The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional Episode 12 Mission Orientated Research

This week on the Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional we talk to Deborah Rhodes, Deborah is a Dairy Farmer, award winning academic and health and safety advocate. Deborah talks to us about Mission Orientated Research which she suggests as a way to achieve goals. 

We discuss the risk profile of a farming environment something Deborah came to later in life after a career as a nurse and working in pharmaceuticals. During the discussion Deborah highlighted the value of Farm Assistants and their risk profile and it made me think about what other roles within an industry might have a similar profile and one that came to mind was the spotter on a construction site, in some ways holds huge responsibility, may not have high skills exposed to a range of hazards, but is usually a role that doesn’t get much attention. Who on your site or in your industry might fit the same profile?

Deborah is passionate about promoting the wellbeing of workers and she is right when she discusses the lack of attention we give to this subject in our workplaces, highlighting it as a more holistic approach than the way we typically focus on worker health, wellbeing brings a much wider scope to the discussion.

There is lots of great content around workers needs and how employers need to engage with their workers to better understand and appreciate those needs and we finished off with a discussion around the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, an area Deborah suggest health and safety professionals use to guide their work.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah-rhodes-1095b72a/

https://sdgs.un.org/goals

The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional – Available now. https://theculturallyintelligentsafetyprofessional.buzzsprout.com/

#connection #engagement #value #culturalintelligence

Transcript

Greg: 0:00

Hi, everyone welcome to another episode of the culturally intelligence safety professional a podcast aimed at providing a platform where by safety professionals can develop a pathway to enhance their cultural intelligence capability which will help them function more effectively when working in a multicultural situation. I'm Greg Dearsly your host and I have a range of guests lined up to talk to this year. We have people with experiences across leadership psychology, health and safety, education and of course cultural intelligence. All of our guests come from a wide range of different backgrounds across the diversity spectrum, including from different organizational context. In this podcast you'll hear stories aimed at helping you the listener enhance your cultural intelligence. You'll gain an understanding of how you can create trust when working in diverse environments and quite frankly, that's all the time no matter how homogenous the place you work, it might be, it's still full of diversity, people with different backgrounds, experiences and beliefs, all built on their figured So today I'm talking to Deborah Rhodes. Deborah is a rural advocate and a dairy farm owner and is pioneering some groundbreaking research on health and safety in the dairy industry. In 2023 she completed a master's pilot study which championed safety climate as a lead measurable indicator of work group safety perceptions in New Zealand industry. Now in 2024, she's down the path of completing a PhD which is going to address critical gaps using innovative methodologies to shed light on worker relationships and safety challenges. And excitingly, this won her an Emerging Rural Researcher Award just a month or two ago, which we'll come back to later in the conversation. Deborah's ambition for mission orientated research to achieve responsible and safe work life aims her own work towards tangible policy improvements by promoting collaboration of government, academia, and civil society. Welcome, Deborah great to have you on the show.

Deborah: 2:18

Thanks. Great to be here.

Greg: 2:21

As always is the case with this podcast the audience is really keen to hear about our guest's journey so maybe if we start there and if you can just give us an overview of what has brought you to this point today.

Deborah: 2:34

Yeah thanks Greg. Normally it starts with a chronological timeline. However, just thinking about the dairy yard that I was in this morning and its circular nature, I could probably pretty much say that I've come around in a big circle. So I started with learning education as one does as a young child. I am then on into Academe, and through university at Victoria doing my Bachelor of Nursing in early, the first Bachelor of Nursing in, in early 1990. Graduated before that as a Comprehensive Registered Nurse in the health sector essentially and then went to industry after that, changed industry in Europe and spent 14 years pretty much most of that in pharmaceuticals and pioneering new farmer products. I won't tell you which ones because you'll all just raise your eyebrows or not. And ran various projects and eventually came back to New Zealand in early 2000s. And as one does in their middle 30s finds a husband, has children and not that its a tick box, but it's been an extraordinary, an extraordinary time going into a new industry, starting the learning all over again in dairy and eventually coming back into academe in the dairy industry specifically within the Faculty of Health, where I first started at Victoria University in the new discipline of workplace health and safety. So that's why I'm here today.

Greg: 4:14

Yeah, absolutely. So a bit of a global journey and sounds like some interesting experiences around the world and in different Different sectors and different environments. And so you're now about to launch into, a PhD. So tell us about that and how you ended up in safety specifically?

