Using Design Thinking to Redefine Safety​

Challenge

Safety is a major concern for construction companies and their employees, whether on site, in the office, on the road or elsewhere. Organisations typically address safety as a problem of compliance, using rules and​ policies to tell employees and contractors how they should behave.​

The Strategy Group helped this ASX-listed construction company's Living Safely project team redefine employee safety.​

Approach

Shifting Safety from Compliance to Second Nature​

The Strategy Group used the human-centred innovation methodology Design Thinking to uncover what drives safety behaviours and to understand on a deeper level what engages and motivates them. ​

​Design Thinking enabled the project team to empathise with the employees’ safety experiences and to distil insights that ultimately turned the problem on its head.​

​The Living Safely project team applied the five phases of Design Thinking to their problem: Empathise,​ Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.​

Outcomes

Re-defining the safety experience​

Three key insights into safety “Flipped the script” on the project, delivering its success:​

1. There is no point in talking about the abstract concept of safety​
2. People relate better to ‘living safely’ as a personal experience​
3. Living safely is about living a healthy and more meaningful life.​

By the end of the Design Thinking process, the team had designed three powerful initiatives:​

1. Your better life mentor – a peer-to-peer mentoring programme to help people identify life goals and define a clear path to achieve them​
2. Your passport to a better life – a way to track progress towards life goals and promote success​
3. SafeBook – a social networking platform similar to Facebook where employees share safety tips and publicly celebrate positive safety behaviours