All of us know that purpose is the key to most things. If you’re a leader or manager of any sorts you know that your people need to know the why if you want to motivate them to do things.
We all do our best work when we have purpose, and when we understand what that is. We’ve probably all been in jobs where it wasn’t clear, where you were just doing something that seemed a bit of a waste of time and had no real benefit to anybody or anything.
Health and safety has a purpose. Ostensibly, it’s about keeping us all safe and free from danger. But it seems to frequently veer into areas that are really hard to say have any real ‘why’.
We’ve recently had another wave of farmer clients asking us to wear hi- vis on their properties. This happened a few years ago, as various legislative interpretations made their way through New Zealand courts and people became wary of how these regulations could be interpreted.
Fortunately, we had a real life health and safety crisis during which millions of people around the world died or became seriously unwell, and after COVID, a sense of proportion returned to health and safety.
But it seems to have left once again. I was called out to calve a cow at the weekend and was politely asked by the farmer to put on a high-vis vest. When I asked him why, I was told it was policy. Policy isn’t purpose, and he seemed like a captive audience I could take out my cynicism on.
So I took his high-vis vest, put it on over my calving jacket, went to the cow in the vet race, and started getting on with it. Calvings usually take a bit of time to sort out. This one was a head and leg back and so needed a wee bit of faffing about. Ample time to engage in polite conversation or malicious gossip or, in this case, gaining some serious understanding of the purpose of this hi-vis.
What was the purpose of the hi-vis policy? It was part of their H&S rules. But what was the purpose- what did it do? It meant everyone could be easily seen. By whom? By people like him, the manager. But why couldn’t you see me before? I could, but might have missed you and ran over you. But I’ve only walked from my car, through the cowshed, to the vet race. But you might go into the paddock. But I haven’t.
And so, the long process of sorting out the limbs and head meandered on. I was more intrigued than anything else. I’ve never really understood hi-vis on most farms. Of course, there’s machinery and tractors and big implements. But these are normally used in paddocks, and there’s not many farm staff or visitors wandering around empty paddocks.
I guess in a cowshed it makes you more easy to spot by a cow when you need to intervene. But I’m not sure this is a tremendous positive, when the cow in question is imminently periparturient and quite likely less than amused at being intervened with.
Admittedly, on larger farms it makes the workers easier to see. So, when you turn up and there’s no cow and nobody around you can more quickly spot someone fiddling around trying to avoid getting tangled up with the vet by the brief flash of hi-vis as they slope off behind the calf sheds. But neither of these benefits seem a critical health and safety intervention.
One thing that could be more useful is a helmet. I’ve had way more head knocks- some quite significant- climbing around cow sheds and calving cows and banging into metalwork than I’ve ever had near misses being run over by a tractor in a paddock. I’m loathe to give the H&S people more arrows in their quiver but I’d prefer to be issued with something effective like a helmet before I got a flimsy hi- vis vest.
I mention all this because of politics. I really enjoy politics- at least I enjoy the drama of the UK, and the clown show of the US. I can’t say I enjoy either NZ or Australian politics. Both seem to be a very light version of the UK and America respectively, without the fun and games or any world consequences.
But, like most of us I guess, I have very little time for politicians, for all the obvious reasons. And they seem to have got exponentially worse in recent years. It’s almost as if some goon took up politics and decided that if a little bit of lying and ignorance could be effective, lots of both could make him President. And everyone sort of just copied him.
However, I must confess that I did warm a little to our very own Winston Peters recently, when he was invited on a test ride on a new train, and told he had to wear hi-vis. To which he refused, asking what purpose it served. He was told it was for visibility, evacuation and safety purposes, to which he quite rightly responded that if that was the case then it didn’t seem like a very safe train.
His point was really that this sort of box ticking threatens to trivialise the very genuine safety purpose of hi- vis for people who genuinely need it. Because if everyone is wearing it, the person who is more visible and who stands out most is the person who dresses down in grey.
We have very comprehensive health and safety recording for our staff working on farms. They have an app on which they record almost every bash and knock and scrape and needle stick and tumble and back strain and scalpel cut and RSI and head donk and shoulder tweak. And they even record tiredness and fatigue and near misses. And they suggest mitigations. And I can’t recall any of these incidents where ‘wearing hi-vis’ could be seen as a mitigation. And if that’s not its purpose, I’m not sure what use it is.