Deborah: 4:34

When we first came into dairy as second career people in 2010, I did come across a number of people who were registered nurses and we're involved in that sort of rural health aspect of of the industry. However for us coming into the dairy industry and learning on the ground how to farm, having experiences that were really quite difficult at the time, being a bit older and starting at the bottom of the career ladder there were Considerable aspects of those experiences on big farms where everywhere you look there is a hazard and every which way you turn you feel you're at risk. So It never was leaving me much other choice but to hone in a bit further on how people worked in the dairy industry about four or five years ago now I really started to think about how people's safety were affected by the work relationships on dairy farms and how they manifest as being only a very few workers, like literally on a average size farm of 440 cows, you might only have three workers. On a thousand cows, you might have five or six workers. So really, A few workers, so those relationships are really critical. I quickly realized that actually acquiring any funding to do any research without an academic background was quite difficult and so I made some inquiries at the Victoria University to look at coming back in to do a postgraduate diploma in workplace health and safety that just happened to arrive on the doorstep at the same time that, that I was looking to go back into some tertiary education. So that process I don't do anything part time. It's normally full on or full time or nothing. So trying to run a farm at the same time, but nevertheless the postgraduate diploma in workplace health and safety at Victoria University was fantastic. I have to say that because Greg, you're one of my lecturers. Thoroughly enjoyed it. And that led me naturally into a master's, which I undertook last year. And at Victoria University, they have a pretty intense system whereby if your master's research is got enough in it, then PhD, which which I have succeeded in doing.

Greg: 7:31

Excellent. And And do you want to expand a little bit on what it's all about? I know I gave a bit of an intro about critical gaps and innovative methodologies and relationships and safety challenges. Is there anything you can tell us at this point in terms of what that all might mean, might look like?

Deborah: 7:48

The Masters pilot research that I did last year used a very well established, validated international survey from the Scandinavian countries looking at safety climate. Safety climate is a snapshot in time of work groups perceptions of Practices, Policies and Procedures within the Workplace. So that survey actually consists of seven domains and each of those domains, along with the interviews that I conducted as a mixed method pilot research gave me a whole new insight into what a PhD could investigate more deeply in terms of what was really affecting workers perceptions of safety. And so the PhD question is really to explore the work relationship and its intersection with occupational health and safety. So taking that out of academic language and really just looking at what is it that happens in those relational transactions or those interactions that people have in the workplace that may or may not affect what they do next, what action they took next, how that behavior may have changed or be affected in terms of safety.

Greg: 9:29

Okay, interesting. And I guess, given that this podcast is about cultural intelligence, is there any aspect of the PhD that might look at how those perceptions are viewed by different cultures in a New Zealand dairy context, or is this a global thing?

Deborah: 9:50

So culture clearly from, let's talk about that in terms of indigenous culture in New Zealand, te ao Māori, um, there, and this is specifically within the dairy industry. So we have a considerable number of iwi owned dairy farms across New Zealand. They work within their structures with Mautaranga Māori principles, they may be explained in terms of more of a regenerating type practices that include looking after environment, people, water more closely and reporting obviously to, to all of their iwi. So it could be, thousands of shareholders. The approach from a cultural perspective of this research is really about how humans as a species fit into how we do the work and what is the impact on us as humans in the workplace? So I suppose in answering your question in a roundabout sort of way, cultural safety Can I even ask you, Greg, what is it, what does it mean? Is it different in different sectors? How do we incorporate that into the normal health and safety plan, if you like, ticking off various pillars within the workplace that we need to manage? But and just to sum that up, risks are all, are always those things that we are trying to manage, or at least that we are encouraged to manage. But nowadays we have to accept uncertainty as something that we need to be comfortable with. Nature currently and has done for some time pressures us also to learn how to live with that uncertainty as much as we can. However, to do that, we need everybody's voice. We need work groups perceptions of safety. We need to use our humanity and our empathy and our skill sets just to be open to how to manage those risks and be comfortable with uncertainty. And we need to listen. So whether that fits our level of definition of cultural safety is up to the listener of this podcast, but certainly for me, that's how I think about it.

