• Brian Darlington

    Group Head of Safety and Health, Mondi

    Masters in SPoR, Dipl. Safety and Health, GradSaiosh

    After completing two years of Military National service in 1982, Brian returned from South West Africa to South Africa. HAfter qualifying in 1985, Brian joined Mondi in 1987 as a maintenance supervisor at one of its operations, and this is when he decided to enter the field of safety and health. He completed a National Diploma in safety and health through Technikon South Africa in 1996, followed by a diploma in transport logistics through Rand Afrikaans University.

    In 2000 Brian was transferred to Richards Bay, South Africa ias Divisional Risk Manager with responsibility for the safety and health and risk management of several of paper mills. In 2005, he moved to Europe, taking up the position of Business Unit SHE manager with responsible for in Austria, Hungary, Israel, Slovakia, Poland, South Africa and Russia, and forests operations in South Africa and Russia. Brian is currently the Group Head of Safety and Health for a leading global packaging and paper group in Vienna, Austria. He has filled the role since 2012 and is responsible for safety and health of about 100 operations across more than 30 countries, employing around 26 000 employees.

    Brian has co-authored the book “It Works!” with Rob Long, based on the some of the fundamentals of Social Psychology of Risk and the practical implementation thereof. Brian has written articles for a number of magazines over the years and is currently a columnist for a safety, health, environment and quality magazine (SHEQ Management). He started his regular column, titled “Embodied Safety”, after presenting a paper titled “Safety from the Heart” at numerous international conferences. The column is focused on the caring and people-oriented approach and more recently has included elements of social psychology.
     

    Speaker for following sessions
    • 14:00 - 14:40 Bringing the Person Back into Safety reflecting caring and helping

      In order to develop and sustain our efforts in risk and safety, we as leaders need to bring the human back into our efforts by moving from the traditional risk and safety approach to one that finds the balance between workspace controls, psychological and cultural elements. This approach reflects caring and helping as well as a move away from a telling approach to one of engagement, an approach that considers the true meaning of culture.

      14:40 - 15:10 Safety talk: Sustaining the safety mindset (Part II)
      Discussions to improve “safety” are more and more challenged by arguments of “more people are being damaged by long-term effects of the working environment and stress than by physical accidents”. Therefore, we must  deal with the working environment to a much larger extent before we go on with traditional safety talks. But how do we do this? How can we integrate health and wellbeing into safety? How do we handle the interface with HR? What is similar – and what is different? What are the challenges? What are the enablers? What are the pitfalls and the tips’n’tricks? 
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