hasn’t gone according to plan and get the benefit of somebody else’s experience without having to make exactly the same mistake.

One thing that became much clearer to me was the role of leadership. Health and safety needs specialist knowledge and good people looking after it day to day, but the responsibility for it can’t simply be handed over by the people running the business. There needs to be genuine commitment from the top, and then the challenge is making that commitment real throughout the organisation.

I think this is probably where my own thinking has changed most over the ten years. Back in 2016, I probably placed more emphasis on having the right documents, systems and processes in place. I still think they’re important, but over time I’ve come to understand that they’re really only part of the picture. You can have a very good system on paper, but it’s the way people behave around it that ultimately determines whether it works.

We focus much more now on organisational behaviour and creating a positive workplace culture. If people throughout the business have the right attitude towards safety, feel comfortable speaking up and are prepared to question the way something is being done, then the systems and processes have a much better chance of doing what they were designed to do.

That sort of culture develops over time. It comes from what leaders pay attention to, the behaviour that is encouraged and what actually happens when somebody raises a concern or suggests there may be a better way. We’ve learnt a lot about that over the years and, like everything else, we’re still learning.

Contech certainly does things differently today from the way we did them ten years ago, but I don’t see that as meaning what we were doing in 2016 was wrong. We were doing what we believed was right with the knowledge and experience we had at the time. The important thing is being prepared to keep looking at yourself, learn from others and change when you find a better way.

The Forum has been very good for that. François Barton in particular deserves a lot of credit for the environment he created. He had an ability to engage with everyone, regardless of whether they represented one of New Zealand’s biggest organisations or a relatively small specialist business like ours, and there was a genuine feeling that we were all there to learn from one another and improve.

This year Contech has been recognised for ten years of membership of the Business Leaders’ Health & Safety Forum. It’s nice to receive the recognition and I’m sure we’ll find somewhere suitable to hang the certificate.

For me, though, the more interesting thing about reaching ten years is being able to look back and see that we’ve changed. Some of that has come from our own experience, some from the people within Contech and some from listening to other organisations prepared to share what they’ve learnt.

We thought we were going pretty well in 2016. I think we were. Our people have certainly enhanced things since then, and I have no doubt that our ongoing learning and development will generate positive results in the 10 years that lie ahead.

Paul Wymer

Chairman, Contech