Greg: 12:33

Yeah, look, just from my own involvement in cultural intelligence and getting an understanding that some of the ways that safety, and if we bring it down to a safety level, um, is done from a Western perspective, is just doesn't fit with other cultures thinking around how they do things, how they understand things, um, how they view hierarchy, how as I say, Western approaches just don't make sense in some areas. So I guess the whole point of cultural intelligence is that they're leader, boss, manager. Colleagues if they were more culturally intelligent and aware of the people that work with them, then, those things could be taken into consideration. Where you've got some cultures whose view is, c'est la vie. If it happens. It's God's will. And that's their cultural value. That's their worldview. And so it's just that. Connection between that world view and a more maybe western world view that says this is the structure of safety and how it works here and this is how it's got to be. And there's generally a bit of a clash there.

Deborah: 13:49

Yeah, I think, what I've just described is, and to be a little bit presumptuous has deep elements with, that align with Matauranga Māori in terms of how we live and work with nature in my specific, Industry in the dairy industry across the sector in primary production. We're outside, we're impacted by climate change, we've got weather events coming at us. We need to be very conscious about how all of those aspects interacting with nature is very uncertain and we have to have everyone's voice. We have to have empathy across the board and We have to be able to hear different views of how people perceive, and this is, an element of cultural safety, how different people might perceive, for example, a weather event coming at us, what does that mean for that individual? Is there is there perception of, safety for the animal higher than their perception of safety for a colleague. You only have to look at the way in which cattle are revered in India, compared to perhaps how they might be in feedlots across vast landscapes in the U. S. So yes, so as we have lots of different views working within our sector on the ground, we have to be culturally aware as to where people's perceptions of safety are and, Where their levels of uncertainty change their behaviors or not.

Greg: 15:48

Absolutely. Perfect. And I think what that speaks to is, and I've said this before on this podcast about it, it's almost a real reflection of worker engagement if you're doing that, worker engagement's, not just about having a health and safety rep and a committee or a toolbox meeting every day. There's just so many other things that organizations can be doing to. Understand the perceptions and the views and the beliefs of their workforce, and understand that not everybody might think like the boss. And you would hope that most bosses probably know that inherently. But maybe not. So that, actually that, that discussion talked to one of the areas I was going to cover off on later. So that's cool. We've ticked off another question, but what I wanted to come back to now is. Is this award that you got to stand on a stage and accept an award about emerging rural researcher so who, what was the organization? What was the event? What was the award all about?

Deborah: 16:52

Hauora Taiwhenua is essentially our national rural health organization sector. They came under this umbrella two or three years ago now to incorporate about seven different networks and organizations from rural GPs, rural nurses and midwives association, then you've got all of the allied Health professionals like physios and occupational therapists and so on, and they all came under this umbrella of Hauora Taiwhenua so the previous government delegated significant budget to Rural Health New Zealand to ensure that, we, as an organization of which I belong to now. We're able to address rural health needs and we hear a lot about rural mental health, but there's there are women out there having babies as well. So, I entered the award because I wanted to really shine a light on an aspect of rural work that nobody has really addressed before in terms of their voice, who they are, where they are and which is the dairy farm Assistant. That is the person that is most hurt on farm, the least experienced, interacts. within the dairy farm working shed amongst the most hazards and yet we don't really hear much about them. They're remote, they're unorganized, un unionized, and they're incredibly difficult to find. However, we need them to harvest the raw product that generates a level of approximately 22 billion worth of dairy product leaving the country every year. So this particular research of my PhD, I submitted to Rural Health New Zealand. This is the first year, the inaugural year, of an Emerging Researcher Award. They believed that the research aspect of the organization is becoming more critical as we struggle with providing rural health care and I won it. Which was quite a, which was quite a surprise because It is a new discipline within the Faculty of Health at Victoria University. It has emerging qualified professionals with huge amounts of understanding of global literature and in depth understanding of theory and ways in which we can create and design research that has practical implications for policy development, but very real hands on way in which people in workforces can understand and utilize better to improve their own lives and their own safety.

Greg: 20:14

Yeah. Congratulations. That must have been, if it was a surprise, that's that was, that must have been a great surprise and a very proud moment, to get up on the stage and receive that inaugural recognition.

Deborah: 20:26

I think it's recognition of the research. That, that I've put forward to be done, of which is pioneering research. That's why it's a way I always choose the difficult things. But but also within the umbrella of health, I think is really important because health and safety. is, the health part of health and safety often gets forgotten in terms of just how big health is globally as an overarching umbrella of absolutely everything. So really important to, to drag this research into that setting where we can have better cross silo. conversations about really what research is important for the future.

