Innovation through collaboration

Why work at SafetyCulture?

I’ve worked at SafetyCulture for more than 3 years now.

That’s longer than I’ve worked at any other company in my 15 year design career.

If you meet me at a party, I’ll awkwardly play down the success and impact of this $2bn unicorn — but the truth is I am actually deeply inspired by the mission of this “simple checklist app”.

My personal mission is closely aligned with iAuditor’s.

Helping businesses improve with the help of their frontline teams.

When I talk to new people joining the company (or my team) about our mission at SafetyCulture, I describe our work as covering the following 5 goals:

  1. Make it dead simple for businesses to adopt best-practice processes.
  2. Influence teams to shift over time from process and PPE, to collaborative improvement of the work they do.
  3. Democratise and distribute continuous improvement, empowering team leads and managers to make better decisions.
  4. Actively involve the frontline in order to generate the best insights, and to suggest creative improvements.
  5. Help organisations share knowledge about what works, improving the entire network of organisations that shape our world.

1. Best-practice-in-a-box

Customers come for a compliance quick fix.

How can we make it easy for them to tick the box, and get on with what they’re really passionate about? How can we continue to help their business as they grow?

2. From compliance… to redesign

Compliance & process is just the beginning. The holy grail is continuous improvement. How do we move customers up that chain towards that?

Customers love that our product gives them visibility over their business, but how do we also show them opportunities to improve?

Customers come to us for compliance purposes, but we can show them how to avoid issues and ultimately encourage them to redesign the way they work.

3. Collaborative Kaizen

Continuous improvement is most successful with the involvement of the team. The people who are closest to the work are the ones who best know how to improve it.

“The best things we do today have been started somewhere down in the organisation somewhere on the shop floor.”

IKEA

How do we create ways for the frontline to directly participate in the design of their own work? How do we make it easy for frontline innovations to be discovered, and to spread through the organisation?

The best way to help businesses improve is to include the people who do the work every day.

4. Hearts and minds

Successful participation usually requires cultural change. One of customers’ biggest challenges is getting their workforce to care.

Frontline teams have been let down by management before. They think their leaders care only about compliance, not people.

How can we help customers demonstrate true partnership and value to their frontline teams?

5. A network affect

(This is the philosophical bit.)

Communities and societies that rely on cooperation survive and thrive better than individuals.

We owe our remarkable standard of living in the world today to a vast interconnected web of specialisation and cooperation.

In creating much of the products and services we take for granted today, countless organisations and people are involved in doing their part.

Co-operating together, each contributing according to our specialist skills, we can produce far greater value — and make a bigger impact on the world — than we could as individuals in isolation.

This network has become so intrinsic to our daily lives that it’s easy for it to be invisible — but all of SafetyCulture’s customers play their part in this cooperative network.

As we help their business improve (get more efficient, better quality, even more safe), we are improving the contributions of individual nodes in this invisible network.

Working at SafetyCulture we are helping to improve the world for everyone.