Someone Noticed.

This week I was offered a new job with the company I have worked for, for the last five years.

When the announcement went out across the business, I laughed.

Not because I don't want the job. I do. I'm genuinely looking forward to it.

I laughed because somehow, at 45 years old, I have become an Operations Manager.

That probably doesn't sound particularly remarkable until you consider that I left school with very little apart from a GCSE in Art, which I was naturally good at and therefore had almost no chance of failing.

I wanted to join the Navy when I left school, but my grades were shite so that was pretty much a non-starter. I wasn't thick, I just went to a crap school and didn't learn a great deal while I was there.

So instead of sailing the world, I fitted fireplaces.

Then I put fences up, worked on roofs and eventually became a groundworker. For a brief period I even had a job throwing stones at furniture to make it look distressed.

It distressed me more than the furniture.

That didn't last long.

Neither did my career making Venetian blinds, where I was eventually sacked for being too slow. I hated that job anyway, so I think we were all reasonably happy with the outcome.

There was never much of a plan behind any of it. I was working, earning money and gradually becoming quite comfortable with the idea that I was a grafter and that was probably what I would always be.

Which is why seeing Operations Manager written next to my name this week made me think about all the different versions of me who would have found the whole thing absolutely ridiculous.

Especially the one who was about 27 and had somehow stumbled into health and safety.

My dad had started working in safety himself by then, although saying he had "started working in safety" probably makes the whole thing sound far more organised than it actually was. He was blagging his way through a fair amount of it, as he tended to do.

But there was another reason I became interested.

Someone I knew was killed at work.

One of my best mates lived next door to his mum and dad and rang me one evening to tell me what had happened. The lad was younger than me, had recently bought his own house and seemed to be doing alright with life.

Then, suddenly, his mum and dad were standing at their front door while police officers explained that their son wasn't coming home.

That stayed with me.

Not the statistics or whatever investigation followed. I don't remember any of that.

I remember thinking about his mum and dad answering the door.

A few weeks later I saw an advert in the newspaper for a safety qualification. It wasn't particularly expensive, so I enrolled.

Around the same time, the company I was working for needed somebody to come into the office and help with basic safety work. They needed RAMS writing and a few other bits sorting, so I put my hand up.

It became obvious almost immediately that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I had spent the best part of ten years grafting for a living and suddenly I was sitting in front of a computer trying to work out Microsoft Office and Excel.

One of the first sets of RAMS I wrote was rejected by the client. Apparently, the bloke who rejected them subsequently complained to my boss because he thought I was going to hit him.

I wasn't.

I was just mortified that I'd produced something so shit.

For those first few months I seriously considered going back on the tools. I knew where I stood there. My shutter joinery was a work of art, I could tile and slate a roof, finish concrete and generally make myself useful.

In an office I didn't have a clue.

Even my clothes didn't belong there. The only shirts I owned were the sort you wore for a night out, so I would turn up for work in a pinstriped shirt looking like I was heading straight to a nightclub afterwards.

And then there were meetings.

What the fuck were they all about?

On my second day somebody asked me to deliver a toolbox talk to about fifty blokes I had been working on the tools with only days earlier.

I'd never stood up and spoken in front of a group that size.

My hands started sweating as soon as I was asked.

Obviously, I said yes.

I spent the rest of the morning absolutely shitting myself.

When I eventually walked into the workshop I could feel everyone looking at me. There was muttering, laughing and that particular atmosphere you get when a group of construction workers senses that one of their mates is about to publicly make a complete tit of himself.

They weren't disappointed.

I stood at the front, stared at the sheet in my hands and read almost every word from it in the most robotic voice imaginable. I barely looked up and, when I got to the end, I left at a pace that probably constituted a workplace hazard in itself.

There was no time for questions.

That was deliberate.

If somebody had put their hand up, I think my head might genuinely have fallen off.

Somewhere along the way, though, I got better at it. There wasn't a moment when confidence suddenly arrived, I just kept finding myself in situations that made me uncomfortable and gradually realised I could survive them. Speaking to people became easier, standing in front of a room stopped making me feel quite so sick and I slowly started to understand how businesses actually worked.

More importantly, I started understanding the people inside them.

I worked for some fairly big organisations, built a decent reputation and grafted like mad because for years I had a nagging suspicion that eventually somebody would realise I wasn't supposed to be there.

Looking back, I probably had imposter syndrome long before I knew there was a name for it.

Then, when I was 34, somebody offered me a job as an HSEQ Director.

Me.

A bloody director.

I'd recently become a dad, the money was better and, if I'm completely honest, I quite liked the idea of being able to tell people I was a director.

So, I accepted it.