Greg: 21:21

Look, we know that, many years, it's always been big S, little h, isn't it? And from a health and safety perspective, it's always about safety. Yet we know that the stats show us that, 15 to one of people dying prematurely due to work related health. And that's the stuff that we, the asbestos, the silicosis, the hazardous chemicals and those sorts of things, it probably doesn't even get into the psychosocial mental health space of well being. And that ratio I think is applied globally. It's the same or similar.

Deborah: 22:02

Yes. And I think it's been quite extraordinary how mental health and please don't misinterpret me or listeners misinterpret my comment. About mental health has certainly generated its own its own sort of bubble, if you like that we've all become aware of very quickly over the last number of years and that's great. It, really needed to be lifted. And certainly previously working in acute mental health you always, I always felt like it was, where I got put because there was no surgery to be done or something. But nevertheless, health, the impacts on people's health. Considering that they spend eight hours a day the old eight hours a day at work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of play we're spending some of that play time also in work and just things like diabetes in the workplace, people not being able to have time to check their blood sugars, people not being able to stop on the side of the road eat their lunch when they're driving. These are considerable health issues that impact directly on safety outcomes and cost to the National Bill of Health.

Greg: 23:26

And added to that, and you talk about it being a recent phenomenon, or a recent known phenomenon, or talked about subject, because 20 years ago we were told to come to work and leave all that personal stuff at the gate, and now we're told, bring your whole self to work. But then the business owner doesn't know if that health issue is A, their responsibility. B, they probably don't understand the impact it might be having on their work or the risk to the safety. The worker doesn't want to tell. It's a, it's, it can be a bit of a minefield if to try and work out what is the right thing to do in some of those areas.

Deborah: 24:09

Yeah, and we haven't worked that out, and yet you're running a podcast on cultural safety, you know. But this is really good timing for cultural safety because it has You know, because it's this new aspect that people need to think about. It actually can pull all of those siloed discussions more neatly into more of a comprehensive understanding and discussion about. about the human in the workplace, about our humanity in the workplace, about really, we're not in the workplace to have to, for our labor to be financialized and profit extracted off our backs without any return to our own State of humanness, our health, our safety, our cultural beliefs, and how we may perceive culturally the workplace and how we are treated by others. A really good time to open up cultural safety in terms of being able to collate all of those other issues into a better conversation, in my opinion.

Greg: 25:26

Yeah. And you talked about things like Diabetes and lunch breaks and those things. And I take it, to, to another extreme. It's more a mental health thing. I would assume given the diversity of our workplaces and the spiritual or religious needs. Of some people in, in, the working community, some of the cultural norms. Do we understand the impact? You talk about lunch, but do we understand the impact of things like Ramadan? on a person's ability to do a physical day's work if their, nutrition intake has changed for a period of time, or that, the impact on somebody who needs to pray at a certain time of the day, those sorts of things which which I'm guessing most workplaces probably don't consider, certainly not in New Zealand.

Deborah: 26:21

It's interesting you bring that up. I worked as part of my role in Turkey for I think it was one of my markets for about five years and come Ramadan, I was normally feeling quite hungry really by the end of the day but as a nation and when the mosques let off their sound for praying I was in the, I was in the minority, probably along with, thousands of other tourists, but nevertheless. In, within a cultural setting, those things are the norm. However, now we have so many immigrants working across all of our different sectors now, we have a responsibility as an employer to have an understanding of Employees needs, and that's really critical to ensure that the employment relationship doesn't become so unequal and skewed that it becomes exploitative. So cultural safety is something that we have an obligation, if we're an employer, to take consideration of and therefore for human resources who manage those processes and policies within the workplace to make sure they are installed adequately for employers needs to be managed.

Greg: 27:48

Absolutely. So that's that's a really cool conversation, just as we bring it to a bit of a close anything that you can offer the health and safety profession out there who might be listening to this in terms of what can they do on the front line to maybe think about some of the things that you've talked about. How do we make sure that we're a little bit more human, in our interactions with the workforce? Health and safety people tend to be, has a reputation, let's say that we've got a reputation of being people that tell others what to do and how to do it. That may be, the wrong approach, but how can we be better at engaging with that diverse workforce to make sure that employment relations are undertaken in a more appropriate way?

