Ep 33 Tap into Dr Susanne Bahn's innovative online safety & mental health program

Dr Susanne Bahn has an academic and safety background. In 2014, she started Tap in Safety by developing a system that allows companies to effectively train their staff around key safety and mental health issues in the workplace. The system embraces micro learning and online accessibility to pack a punch and engage workforces. Now in over 700 companies she offers a system that has solid back end reporting that helps companies demonstrate their duty of care.

• IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY TRAINING ONLINE
• ARMED ROBBERY SAFETY COURSE ONLINE (AWARENESS TRAINING)
• BSB41419 CERTIFICATE IV IN WORK HEALTH AND SAFETY
• DRIVER SAFETY AWARENESS TRAINING COURSE ONLINE

TRANSCRIPT

Unknown Speaker
This is an ohs.com.au production

Brendan Torazzi
Welcome to Episode 33 of the Australian Health and Safety Business Podcast. I'm Brendan Torazzi, the host of the show, and today I'm joined by the founder and CEO of tap into safety Dr. Susanne bond. Good morning, Sue. Good morning, Brandon. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah, it's great to Great to have you on the show. And one of the one of the things I love about the podcast is I get to meet all these people that I probably wouldn't normally meet if I didn't have a podcast. So that's great. Tell us tell us what tap into safety does?

Unknown Speaker
Oh, yeah, with pleasure, I'll tell you what happened to safety does we have a interactive safety and employee mental health training platform, it has a whole heap of out of the box training that you can use straightaway. It really focuses on hazard perception training around critical risk and critical controls on the safety side. And on the mental health side for employees. It covers a wide range of topics, things that impact mental health, and it uses a micro learning methodology, and then supporting the whole lot of that there's a great deal of reporting. And that is really what most of our clients want. Because, you know, they need to be able to prove ongoing competency, particularly to cover their own h&s obligations. And now definitely in terms of the industrial manslaughter climate that we're that we're in at the moment.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, I just actually the interview before this, I interviewed a Jeremy Kennedy who works in that industrial manslaughter space. And the fines are really they're really ramping them up now. So that could be a good podcast for listeners to listen into. If you if you want to find out why it's so important to get training done for your staff, just to make sure that, you know, they understand the risks and hazards but also, yeah, that just keep keep workplaces safe and protect you against you know, what can go wrong?

Unknown Speaker
How did you just to put my two cents worth in here, Brendan, sorry not to

Brendan Torazzi
interrupt you? No, no, that's fine. But,

Unknown Speaker
look, we also run a blog and articles, a series of articles that we write every couple of weeks, and there is an article on there just for your listeners, which they really might want to know. And that is unpicking across Australia, what the industrial manslaughter laws mean? What business need to do just very simply, and you know where to go to from here. And the key issues with industrial manslaughter? Yeah, sure. You need to train them. And you need to make sure that your employees understand workplace risk and critical controls as Safe Work Australia, you know, asked us to do, but one of the critical issues is keeping accurate reporting, because otherwise you don't have evidence of continued competence. And in the case that something may go wrong, something fatal may happen. And you know, look, God forbid everybody bless yourself right now that this doesn't happen. But if it does, as a business, you need evidence, evidence that you have actually done everything you possibly could to keep your people safe.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, absolutely. Well, what we might do Sue is get that link and put it in the show notes so people can have easy access to it. Yeah, but so I'm curious how you got started, like, how long? How long has happened to safety been going for? And, and, and why did you start?