And walked into one of the strangest businesses I have ever worked for.

The first time I visited, I turned up properly dressed for the occasion. Suit, white shirt, notebook and pen. I was going to meet the existing HSEQ Director because I would effectively be coming in above him and wanted to understand what I was walking into.

The postcode took me to a yard full of portacabins.

Not exactly what I'd imagined, but fair enough.

I walked inside and was pointed towards a room at the end of the corridor.

The bloke I was meeting was sitting behind a desk surrounded by paperwork, wearing jeans and a jumper with a little white dog sitting on his lap like some sort of low-budget Austin Powers villain.

He turned out to be one of the funniest people I've ever met and became a really good mate, which is probably one of the reasons I stopped trusting first impressions quite so much.

That first day, though, I was still trying to work the place out.

I sat there in my suit pretending this was exactly what I'd expected.

It wasn't.

Over the next few months I realised that most of the things I'd previously associated with senior management didn't really apply there.

Some of the directors wore skinny jeans and T-shirts. Board meetings occasionally involved beer. People disappeared halfway through meetings for cigarettes and arguments could escalate at a remarkable pace.

Everybody seemed to have several jobs.

At one point the commercial manager appeared to be freelancing as HR while somehow also overseeing payroll.

I would go home and tell stories about whatever madness had unfolded that day, only to be asked, "Have you spoken to HR?"

My response was occasionally:

"That was HR."

It was that sort of place.

One minute it felt like a perfectly normal construction company and the next I would be sitting in a room wondering how I was supposed to persuade this collection of fairly intimidating Scouse construction directors to embrace whatever new safety initiative I had walked in with.

The interesting thing was that the longer I stayed, the more I realised the chaos wasn't the whole story.

There were some incredibly capable people in that business.

The lads on site knew what they were doing. Some of the directors had forgotten more about construction than most people would ever learn. They worked hard, expected everyone around them to work hard and, in their own slightly aggressive way, they looked after their people.

They just weren't particularly interested in talking about it.

There was no wellbeing strategy being discussed over herbal tea and nobody was asking anyone to rate their emotional energy out of ten.

If somebody asked how you were, "sound" was generally considered a perfectly adequate answer.

To be fair, that suited me as well.

I'd spent most of my working life around construction. You cracked on. If something went wrong, you sorted it. If somebody did something stupid, they got a bollocking and then everyone went for a pint. Usually, the person who had done something stupid bought the first round.

When I first joined, I struggled to get much traction with the directors and I think they struggled to work out what exactly I was there to do.

Then one of our bigger clients held a safety stand-down and I saw an opportunity.

I brought a friend of mine up from Oxford to speak about a serious workplace accident he had experienced himself.

You could have heard a pin drop.

Some of the hardest blokes in the room had lumps in their throats listening to him.

I think something shifted that day.

They realised I wasn't particularly interested in wandering around with a clipboard or producing another set of colourful pie charts. I wanted people to understand why any of this mattered.

Not because a procedure said so.

Because real things happened to real people.

That mattered to me from the day I'd pictured those parents standing at their front door.

But I was still learning that keeping people safe was about more than stopping someone falling off a scaffold or getting hit by a machine.

That lesson came a little later.

One of the lads working for us started struggling.

His relationship had broken down, there was a young child involved and things were beginning to unravel. He had also developed a serious problem with cocaine.

In most businesses it would have been easy for that to become a drug-and-alcohol issue.

There was a policy.

There would be testing.

There could be disciplinary action.

Someone had broken a rule, so you found the relevant procedure and followed it.

And workplaces need rules.

But one of the people working alongside him had noticed something else.

He wasn't himself.

That was all it took to start the conversation.

One bloke knew another bloke well enough to realise something was wrong and, instead of ignoring it or deciding it was none of his business, he told somebody.

The concern made its way to one of the women who worked in my team. We'd recently put several people through mental-health first-aid training and thankfully she was one of them.

She reached out to him.

What came back was far more serious than any of us had realised.

He wasn't simply having a difficult few week’s.

He was regularly thinking about taking his own life.

His relationship had broken down, he wasn't seeing his child in the way he wanted, and his drug use was draining whatever money he had left. Everything was feeding everything else until he'd reached the point where, in his own mind, disappearing completely had started to feel like a way out.

At that point nobody gave a shit about the drug policy.

The question wasn't whether he had breached a company procedure.

It was whether we could stop one of our people from dying.

We found specialist suicide-prevention support in Liverpool through James' Place and, thankfully, he agreed to go. We made sure the practical side of things wasn't going to stop him getting help and then people far better qualified than us took over.

After that, life carried on.

That's the strange thing about moments like this.

