World Health and Safety Day: Making Safety Personal at BGEN

By Ross Watson, Head of SHE, BGEN

Health and safety is often seen as boring or overly process driven. Tick box exercises, paperwork and rules that don’t necessarily work in the field.

At BGEN, we have chosen a different path. We don’t leave Health and Safety contained within policy documents or training sessions. We embrace it by ensuring it’s at the core of everything we do. We talk about it daily to keep it at the top of our team’s agenda. We challenge ourselves to simplify processes to ensure they’re easily understood and suitable for our activities. We push it at every available opportunity because ultimately It Starts with Me and all of us to lead by example, by embracing a proactive Health and Safety culture to continually improve performance.

On World Health and Safety Day, it is worth pausing to reflect on why this matters so much. Everyone who comes to work should go home in the same condition, or better, than when they arrived. That is not an aspiration. It is a responsibility we all share.

Making Safety Visible

One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is treating safety as something that just exists in the management system. At BGEN, we believe safety should be visible, present and impossible to ignore, in the right way.

We focus on simple, consistent actions that drive transparency, visibility and accountability across the business.

Senior leader site visits play a vital role in this. Health and Safety leadership starts at the top. When senior leaders are present on site, talking about safety, listening to concerns, supporting solutions and leading by example, it sends a powerful message that this really matters. It also reinforces that safety is not owned by one department but belongs to all of us.

Our weekly Message of the Week helps keep safety at the front of people’s minds. These messages are simple, relevant and focused, whether they are highlighting a focus topic, sharing updates or recognising positive behaviours. Regular conversation builds awareness, and greater awareness leads to better decisions.

We also place strong emphasis on sharing lessons learned and sharing best practices. We do not shy away from incidents, near misses or observations. Instead, we optimise the learning opportunity. By sharing openly, we help everyone better understand risks, spot early warning signs and utilise best practices to prevent potential future events. A strong safety culture is about proactively learning and improving our practices.

Daily briefings are another essential part of our approach. They create a space to talk about the work ahead, understand the risks involved and our shared responsibilities to ensure we effectively set our teams to work safely.

Keeping It Human

None of this is complex or groundbreaking, and that is exactly the point.

Health and Safety does not need to be complicated to be effective. By keeping our approach simple and consistent, we make it accessible, relatable and real. It becomes part of how we work, rather than something separate from it.

At BGEN, we have worked hard to make Health and Safety something people actively engage with and feel ownership of. Call it cool, attractive or whatever label fits. For us, it is about making safety something people genuinely care about.

When people care, they speak up. They look out for each other. They make better choices, even when no one is watching.

That is the culture we continue to build, not just on World Health and Safety Day, but every single day. If we get that right, the outcome is simple and powerful. Everyone goes home safe.