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so tap into safety formed in June 2014. So we're coming up to our sixth year now. And we're a small team. We're a husband and wife, founder team with a long history in safety consulting. But as well as that I also have academic credentials and did a whole lot of research around workplace hazards and what people know and how that works and know in business, and then also adult learning. Because I found that there, you know, there was this propensity, and there still is in lots of organizations to use death by PowerPoint. And the problem is, there's research that shows evidence that shows that within the first seven minutes, if you're doing PowerPoint, even on an elearning platform, just PowerPoint after PowerPoint within the first seven minutes, they've already drifted off. Yes. And the other piece is if you train that way, within the first month, it pretty well lost 90% of what you trained, because I really didn't listen in the first place. So what research is showing to have training that actually makes a difference is to have it that it is interactive, in that you have to be involved emotionally with what's going on, and that you also You have to have some decision making in there where you have to actually work through a problem and come up with some answers, then you enlist the frontal cortex of the of your brain. And then you have an emotional response. And you actually buy into the training and look, not all the learning sticks, but you know, a lot more does. So we were looking for a way that we could provide training around critical risk, because that's, that's my area, do it an interactive way. Keep it short and sharp, because we know business doesn't have time and money to have people in, you know, training, unless it's certified training. And then, you know, refreshing later, they're not going to take them off work for for hours on end. So delivering online, and to make it interesting and engaging for the end user, but at the same time, give robust reporting to the business to show ongoing competency. So five and a half years ago, when I started tapping to safety, industrial manslaughter laws weren't in place. And it's quite interesting that we've now got to the point where the legislation has caught up with us.

Brendan Torazzi
So I'll find that did good. Did you plan it that way? I mean, could you see that? That it was coming? Of

Unknown Speaker
course I did. Then I didn't. I knew we had our obligations. And you know, look, business does try to keep their workers safe. We're not out to employ people and injure people, of course not. And we're trying our best to make sure that they're, you know, trained in high risk activities, and so on. But there's a problem where we have this ticket for life piece where I do the training, and that's it. I'm trying forever. And look, the environment changes. And we forget, and complacency sets in and bad habits set in. So there is a need for ongoing refresher training. But the problem then is, is how can we afford it and do it quickly. And, and, you know, cost efficiently?

Brendan Torazzi
You'll I had a I had a quick look at your demo. I mean, it's really, really impressive the way you know, you've got the 360 pictures and you go around and you've got to the one I looked at anyway had to pick out some hazards and and then it was different styles of questioning and information and videos. And it was really, really impressive.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. So we use 360 degree panoramas, where we can in our safety training, because that actually places the individual in an example of either their workplace if it's customized for the business, particularly or a typical work, workplace. So for example, a warehouse is a warehouse is a warehouse, it doesn't really matter whose it is pretty well standard. And then you know, how do you navigate around that? What happens with the forklifts and so on. So sometimes we can't use a panoramic scene, and then we use elearning. But we always use animated videos, because animated videos are fun. They're usually only about a minute long. So we're using micro learning. And they give you the key concepts really quickly without having to you know, sit through just pages and slides of PowerPoint text.

Brendan Torazzi
So So what was the first course that you develop? Because if you've got, you're saying the other day that you've got, what 30 or 40 off the shelf courses now is that we have so

Unknown Speaker
in this safety, the first one, I don't know, Brendon. There's there's about 25 prebuilt out of the box on safety. And then there's another 13 on employee mental health. So we can talk about that one in a moment. And the reason we've got the two is because they're the two gaps that we found that there just is not enough in terms of hazard perception training that's easily consumed and, you know, done in a nice interactive way. And there's not enough in employee mental health training, because we kind of miss our general employees. We focus on our managers and supervisors. If we have budget to do Mental Health First Aid training, but the only thing our general employees get for mental health is access to an EAP. If you've got one, we might do an IU. Okay, day, we might do a little focus on mental health week. But that's kind of it.

Brendan Torazzi
Yep. It's an invisible, isn't it? I mean, mental health. It's a

Unknown Speaker
minefield. Yeah.

