Meet Niklas Hultdin and learn about his role as Service Manager in Sweden – a real safety ambassador – in the Alimak Group.
Hello Niklas, could you share a bit about yourself and what you do in your work with safety?
Our team want to work preventatively, we want to notice our risks before any accidents occur. Since my team works in the field, we try to identify risks and deviations before we start our work. Our work starts by identifying potential risks or disruptions to always ensure progress in our tasks or mission. Therefore, work starts when our risk analysis is completed. There is a special section before we start our work orders every day where we try to analyse any deviations for our work environment and further on, take actions to eliminate risks in our work.
Can you explain why this is important to you and your employer?
I think offering a safe and secure working environment is crucial to our success, and if we succeed in this, we are more attractive as an employer and thus also productive. As a leader, I have a responsibility to my staff and want to make sure that they go home to loved ones in every day in the same condition as when they came to work in the morning. Also, as a leader you always send signals, in this case I always need to send the signal and show with my behaviour that safety is our highest priority. As a leader you need to lead the way and have the courage to show the team that it is important and also what has a lower priority, even though everyone around you is in a hurry, you need to feel sure that safety is the top priority in everything your team do.
I believe that a leader needs to be patient and meet challenges, together with your team. Different teams face different risks in their environment every day and we need to accept that. But I don’t see safety risks necessarily as a problem, they are challenges or opportunities and if we have good routines, the team we can overcome them and learn from them.
What are you most proud of in terms of initiatives that have led to reducing risks of f injury or ill health in your job?
I feel most proud that we, as a team, managed to take ownership of the area of safety. As a leader, I have used the method acknowledge – accept – change. In this process, our team has together mapped our risks, created SWOT analyses, identified focus areas and implemented prioritized actions.
Raising awareness or acknowledgement of the risks in our team has sent an important signal and we accept that we have to work with risk management on a daily basis. Signals that also give us courage to acquire more knowledge and then ultimately change our way of working.
Some examples of initiatives that we have implemented are: recurring training in driving, work environment training, changed risk analyses before starting jobs, changed introduction plan for new employees, clarified communication path for projects and safer technical equipment for our workers.
To motivate others to take on a role of safety ambassador with us, what would you like to say?
Dare to be the one who contributes, if a plan doesn’t feel safe, do not hesitate to stop the work to find new safer solutions. Every little contribution in the right direction makes a great difference!