In his three-part blog series on building transformation capability in WHS teams, Will Mosenthal, our Director of Transformation & Delivery, unpacks the patterns we've observed in WHS functions navigating complex transformations, exploring the capabilities and structures we think leaders need to build to close the gap between strategy and delivery. Each post stands alone, but together they trace a path from team-level realities through to the institutional structures to deliver change in WHS teams.
Success! The polished Health & Safety strategy is complete. Several months of hard work have produced a sequenced roadmap of projects, which are all prioritised and signed off. Senior executives are impressed with the slick slide deck, and the safety leadership team is buoyed by the progress made.
But now the team needs to deliver it.
This is where most Health & Safety strategies stall. The strategy itself is usually sound, but the challenge lies in making it real. At PKG Safety Innovation, we’ve seen some repeated patterns and outcomes across multiple WHS functions in a range of organisations and industries. In the first post in this series, we look at why building delivery capability inside a WHS function is challenging.
Here are four recurring patterns we have seen across our client projects:
1. Unqualified safety professionals are expected to be project managers
When a new strategy lands, most of the WHS teams we’ve observed don’t have the project and transformation delivery capabilities needed to execute it. Most WHS teams are made up of safety professionals with deep domain expertise built over successful careers, but their exposure to foundational project management disciplines and successfully delivering complex change is often varied or non-existent.
Responsibility for leading strategic safety projects typically gets assigned to team members as an additional responsibility on top of their functional WHS roles. Often, this is framed by leaders as a career development opportunity, but these team members are usually expected to take on these projects with no recognised project management or PMO support and minimal training or templates to use. Some safety professionals are naturally strong at structured planning, stakeholder management and reporting, but this isn’t always the case.
There are multiple impacts to this mismatch of capability and capacity. One of the most striking is that inexperience in managing expectations and escalating early results in senior leaders learning about delivery slippages to the plan too late to intervene. Other recurring observations we’ve seen in WHS teams are that project plans get built in isolation, dependencies between projects are poorly defined and communicated, stakeholder requests become inconsistent, and reporting becomes a weekly chore rather than an active control mechanism.
Going back to the polished strategy deck a year after it’s been developed, the leadership team might look back and see that several priorities from the original strategy haven’t progressed to the extent they were expecting or being measured on.
To be clear, this is not a failure or criticism of the people doing the work or assuming these additional responsibilities. What we are really seeing is a structural imbalance between what the Health & Safety strategy assumes about delivery capability and what the function is actually equipped to do.
2. Bandwidth in the team and juggling priorities is a constant challenge
Even where WHS leaders recognise a gap in their delivery capability, they often can’t act on it because the team is already over capacity. We see a number of team members who have the core skills needed to deliver projects, but these individuals very rarely have the capacity to lead a project and do their day job at the same time.
Business-as-usual WHS work doesn’t pause for strategic delivery. Most WHS functions will always have new regulatory requests, assurance activities, incident investigations and executive ad hoc demands which might displace planned project work. This means that reactive new urgent priorities consume time, energy and focus while the delivery of “critical” strategy work gets whatever is left over.
We have observed that the WHS teams that most need to build delivery muscle are nearly always the teams with the least capacity to build it. Any framework or governance structure that demands more of an already-overcommitted team will likely fail before it starts.
3. Delivering digital safety is a different kind of work
Of all the changes a WHS function is expected to deliver, we tend to see that the most complex and fast-moving is in the implementation of technology, data and innovation initiatives.
A new incident management platform, an AI-enabled hazard tool, a mobile pre-task briefing app, or a data integration that connects safety records to asset management and HR systems are all significant undertakings that call for different skills, mindsets, governance and patterns of stakeholder engagement than the work most safety professionals are familiar with. As well as technical skills and expertise, these projects often operate in a wider stakeholder field, working with tech vendors, internal IT teams, procurement, legal and new executive sponsors.
Planning for the change associated with digital safety projects is often underdeveloped or underestimated, and successful delivery hinges on building a credible plan, sequencing work, identifying dependencies and reporting transparently on progress. Other key skills include cross-functional stakeholder management, clear communication for different audiences, influencing without authority, managing scope under pressure, translating between domain and technical language, and navigating organisational politics.
4. The mis-framing of digital safety initiatives
We have observed that digital safety projects are routinely framed inside organisations as IT upgrades, system enhancements or platform refreshes. In our experience, this mis-framing can be damaging and undermine the business goals for implementing digital transformation in the first place.
Too often, the message of “we’re upgrading the WHS system” is seen by senior leaders to be something relatively modest, led by IT, and they allocate accordingly. This results in smaller budgets, lighter governance and less executive attention. Procurement treats it as a software purchase rather than a transformation, and internal change management capacity gets prioritised elsewhere.
However, these initiatives tend to be more than “just” IT upgrades. A new incident management platform changes how workers report near-misses, how every investigation approaches causal analysis and how operators engage with safety day-to-day. The visible artefact is the software but the implementation nearly always drives some degree of transformation to roles, processes, data flows, leadership expectations and behaviour.
The mis-framing also happens inside the WHS function. Attention is focused on “the system go-live” rather than “the new way our function is going to operate”. Success becomes the deployment of the tech rather than its adoption. A post-implementation drop-off then gets blamed on user resistance, when the real cause is a strategy that never accounted for the human and organisational work required to make the technology stick.
AI introduces further distortion. We are increasingly seeing AI projects in safety being over-framed as transformation regardless of whether the underlying foundations can support it. Real wins are achievable, including guided data capture at the point of work, reducing administrative load on investigators and surfacing patterns across data sources that humans couldn’t synthesise. However, unlocking these benefits depends on the same disciplines as any digital project. These include the need for clear problem definition, honest assessment of data and process foundations and working hard with business leaders and users on data quality, process redesign, role changes and behavioural change to make the target new capability work in practice.
The impact of these patterns
We have seen that any combination of some or all of these four patterns produces very similar outcomes – a safety strategy that everyone signed up to, but one that the team can't realistically deliver. Those of us who have led complex business and technology change in other functions and industries will recognise that the patterns aren't necessarily unique to WHS, but the combination of them in a stretched, technically-led, often under-budgeted function is distinctive.
These challenges are solvable, but not with a better strategy or a more polished slide deck. The teams we see making the best progress in executing transformation in WHS are the ones focused on developing and introducing new skills and expertise into the team alongside cultural, structural and governance changes at the leadership and institutional level.
In the next blog post in this three-part series, we will explore what actually works at the team level and the conditions around the team that enable the delivery of transformation in WHS.