Brendan Torazzi
I mean, is that something that you've developed in recent years? Because I really soon in the last couple of years, it's become a huge, it's very topical, you know?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, we moved the platform to include mental health about three years ago, okay. And we deliver that training as micro learning again, because this is a way of delivering the message around mental health for employees around key topics, and we have a broad range of topics much broader than what you get with To AAP or, you know, on the beyondblue site, there's a couple of videos you can have. And the key message with mental health or the key issues with mental health is one, there's stigma associated with it. So if we offer different types of support and training pieces in mental health is starting to hit send the message that, you know, we're happy to talk about mental health here and start to break that stigma down. The second piece is as an individual, because mental health is an individual journey, generally, I need to know some coping strategies. What do I do? If I am faced with an issue? Perhaps I feel like I'm being bullied. Or perhaps I've had a recent death in my immediate family, I'm not coping with the grief, what do I do? And so we need to have some, some coping strategies of how we navigate that ourselves in the first case. And then the final piece is if our mental health we feel we're really not coping, we need to be able to be given options of where we can seek help. And that is not just go to the EAP. It could be well, we always say GP first anyway. And secondly, EAP is there. But it could be family friends, it could be supervisor, manager, you may get on with them really well. It could be a friend, it could be a colleague, or if none of that works is the government agencies like you know, lifeline, beyondblue, and so on.

Brendan Torazzi
And so you were saying that you've got roughly 700 companies using tap into safety now. To the majority of them go for the safety side or the mental health side? I'm just curious as to, you know, or are you seeing any particular trends? Maybe mental health is starting to come up as more popular?

Unknown Speaker
Well, this is the thing I asked whenever I'm doing a presentation of the software, because I do quite a lot of online presentations when people want to do a deep dive, even though Yeah, they can do a free trial on the website at any time. I say to them, you know, what is your interest? Is it safety, predominantly mental health, predominantly, or both? And right now, it's both, okay, it's it started off safety, then mental health started to come through. And now it's pretty well, we want to see all of it. And we can see, we can use both sides of the platform quite usefully for us, you know, there's the focus now is not only physical safety, but psychological or psychosocial safety.

Brendan Torazzi
Oh, 100%. I mean, if you're not, if you're not in the right headspace, you're going to be more likely to have an accident.

Unknown Speaker
All the research shows that clearly. Yeah, clearly, if you're not present, while you're doing a high risk task, there's a high risk of you getting injured or actually creating an issue that may injure someone else.

Brendan Torazzi
And so, companies come along to you, and they say they take the whole suite, or they pick and pick and match, or how does it how to how do they generally consume your content,

Unknown Speaker
they get access to the full platform immediately. And we sell on a credits model. So you purchase credits, and look just to give some detailed $10 per person per use of a training module. When you get in as an administrator, you see the whole suite of modules there. And then you decide what you want to make visible and what you want to disable, because there might be safety modules there that don't, you know, meet your needs, because they're not your industry, for example, most clients take all of the mental health. Some will hide certain modules, and they will roll out campaigns around a module, many leaves them all there, because they really can't determine what is it that the employees are going to need at any given time. The key though, to making the mental health training successful, is to make it a mandatory training piece as part of your professional development. So we need you to do the training module on you know, relationship breakup, because that's such a common thing. We need you to do the one on change, stress and burnout. And then what happens is in the training records, and the compliment, or the sorry, reporting is complimentary, there's no charge for that that's just part of the support we offer on the platform will actually show who has completed what module and when they did it. And they show evidence that you have actually looked at psychosocial risk. You've provided training for all employees, and this is when they did it.

Brendan Torazzi
And I'll take it there. You know, when each of these modules they quizzed on the content, and that sort of thing, or is it just they watch it and answer some? Like, how does it in other words, how they are they tested or they just need to watch the content?

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so in this safety, they're definitely tested. They're tested on control measures and critical control measures and their understanding of risk. And that's important because that's what industrial manslaughter or when you know, our obligations are actually saying, we actually have to have evidence that they you've trained it, they understand it, and you know, any gaps that you reveal you need to address. So we have a full Gap Analysis Report in the safety side. In the mental health side, it is simply just that you have viewed the training. Yeah, it's very hard to assess mental health, because now you're getting into this murky area of privacy. Yeah. And really, what we're trying to do with the mental health is to take a character in a story, because storytelling works beautifully, to teach coping strategies around the problem, and then to encourage them to seek help.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, it's more awareness really, isn't it? It is. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker
And not the amount of times I get told that people just don't understand, you know, what is the problem? What are the the, what is it that we're showing that we're not actually doing? Well, you know, how do we see ourselves, and then how to other see it? Because as I understand the symptoms, and the signs, you know, people can say, hey, look, I'm noticing you just not doing so well. You just don't seem to be coping here. Or you can recognize yourself, you know, I'm not sleeping so well at night. You know, I'm stressing, because, you know, we've got a whole heap of change going on in our organization right now. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's

Brendan Torazzi
amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like a real buddy system, really, isn't it? Like, if you're an organization and everyone gets that mandatory training, then? Yeah, they can. Yeah, they tic tac off each other? And and see, because sometimes you're blind to issues that you're having as well.

