My name is Chris Jerram, I'm the General Manager of Safety Assets and Sustainability at Wellington Zoo.
Our Kaupapa is Me Tiaki, Kia Ora and roughly that translates to mean; if we look after our environment everything will flourish. And that applies to all aspects of the Zoo. So if we look after our people and the people that come to visit the zoo, then obviously we're going to be able to help them flourish as well.
The SafePlus tool really appealed to me because it wasn't really looking at you know systems and processes but, it was more of a health and safety culture, and it was also about asking our people how we were doing as well. So we really got a good 360 degree review from our people telling us how they see it on the ground.
The biggest thing that we took out of that was that there was a significant perception gap between our leadership group and our workers on the ground, and that was really valuable because it showed us where our blind spots might have been, particularly around some of that worker engagement. So we're really focusing on trying to improve ownership around health and safety across the organisation. But also trying to build a bit of a culture that it's everybody's responsibility.
Our managers are getting out on the ground more going out on site visits and things like that. It's giving us a good opportunity to see work as done not work as written on paper The really encouraging thing from the SafePlus assessments, that we had feedback from our workers was that we're really managing our five critical risks really well.
The real benefit for us is that the SafePlus online assessment is a repeatable process. It was a really simple tool to use and it's free to use as well.
So by utilizing the tool on an annual basis it really connects the dots for us between what we're doing on the ground the actions that we're making to the Zoo's overarching strategy.