Safe at work, safe at home

Joe Warnick is one of our Safety Advisors dedicated to supporting our teams and wider workforce in all things safety so we can all go home at night.

How did you end up in safety?

I was working as a site labourer when I was approached by now good friend,  Paul Fullwood (Alder’s HR & HSE Manager). He told me he had been watching me for a while and I was quite safety conscious. He asked me if I was interested in an opportunity to join his safety team, and if I would like to do some training to upskill.  I jumped at the chance and I haven’t looked back since. I have now been a Safety Advisor for 8 years and I love it.

What do you enjoy about being a safety champion?

I like that I get to make a difference on site through communication and building relationships with our site workforce as the project progresses. There is no better feeling than to change a person’s  perspective on safety who previously had a poor perspective when I first met them. It can be a challenging role at times, but also very rewarding when you see the attitudes of the workforce change throughout the project.  You need to be a good communicator and listener in this role and my wife is dumb-founded that I possess those two skills. Ha-ha.

Tell us about the “My Reason” Initiative and why is it important to you.

The “My Reason” initiative is to get people thinking about why they are at work, and why they should make good safety choices at work. For me, working safely is not about work at all, it’s about being able to enjoy family time. It’s being able to play with my kids when I get home from work, go to the beach on the weekends with family, watch the kids sporting events on the weekend etc.

We have created a colouring-in competition with different messages to help raise awareness. Having your child’s colouring-in picture around site is a great reminder throughout the day of “My Reason” to work safely. Hopefully the message of working safely for others hits home and we can alter some bad habits that can creep in on site from time to time. We are expanding the idea to hard hat stickers and they will be on our sites in the coming month.