The Secret Sauce Behind Safer Workplaces

Victor [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the ideas from your peers podcast. This is episode number one and let me just say thank you. I'm grateful that you've decided to tune in and I really want to make this worth your while. This episode is literally just setting the canvas for what is to come in future episodes. So we'll jump in. I'll give you a bit of a premise behind the show, how it came about and what you can expect and if you're in the right place to start off with. So however you got here, thank you and I look forward to sharing some of this quick background. About me.

Victor [00:00:33]:

My name is Victor Ahipeni. I'm a physiotherapist. I've been in the healthcare industry for close to 14 years and at the start of my career I worked in private practice and obviously that comes with a lot of rehabbing of injured general population. But it was a few years into my career I was introduced to the occupational health space. So initially through pre employment assessments, then job task analysis, and putting different injury prevention plans in place for different organizations. And that really sparked a bit of a passion on how can we avoid a lot of these injuries that are happening and what does this space look like as a whole? Now, when you've only got one person to learn off, you can take them with their knowledge and their expertise, but the more people that I've been able to speak to and learn from over the last decade, it's definitely helped accelerate my learnings, my knowledge, and in turn the benefits that you can offer to different organizations. And so the premise of this is to be able to create safer, more highly productive workplaces together. So hence the name ideas from your peers.

Victor [00:01:54]:

I know from Napoleon Hill, you may or may not have heard about one of his books, it's a classic called Think and Grow Rich. But one of the key premises or ideas from that is about the power of a mastermind. So the knowledge that you can get from a collective whole is greater than what you could ever have by yourself. And that's what I want to do. I want to be able to tap into what is working right now within our industry. And that's going to look from recruitment, pre employment, screening applicants in different ways both physically and mentally. How do we monitor our staff in the most effective ways to be able to have useful information and be able to act on that? And that may look at as a growing organization, how do you tap into the compliance side of things? How do you create a positive culture within your workplace? How do you identify a negative culture within your workplace? How do you implement change management, injury prevention, the mental health side of things, supporting workers, and then obviously, regardless of the amount of things you put in, there's still going to be injured workers and how do we support them? Of course I don't have the answers, hence I don't have all of the answers, hence the ideas from your peers. So I want to tap into some of the industries leading experts, people who have products to be able to support these different spaces and how they came about but also different organizations.

Victor [00:03:29]:

So internally what have they done that has been successful to turning around different areas that we just spoke about within their business? So that's really what the premise of this is about. I want to wrap it around themes whether it be a series on the physical side of things or the compliance side of things or the mental side of things supporting workers, cultural change, these different aspects that we can tap into to be able to altogether grow greater than we could ever by ourselves. Because if we are truly passionate and driven to create safer workplaces for the staff that we work with or that we hire, then sharing these ideas should be able to benefit everybody. This is definitely not a zero sum game. I know, having treated as a private practice physio in the past, the ramifications of having a worker's compensation injury patient come in your front door. Obviously, they come in all shapes and sizes, but the ramifications of them say, being off work and the effect that that can have when other people have to cover for them at work and pick up extra shifts. The cultural change that can happen with them, the stigma around it, the effect that it can have on their home life with their friends and their family, and even if they're touchwood. But in the cases where they actually can't return to work or to their previous job, the ramification that has on both themselves and the economy as a whole and I believe that there is enough knowledge and enough actionable insights tie it in to be able to have impact much greater than what some one person may be doing within their own particular organization.

Victor [00:05:18]:

So tune in. Feel free to subscribe. Feel free to reach out to me. There'll be links to get in touch with me below. If you're a potential guest or you know somebody who has had some great success or maybe an expert in this space that you think may be worth talking to, I'd love to connect. Explore to see if there's a benefit for us, to have a chat and to share the ideas from your peers.