Q. Could you walk us through your career in people leadership and how your experiences have shaped your understanding of health, safety, and well-being? What are the emerging paradigm shifts you see impacting organisations today?
I have spent a large proportion of my career in HR, working across a wide spectrum of specialised roles in different industries and sectors. More recently, I have had the opportunity to manage the "full gamut" of HR activities. Naturally, this includes health and safety. However, I have never believed that health and safety are exclusively an HR domain. Operations in many businesses are equally capable and should be equally committed to making sure people go home safely every day. Regarding trends, I find the intersection of technology and people quite exciting. For a distributed business like Briscoe Group with 100 sites spread from the top of the country to the bottom, trading seven days a week with extended hours, having leadership or HR capability at every location 24/7 is a real challenge. Technology is now stepping in to supplement, support, and cover the gaps that humans can’t necessarily reach.
Q. Can you give us an example of a technology implementation you specifically implemented to streamline health and safety at Briscoe Group?
About eight years ago, we identified that manual handling was a key risk for our team, a challenge shared across retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. We piloted a very good manual handling program in two stores and a distribution centre. The team loved it, but it was problematic to deploy. It required a human facilitator to be there, working alongside every trainee. We could not get it rolled out consistently across the business, so we initially stopped. Three years ago, I was talking to a capability partner who we’ve worked with across many initiatives including our leadership development programme, and realised how far devices had come—accelerometers and VR headsets like Meta Quest. We wondered: Could we use this to deploy training? With manual handling, you are looking at balance, posture, load, and speed among other things. We kicked off a pilot using a combination of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Today, we use VR headsets that teach our team how to move safely. We knitted together a physiotherapist-designed course with our specific environment. It ensures that even in a distributed model, every person receives high-quality, consistent training on how to handle products safely.
Q. How did you measure the impact and justify the ROI of this investment?
We business-cased it right at the beginning because the investment was significant—headsets, software licenses, and course design. We looked at several factors, including reductions in manual handling injury rates. Avoidance of other absences. Reduction in regulatory and injury costs. Conventional HR feedback: How do the team members feel about using this tech? We are still in the early days of the rollout. We move store by store to ensure the management team is confident and competent in using the tech before activating it for the staff. We aren't at a point where the "jury is in," but we are measuring this over years, not just weeks or months. We’re quietly confident this represents a step forward for our people and our business.
Q. Often, leaders who champion these initiatives go beyond their professional responsibilities. Do you have a personal passion for this area? What motivates you?
I am under no illusion about how important this part of my portfolio is. We have legal responsibilities and moral obligations. Personally, I believe safety saves money; if you design it from the get-go, it’s a financial benefit. But on a human level, I reflect on the fact that we all work to live, not live to work. Everyone has a reason to go home safely—partners, children, other community groups, even pets. I also carry two specific memories involving young men who had been friends since school. In 1990, one of those friends, then in the Defence Forces, died during an outdoor training exercise on a mountainside; six young men lost their lives that day. Another school friend was one of the 29 people who died in a tragic mining disaster in New Zealand’s history. He went to work in a mine and never got home to his kids. These losses leave massive holes in the lives of many people. I have been fortunate to work for a handful of leaders who have seen safety as part of what we do, not an addition to it.
Q. While physical safety is a cornerstone, mental, social, and financial well-being are equally critical. How is Briscoe Group evolving to address these less visible aspects?
It’s a sad reflection on society, but our team faces undesirable situations from aggressive, assertive, and sometimes abusive people who steal or threaten staff. A third of our workforce are young people; they should not enter the workforce thinking this is an "acceptable" part of this job, or any job. Furthermore, retail and hospitality are often lower-paid industries. If a washing machine breaks or an unexpected bill arrives, financial well-being is undermined. We have long had an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), but in the last 18 months, we have complemented it with technology. Our provider’s app allows people to track their journey home safely after a shift or access a professional via a chat-like interface. It can give them immediate access to a nurse to triage their health concerns or be used to expedite a visit to the doctor. Technology augments human support; it doesn’t replace it.