Unknown Speaker
Oh, absolutely. With mental health, when you're in the problem, you don't see the problem? Yeah. And you actually see it more from someone else. But of course, as a colleague, you know, you're not a counselor, you can't tell them what to do. Or you can just say, as you know, you know, are you okay, mate? You know, I am managing at the moment, you know, do you need to talk about it? If you do, you know, let's, let's get your help. We don't need to be, you know, backseat counselors, but no, he's certainly not qualified to do so. But, you know, the suggestion could be, you know, why don't you jump on and do that training module? Again, it might give you some ideas? Or, you know, why don't you seek some help? Or, you know,

Brendan Torazzi
and and do you find that a lot of the clients actually want custom stuff? Or does the library pretty much cover most of the most of the key issues?

Unknown Speaker
Our tier one clients want custom work? Yeah. Because they actually would like us to do a panoramic scene within their organization and cover off their critical risks. And so therefore, yes, we do we build safety content quite regularly for tier one clients. And they often include that in their safety induction, they often Top and Tail it, they have an online induction, you know, welcome to the company, and then hey, and we jumped straight into our panoramic scenes, because it's, you know, more fun, more engaging, and covering off what they need quickly.

Brendan Torazzi
So would you do that as a group? Or is it sort of individually, you know, sent out to people in the company? Or can you do both?

Unknown Speaker
You can do both. But if you want the reporting, you actually need to have it as an individual training piece. Yeah, of course, because it's actually you know, but you can you can put it up in the classroom, you know, and we can go through it together. And look, I've got clients that do this as well, they actually have their individual staff do it and they see the reporting. And they see there's a gap, perhaps, you know, there might be a misunderstanding about, you know, working in and around a suspended load, let's just say, for example, or there might have been a near miss with people in plant interaction, you know, people going into Exclusion Zones, for example. And then what they then do is put up the module into their toolbox meeting, they put it up on the screen, if they've got that, you know, that sort of technology to do it. And they might work through the module together, have a look at the panorama again, and just go look, this is the issue here, here, here and here. And then they don't worry for the reporting for that piece. Yeah. And so that group training to do that, that cost them $10.

Brendan Torazzi
so affordable. Yeah. So

Unknown Speaker
it means that they, you know, they can really cover off on it. And then all they need to do as health and safety professionals then just say, we ran the toolbox session, we put the module up, these were the key issues and just take some notes. And then you know, follow up again, maybe do it again in another six months and see what the scores were then.

Brendan Torazzi
And so take it every time you watch it is a credit. You can't it is yeah, that makes sense. I mean, at that price. Yeah. You You know, you couldn't get any really cheaper code. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
Well, our idea is to have it that you only pay for the training and you only pay for, you know, that safety training piece and the mental health training piece only. You don't pay for the reporting. You don't pay for all of the support. Things that are in place. There's a whole lot of support articles for mental health that are complimentary. You know, there's posters, there's all sorts of things you can use in for mental health. Okay, so you don't pay for that. And the other piece is, you know, if you're in the middle of the module and you get called away, well, you can pause and resume carry on, and there's no charge to keep going. Because that's not fair either.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah. Now that makes that makes a lot of sense. You've really, really thought it through, obviously.

Unknown Speaker
Well, we hope we have. If there's anything we've missed, please let us know.

