When it comes to safety, a near miss is a powerful teaching moment
Client: Transpower
Safety awareness and injury prevention is, naturally, an extremely high priority for Transpower - owner and operator of the high voltage National Grid.
As part of an ongoing and comprehensive behavioural training programme, this video campaign focused on ‘Near Misses’ and how, by reporting them every time, others could learn from incidents. Improved near miss reporting data would also increase the effectiveness of prevention mechanisms.
The Brief
This series of safety campaign videos was conceived to challenge the attitudes of its extended team of contractors to near misses (incidents that could have resulted in an accident), primarily to encourage more people to report them. This reporting feedback alerts Transpower and its contractors to opportunities to put better preventative solutions in place. And it helps keep the work teams ever-mindful of potential danger triggers.
The Solution
The campaign comprised four videos, each looking at a Near Miss incident in Transpower’s critical risk areas: electric shock, driving, working at heights and public safety.
The ‘Switch On: Report it!’ campaign needed to continue the style of the earlier Switch On safety training campaigns (using the actual team for talent, expressing a similar tone and drawing on the familiarity, momentum and interest the Switch On campaign had already created) while adding a little more gravitas to reflect the more sobering content.
The new campaign videos were rolled out a month apart between July and October 2016. They were designed to be used by the contracted Service Provider team leaders at their regular team meetings in conjunction with suggested questions Transpower provided as a basis for discussion with their teams. Transpower followed up with print collateral we designed depicting the ‘heroes’ from the videos.
The project was more complex than the earlier Switch On ‘Back to Work’ videos, as the new series involved multiple sites, greater variety of talent and varying themes (although the overarching messages were consistent).
We took a one-on-one documentary style approach to interviews with team members who had experienced a near miss. We extended the messaging to touch on the impact the near miss had on others including team mates, family and friends depending on the story, to emphasise the visceral consequence that needed to be understood, e.g. ‘look after your mates’, ‘get home safe to your loved ones’, etc.
While we followed the Switch On branding developed for the first series, we gave the material a more serious undertone by altering the balance of the colour palette with more emphasis on the black rather than the green.
The Results
While more serious than the first Switch On to Safety campaign, the videos were well received. Feedback was that they were useful for generating discussion on near misses, controls and the barriers to reporting.
