Health and Safety Month: Where to Start the Journey to a Safety Culture

From Formalism to Conscious Safety: Prerequisites for Transformation

Managing occupational safety in a large retail company with an extensive logistics network inevitably faces the problem of scale. When a company employs thousands of people across hundreds of facilities — from giant distribution centers to compact order pickup points — standard instructions stop working. Anastasia Pozdnyakova, Head of the Occupational Health and Industrial Safety Department at Lamoda, analyzes a practical case of overcoming a formal approach to safety through the implementation of a comprehensive "Health and Safety Month" program.

The trigger for launching the project was an increase in the number of micro-injuries against the background of a decrease in the registration of near-misses. Incident investigations were local in nature, and corrective actions were not scaled across the entire network. The presentation details the process of transitioning to a "zero risk tolerance" strategy, where the main task was to change the staff's attitude towards their own safety and mental health.

Safety Month Architecture: Hybrid Format and Communication Channels

Reaching 14,000 employees at more than 1,000 facilities using traditional methods is impossible. Using her company as an example, the speaker shows how to build a multi-level communication system that combines online and offline activities:

• Unified information field: creating a dedicated HSE channel in the corporate messenger to collect initiatives and publish articles, broadcasting thematic screensavers on work monitors and screens in operational areas. This made it possible to reach employees who do not have constant access to a PC.
• On-site visualization: thematic design of information boards at coffee points and in canteens with a clear program of events and participation instructions for different categories of personnel.
• Ergonomics of workspaces: retrofitting recreation areas with specialized equipment (massage chairs, sleep pods), which directly reduced muscle tension among operational staff who walk up to 20 km per shift.

"Risk Hunt" Project and Gamification

A key barrier to risk registration in the past was a complex bureaucratic procedure. During the Safety Month, the process was radically simplified: an employee simply needs to describe the hazard, attach a photo, and indicate the location.

To increase engagement, a "True or False" game was launched, where employees were asked to identify violations in real and simulated photos of workplaces. Every report was accompanied by mandatory feedback from engineering services regarding the timeframe for resolving the issue. A reward system was introduced for identifying the most critical non-obvious threats (for example, the risk of workwear getting caught in the rotating elements of a conveyor at a distribution center).

Thematic Weeks: From Mental Health to Emergency Response

The Month's program was divided into logical blocks, each of which solved a specific task of changing employee behavior patterns.

• Health Week: hybrid lectures by specialized experts, bioimpedance body analysis for employees followed by a consultation, as well as a round table with top management on the role of sports in a career and combating burnout.
• Occupational Safety Week: practical first aid training adapted to the specifics of the departments (for example, assistance in mountainous terrain for film crews). A separate block was devoted to training managers in the principles of "Just Culture", where the focus shifts from finding the guilty party to analyzing systemic errors in business processes.
• Fire Safety Week: conducting unscheduled evacuations without warning facility directors, deploying fire brigades, and practicing business continuity plans (BCP). Additionally, training on domestic fire safety was conducted to form sustainable habits outside the workplace.

Measurable Results and Overcoming Resistance

The implementation of a large-scale initiative faced expected resistance: the difficulty of attracting people to offline events and the initial skepticism of the staff. However, systematic work yielded tangible metrics: the number of near-miss reports increased by 20%, and 90% of managers began to actively participate in incident investigations, abandoning the "this is the HSE department's job" attitude.

In addition, the results of internal safety audits (physical and documentary) improved by an average of 14% across departments, which indicates a transition from formal compliance with requirements to real control over the workspace.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to organize the collection of risk information so that employees want to participate?
• What gamification tools actually work to increase staff awareness in fire safety matters?
• How to convince line managers that the human factor is a consequence, and the cause of the incident must be sought in the system?
• How to conduct an unscheduled evacuation at a facility with thousands of employees without stopping critical business processes?
• How to measure the effectiveness of the Safety Month and assess its impact on the company's culture?