Brendan Torazzi
And so I take it the trainings not like it could be used in any state of Australia, or could it be used overseas? It's not sort of you don't drill down into specific legislation or anything like that. That's

Unknown Speaker
No, I don't turn around and say, you know, these are the Safe Work Australia requirements or the OSHA requirements, or, you know, the mining rakes, because at the end of the day, critical risk is critical risk around the world. You know, people in plant interaction moving in and out of exclusion zones is a problem, and it doesn't matter where you are. So the message is exactly the same.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, to that point, do you have customers that are using it overseas?

Unknown Speaker
We do we do. We have some mining companies in Africa using it. They're using it as part of their induction. So that's it interesting. Got others that are, you know, looking at it now in the US and in Canada? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the goal, of course, is, you know, we've been going for five years, we're betting down in Australia, it's now to move into internationally. Yeah. And yeah,

Brendan Torazzi
I guess I mean, that's probably the hardest thing, just getting organizations to start using it. And then once they get a feel for it, and they see how good it is, then you probably you know, they probably just keep going because it is a really, as I said before, it was really very smooth system. And it was kind of I don't know what the word is user friendly. That's what I was looking for. So yeah, so

Unknown Speaker
a lot of time on UX. Yeah. It's really important.

Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, amazing.

Unknown Speaker
Job, of course, now, it's just a sales and marketing job more than anything.

Brendan Torazzi
So the Do you have a bit of a runway of stuff for your library that you're going to continue to build, or you're pretty much at the moment, we're

Unknown Speaker
not stopping. And we have just on the mental health side of I've got a module that we're about to develop on fatigue management and how that affects mental health. Yeah, I've got a lot of mining clients that are really interested in that one. And you know, those that do long, long swings, long shifts. I've also got one on workplace conflict and working with others, and I'm thinking of putting one on domestic violence as well. And then if there's anything else that people want to ping us on, you know, what else do you want? Let's let's put it on. In terms of safety, were looking now to extend further and start drilling down to specific issues, things like you know, just isolations, isolating, you know, machinery and making sure that you know, you test for dead and all of those. That's one issue in workshops. Another one is just working in and around hand tools and you know, compressed air and working with electrical equipment, electrical equipment, and just you know, the whole hand and eye injury issue. So I'm trying to drill down to actual hazards and unpick them apart from just using a panoramic scene that covers general hazards within the work area. So on the platform, you'll see there's there's a module specifically around forklifts, and that is extremely popular. Okay. Yeah. And then there's others around, you know, manual handling. And of course, there's, there's ones on, you know, working at height and construction, there's another one on there that's really quite, quite popular as well. But it would be good to actually take, you know, things like handling dangerous goods. And, you know, what is that as a person who's pulling off pallets off the back of the truck, what do you need to do to protect yourself in terms of chemical, you know, hazards, really, you don't always know what you're unloading.

Brendan Torazzi
I guess, you know, having that big client base, you can probably get a lot of ideas from them, just, you know, feedback until I have you got something on this. And yeah, if you keep getting that comment, then that's probably a good reason to, to build it. Think about building it.

Unknown Speaker
I mean, we've got heaps of content. So we've just got to now start to put it together into more or to actually offer more, which is, which is our plan this year?

Brendan Torazzi
Oh, that's great. All right. So we'll wrap up the interview now. Thanks very much for coming on. And if people want to find out more about tap into safety, where should they visit?

Unknown Speaker
Just the website so it's www dot tap into safety.com.au. There is a free trial there. There's a whole walkthrough of the training modules available. There's information on the reporting is really comprehensive and apart from that, there's our articles, our blog articles, and they're amazing the amount of content that's in there. honestly recommend if you don't do anything else Just have a look at that because as a health and safety professional, the amount of resources that are there for you and for HR and well being there, there's their safety and mental health training, sorry, safety and mental health articles there that you across all sorts of topics that you really could use. Yeah, so yeah, and their research base, they unpick what's been going on in the universities around the world to give you the latest and you know, 1000 words and a link back to your research article in most cases. So, yeah,

Brendan Torazzi
have a look. All right. Thanks very much, Sue.

Unknown Speaker
Thanks, Brendan. Thanks for the time.