Q. Many leaders see low adoption rates for EAPs. How do you increase engagement?
It starts with destigmatising mental health. We normalise the fact that not everyone feels 100 percent all the time. We work on a simple premise: “It’s okay not to be okay." We can then provide context specific pathways: Reactive/Event-based: If there’s an aggressive incident in-store, we provide support to help the team member process it immediately and to begin a recovery process. Proactive/Always-on: For roles like loss prevention specialists or my own HR business partners who frequently deal with conflict, we can provide "Professional Supervision." This is a quarterly or more frequently scheduled check-ins with a professional and which are proactive rather than reactive.
Q. How can businesses, especially large ones, drive well-being in the broader community beyond their employees?
Again, look at the manual handling training. Many of our team members won't stay with us for their entire careers. If we train a student well, they take those skills beyond our walls. They use them when lifting their children, carrying groceries, or moving furniture at home. If you train someone well once, they apply that knowledge throughout the balance of their life. There is a real opportunity to scale these activities, doing something good for the business that also inadvertently benefits team members' long-term health. By being the initiator of this exciting project, we have been a significant contributor to our development partners’ ability to deploy this with other organisations, not just retailers. It will benefit NZ Inc, not just Briscoe Group.
Q. Have you seen a shift toward working with partners or suppliers who share this vision?
We recently had an incident with a subcontractor involving a piece of equipment. Everyone was fine, but the reporting didn't follow the agreed-upon protocol. We called a debrief with the contractors to discuss what happened and how to avoid it. At the end, the contractor told us we were one of only two companies they work with that would actually call for a review like that. It’s about selecting partners based on shared values. If something doesn't go as planned, you review it together to improve. Our goal must be to continually improve - I see enormous merit in the “1% Safer” programme which aims for constant incremental change and improvement. This is often much more able to be integrated by employees and employers and sets a strong cultural norm for progress, not punishment.
Q. How do these well-being policies support talent attraction and retention, especially in an ageing workforce?
New Zealand has an ageing workforce. People are staying in the workforce longer because retirement is less affordable. If your body isn't as agile or doesn't recover as quickly, a safe environment is a massive advantage. Conversely, for young people, a back injury can last a lifetime. We don't want to be the company in the headlines for injuries. We focus on not "injuring a lot of people a little" just as much as we focus on avoiding the big fatalities.
Q. In the frontline retail environment, physical work and shifting patterns are the reality. How do you align safety with these frontline unique needs?
A. We actually don’t have much pattern shifting. Most of our team is contracted to specific days and hours. We have extra shift opportunities, but for the vast majority, we avoid rotating shifts because we recognise how disruptive they are to their lives outside of work. Consistency helps keep them in the best operating space when they arrive.
Q. Looking back at your journey advancing health, safety, and well-being at work, what stands out as your boldest innovation, your greatest blind spot, and the one measure you believe truly matters?
Pairing good, existing human-designed training with VR technology to make it accessible and scalable for the entire team was my boldest innovation. As for blind spots, it’s the belief that "we are better than we think we are." One of my former colleagues used camera-based AI to identify human-machine interactions—like people walking too close to forklifts. They thought they had great control, but the AI identified a staggering number of incidents that had gone unnoticed. By using that footage for coaching rather than punishment, they reduced incidents by 75% over a six week period. It’s the difference between the "Ought" (how we think a job should be done) and the "Is" (how it’s actually done). Regarding metrics, there isn't a single measure. It’s dangerous to tie it to one. In New Zealand, 50-60 people die in workplaces annually, but 15 to 20 times that number die from work-related illnesses like respiratory issues. We must look at the total picture. So if I was pushed to answer your question of what is the one measure that matters to me? Well, I think that would be “Am I making things better?”, because if that’s not a “Yes!” then I need to take a good hard look at what I’m doing and what I could do differently.
Q. What is one practical action you recommend readers take today to improve health and safety in their organisations?
Lead. Make health and safety part of your conversations. Destigmatise mental health. Just as you’d go to a hospital for a broken arm, we should accept that our brains—a mass of chemicals and electrical sparks—sometimes get unbalanced. Counselling or medication should be viewed as just as appropriate as seeing a doctor for a physical illness.