About

Best Safety Moment Awards Entry: Dover Harbour Board

Award Nomination:

At Dover Harbour Board (DHB), effective communication is integral to our commitment to occupational health and safety. We prioritise  transparent communication both within and beyond our organisation, fostering a shared understanding of our health and safety ethos and expectations.  

We actively communicate our health and safety ethos and expectations through various channels, including company wide announcements, safety alerts, posters, videos, meetings and our induction programme to name a few.  

The SHEQ team communicate messaging of varying types all year round for general health and safety awareness. One way is a planned, 

proactive approach where a list of monthly topics is decided and shared at the start of the year, with each topic being assigned to a member of the team.  

We also utilise a reactive approach, this happens following an accident or near miss. This incident could be one of our own or one that is shared with us by Port Skills and Safety Group.  

We always strive to create innovative and more engaging communications more fitting with the modern lifestyle utilising more modern devices and methods meeting the audience needs for short, sharp, punchy snippets of information.  This has seen us create a short, punchy, professional safety advert style communication method that we have called ‘SHEQ Shorts’. SHEQ Shorts are 30-60 second clips of members of the team sharing information of topical issues at the source. 

These communications can then be easily shared via email, SharePoint, intranet, internet, YouTube, toolbox talks and more. 

Additional Information

Technology has significantly transformed our modes of communication and interaction, revolutionising the way we connect with one another over the past few decades. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a catalyst, expediting this transformative process, and necessitating our exclusive reliance on digital tools for socializing, working, and learning. Platforms like social media and video conferencing have emerged in recent years, expanding our options for virtual communication. The impact of these changes on our lives cannot be ignored. 

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity states that human brains want novelty, excitement, and social connection, and devices play into those desires. Checking a notification can provide a small hit of dopamine, creating a sense of reward that keeps you coming back for more.  Mark’s research suggests we’re giving into digital temptation more and more. In the early 2000s, she and her team tracked people while they used an electronic device and noted each time their focus shifted to something new—roughly every 2.5 minutes, on average. In recent repeats of that experiment, the average has gone down to about 47 seconds.  With this in mind it is clear effective communication needs to hit the mark on all fronts being novel, create excitement and to be short and punchy. 

Like many ports we have an international workforce and many international visitors, contractors and agencies working or visiting and so written communication becomes cumbersome to have translated in to multiple languages. Visual communication lends itself most naturally to meeting the demands of a multilingual audience. 

With these characteristics in mind we have created a short, punchy, professional safety advert style communication that we have called ‘SHEQ Shorts’. SHEQ Shorts are 30-60 second clips of members of the team sharing information of topical issues at the source. Team members simply record a short snippet of content to explain or illustrate a point these are then added to a SHEQ Short template and placed on Viva Engage or SharePoint and You Tube for sharing more widely. 

This method has seen engagement in safety messages increase with the last post achieving 219 views, 26 likes and engaged 4 comments with employee numbers at 332 this is a high proportion of engagement with the message.