“I’ve been recruiting health and safety professionals for 12 years here and in the Australian market and joined Acre back in 2015 to develop Acre Frameworks. At Acre we are focused on supporting our clients to not just recruit but to build impactful teams, teams that aren’t just competent but really effective in driving change in health and safety. Acre Frameworks is the underpinning of it, a competency framework that we developed with a group of senior leaders in the safety profession, a psychometric tool that underpins a development discussion and on-going coaching and training.
“Why do we do this? More and more of our clients are talking to us about how the qualifications and technical underpinning is important but without the right behaviour set it’s irrelevant. Unfortunately the feedback from many of our clients is that they are struggling to identify individuals that demonstrate these behaviours. So, Acre Frameworks was born off the desire to educate the safety profession about what was important, to be able to provide people with objective feedback on where their personality preferences impacts their performance, and then really focus their development on these areas.
“We use psychometrics to provide detailed feedback on where their strengths lie and then look at how their behaviours might be limiting them, not just in terms of career progression, but also asking why do health and safety professionals exist? – to get people at home at the end of the day – and we push the point that if that individual’s behaviours are limiting the success of the health and safety strategy then what they are limiting is the potential for someone to get home to their family.”
“We are already delivering tailored coaching to many of our clients but this year we will be developing the training that will support and facilitate the development. We are focusing on creating a very different training offering focused on creating an interactive learning environment using real life business cases from health and safety, rather than generic training. We are working with leaders from industry to ensure this training has real impact and is very different from what has been previously available in market.
“The other focus is supporting the next generation of leaders. We don’t want to just focus on the top, but focus on those working within business that has the potential to transform health and safety. In December we launched Acre Inspire+, a series events focused on doing just this. At the inaugural event we had 40 professionals, nominated by their manager, join us to listen to Emma Head, Director of Health and Safety at High Speed 2 speak about her experiences and the importance of leading with integrity. We will be continuing this over the coming months as we see real value in supporting, inspiring and challenging these individuals in changing the direction and stereotype of the profession
“Finally we’ll focus on diversity in the profession. As we saw from last year’s SHP State of the Industry Survey there is a real challenge around diversity in the profession. It’s important we focus on removing some of the barriers to entry. I’ve been speaking to a number of clients about how we encourage, not volunteering or work placements (because people need to earn money), but more of an apprenticeship style into health and safety.
“For us to win a safety award was great. For us to now be considered so much more than a recruitment company was amazing. We believe we are making an impact and our clients are definitely telling us this is the case – for that to be recognised was really important. It’s about actually making a difference. We are not just placing people in jobs – we want to be so much more than that. We want to place people who have a positive effect on not just our clients but everyone who works in the organisation.”
“We need to change the way we develop people, we need to focus more on challenging the behaviours of the safety profession. I think we need to identify and promote different role models and look outside the traditional routes into the profession. We also need to focus on promoting the good news, we talk constantly about where the fines are – but when do we talk about where we save lives and the good stuff that is happening.
“Finally as I said at the recent WIHS Christmas Party; Change happens at the end of your comfort zone. I think every person needs to look at developing and challenging themselves to drive change in the profession.”
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