Mark Haley

We’re a transport and logistics company. We have approximately 100-150 drivers and 700 support people that support the whole business. Manual handling is a big problem for us. It equates to about 70% of all injuries that we have across the network. Predominantly, our injuries are shoulders and arms and low back injuries.

Our system for manual handling training just wasn’t working for us – it wasn’t engaging the hearts and minds of our people.

We saw that Move 4 Life was a great system that would engage, get our people involved, and actually deliver a manual handling package that would make a difference.

We wanted to improve our training. We wanted to improve the way that we delivered that training to our people. We also wanted to engage our people in a different way. We wanted to roll out a package that would get our people excited and enthusiastic; that would look at some of the morale aspects around the business, and really challenge the way that our people thought about their movement and what they did on a day-to-day basis. Nobody else does it like Move 4 Life.

In-house Move 4 Life implementation

We wanted to bring the capability for our people to actually deliver the training in our branches and on the floor across the network. We’ve now got our people in our branches with the Move 4 Life facilitators’ guides and the training tools, etc., etc. It’s really important for us that whatever training that we do is Border Express training – it looks, it feels and it works within our environment.

The feedback has been awesome, and I think the flow-on effect is morale is improving around the branches – like you can’t go anywhere now without someone telling you to stick your butt out. From a trainer perspective, those guys have some really great training that is assisting them delivering other training around the business as well.

Empowering employees to make their own choices

Our approach has been as the teams get involved that it’s up to them. They decide whether they’re going to do the 60-second Investment and how they’re going to integrate the moves into their day-to-day, because that’s really what the program’s all about.

I think what makes Move 4 Life special is it’s not the type of training that somebody comes along and then they’re told that they need to do a certain task or a certain thing in a certain way. Move 4 Life engages people in a totally different way. It shows them their autopilot and then demonstrates a new option, and then they get to feel and experience that for themselves.

I think it works on a number of different levels. There’s that interaction through the training. It’s fun, it’s different and it challenges people. And I think it’s the type of training that people can’t help but go away and then just start thinking to themselves, “Oh, what if I did this and what if I did that?”

And from a leadership perspective, it doesn’t leave our leaders with a mandate to go out and say, “You must do it in a particular way.” It’s actually leaving those choices up to our people, and for the most part people make good choices when they’re shown a new option, and I think that that’s why it works.

Reaction from employees

We get a lot of, “That was the best type of training that we’ve ever done.” We get a lot of thank yous, which is always great. We’ll get anything from, “I didn’t know that before,” to my favourite, which is, “Stick your bum out.” Now, I don’t think there’s too many places that you can go in our business where one of our guys from the floor are yelling out, “Stick your bum out!” or looking after our people, which is great.

I think there’s a whole lot of fun that comes with a Move 4 Life rollout that even though they’re having a bit of a joke and they’re yelling out things like “stick your butt out,” but it’s all done in the right way and it’s still obviously promoting the safe moving techniques, which is what it’s all about.

Setting up for success

Firstly, we made sure that we had the right people as facilitators. It was important that those people weren’t just our trainers, that there were people from the floor, there were people from operations and from other parts of the business. Our group of facilitators is from across the whole business.

Secondly, we had the right buy-in at a senior management level and right through to operations. We did a fair bit of work behind-the-scenes engaging the right people, talking to them about the program, exposing them to small parts of the program, which was equally important.

Finally, and I think that this is the critical part, is that it’s alive out here on the floor. The people that are part of the training are engaged in a way that we want them to talk about the movements, we want to share what they’ve learned, and we want them to look after each other. So if somebody’s not doing something right we’re encouraging them to have those conversations in a way that’s fun and gets the message across.

I’ve been involved in three rollouts of Move 4 Life through three different organisations that I’ve worked with. When I came here to Border Express, it was something that I was really keen to get rolled out as soon as we could.

It’s fun, it’s interactive, and it engages people in a totally different way around manual handling.