Deborah: 28:43

Look, I think I'll, to be practical and and for people to actually have a think about and go and look something up I take it back to my Orientation of my research is what I call mission orientated research. This is, involves and this can be for health and safety professionals across anything that they do, is setting ambitious specific measurable goals or missions that, that address not just societal challenges or opportunities, but they are framed around what the issues are like climate change or healthcare or technological innovation within the organization so that you can actually mobilize the resources that you need within the organization, the expertise the innovative ideas. To achieve those tangible outcomes to meet those measurable goals. So, missions very much come from one of my somebody who I follow quite closely globally Professor Mariana Mazzucato from the Public Policy Institute in London. She also heads the UN Council of Health, and she talks about having mission orientated research that is underpinned by the Sustainable Development Goals. So the SDGs, the 17 SDGs, as a health and safety person within an organization, you can go to the 17 SDGs and you can have a read through them and think, which one of these, are very specific to my organization? And then look at, How you can develop something with those headings of being ambitious and specific and having measurable goals.

Greg: 30:42

Yep. Great. Absolutely. And those 17 goals do provide some practical sort of guidance, as to areas that you might look at. And if you're purely, A health and safety person, some of them may not be particularly relevant but there certainly are ones there that you could say, although there's not a specific one that says health and safety, but there is one that, or there are several that, that talk about health and safety related Yeah.

Deborah: 31:11

And health, very specifically. I can't remember what number it is now but I think it's important to look to see where your resources and expertise that you can use within an organization and working collaboratively for the purpose of everybody's good outcomes. And they then reflect on the wider community and wider society because everything that you do on a micro level with health and safety within an organization will impact through the chain. To the wider community and the wider society. And that's, we've got some major issues now that are big. It's very difficult to break those down to, to understand how we can have an impact at our own level. But you have to be able to have some headings to, to do that. And that's why mission orientated work is very useful in engaging SDG's to understand why You're doing it that way. And maybe how you can achieve it.

Greg: 32:17

Outstanding. Great conversation. Thanks for putting the time aside. I know you've probably been up early. Pushing cows down the race or doing whatever else you get up to at four o'clock in the morning on a milking station in in the middle of nowhere, quite frankly, I think, aren't you?

Deborah: 32:36

Oh, Golden Bay!!

Greg: 32:39

And there probably could be worse places to be, I'm sure. Yeah. Hey, Deborah, thanks so much for your time. Enjoyed the chat and Thanks Yeah, congrats on the award and we'll put some of these items that you've mentioned up on the transcript of this episode so that people can go and go and check some of them out.

Deborah: 32:58

That's great. Hey, thanks, Greg. Appreciate it.

Greg: 33:01

What a great conversation. I loved the mission orientated research approach, Deborah as suggesting as a way to achieve goals. During the discussion Deborah highlighted the value of farm assistants and their risk profile and it made me think about what other role within an industry might have a similar profile. One that came to mind, was the spotter on a construction site, in some ways this holds huge responsibility, may not have high skills, they are exposed to a huge range of hazards, but it's usually a role that doesn't get much attention. Who on your site or your industry might fit the same profile? Deborah is right in the attention that is lacking towards health or maybe wellbeing in our workplaces. In the new Haumaru Tangata framework released by Te Ropu Marutau O Aotearoa they've replaced the word health with the more holistic word wellbeing. More on that in a future episode. There was lots of great content around worker needs and how employers need to engage with their workers to better understand and appreciate those needs. We finished off with the discussion around the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. An area Deborah suggest health and safety professionals use to guide their work. So we've come to the end of this episode. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found something valuable that you can take away that might enhance aspects of your own cultural intelligence. I'll add the transcript from this episode to the show notes and there'll be some other resources available as well. If you'd like to talk about cultural intelligence. Get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I'm posting content regularly so keep an eye on your feed and comment if you see something that resonates. If we aren't connected send me an invite. If you want to hear more about CQ, you can follow and subscribe to this podcast. I would really appreciate it if you did that. And keep an eye out for the next episode. Next week's guest is Rick Fox from FR&NK Health and Safety Consulting based in Australia. Rick is a First Nations man from Central West New South Wales who enjoys collaborating with and supporting clients and colleagues. He has a diverse employment background, including work in state government local government and the electricity distribution sector, as well as manufacturing, retail, and hospitality. Rick talks to us in the lead up to the 2024 Safeguard conference where he will be a guest presenter at this event. Thanks for tuning in to the Culturally Intelligent Safety professional. Ka kitei.