Other problems arrive.

Meetings happen.

Phones ring.

Someone needs something.

The business continued being completely bonkers and months passed.

Then, maybe six months later, the woman from my team told me he'd come back to see her.

He told her that if she hadn't intervened, he had no doubt he wouldn't still be here.

I've thought about that many times since.

Because for all the courses, campaigns, posters and policies I have seen during my career, the thing that started that entire chain of events was incredibly ordinary.

Somebody noticed.

A person who worked beside another human being every day realised he wasn't behaving like himself and decided not to look the other way.

That changed something in me.

Until then, I think a part of me still saw wellbeing as something businesses did. It was another initiative, another campaign, another poster you stuck on the wall somewhere between the fire procedure and the accident statistics.

After that, I found it much harder to see it that way.

Because wellbeing wasn't what potentially saved that man's life.

People did.

Around the same period, COVID arrived and suddenly the whole country was talking about health, vulnerability, loneliness and looking after one another.

For those of us working in essential industries it was a bizarre time. Hundreds of people in our business still needed to come to work while everyone else was being told not to leave the house, and because the word safety appeared in my job title I somehow became partly responsible for making sure nobody caught a virus the entire world was still trying to understand.

We did everything we were told.

Two metres apart, masks, respirators, open van windows in winter, gallons of hand sanitiser, Perspex screens and enough stickers to cover half of Liverpool.

Two of the trainers who worked for me seemed to spend their days walking around spraying Dettol in front of themselves. If I'd allowed them to deliver training in hazmat suits they probably would have done, although I suspect they would still have taken the Dettol with them.

Looking back, parts of it feel ridiculous.

At the time they didn't.

I worried particularly about the older and more vulnerable people who were determined to carry on working. Every time one of them rang to say they had tested positive, I waited for them to come back.

Most did.

One didn't.

A bloke I liked, who was really well thought of across the business, caught COVID around Christmas and died.

I don't know where he caught it. I never will.

But I remember going back through everything we'd done afterwards and wondering if it had been enough.

Had I missed something?

Could we have done more?

Could I have stopped it?

There wasn't an answer.

I think that taught me something else about responsibility.

It doesn't mean control.

You can care about people, take that responsibility seriously and do everything you reasonably know how to do, and still not be able to guarantee what happens next.

For a little while, I think COVID made most of us understand that.

Things we'd treated as ordinary suddenly felt enormous. Seeing your parents. Going for a pint with a mate. Watching your kids play football. Sitting around the same table. Hugging somebody without thinking about it.

Work still mattered, obviously.

But for a brief period it stopped pretending to be the most important thing in everybody's life.

Then the world reopened.

Traffic returned, meetings returned, targets returned and before long we were all incredibly busy again.

The wellbeing posters came back too.

Which brings me back to this week.

Operations Manager.

It still makes me laugh a little when I say it.

The lad fitting fireplaces wouldn't believe it.

Neither would the bloke laying pipes or the one turning up to the office in a pinstriped going-out shirt because he didn't own anything remotely appropriate.

And the terrified 27-year-old desperately trying to escape from his first toolbox talk before anyone asked him a question would have assumed there had been some sort of administrative error.

But looking back, the things that have shaped me most at work haven't really been the qualifications, promotions or job titles.

They've been the things that happened in between them.

A set of parents answering the door and being told their son wasn't coming home made me think differently about safety.

Standing terrified in front of fifty blokes taught me that being completely out of your depth doesn't mean you have to stay there.

Working in a chaotic business taught me that competence doesn't always look the way you expect it to.

Watching one person notice that somebody else wasn't alright taught me more about wellbeing than any campaign ever has.

And trying to look after people during a pandemic taught me that responsibility and control are not the same thing.

Maybe that is what experience actually is.

Not becoming the person who finally knows all the answers, but collecting enough moments to understand which things matter.

I'll start the new job soon and there will be targets, meetings, problems, spreadsheets, decisions and all the usual stuff that comes with it.

Some of it I will know how to deal with.

Some of it I probably won't.

But there is one thing I understand far better at 45 than I did at 27.

People don't arrive at work and leave the rest of their lives at the gate.

The bloke standing next to you might be going through a divorce. Somebody might have been awake half the night worrying about money. Someone's parent might be ill, someone's relationship might be falling apart and somebody who looks almost exactly the same as they did yesterday might be privately wondering whether they want to be here tomorrow.

Most of the time, you won't know.

And you can't fix everyone.

You shouldn't try.

But you can know the people around you well enough to notice when something changes. You can ask the question instead of assuming. You can listen properly when the answer doesn't sound right and, when something feels wrong, you can choose not to look the other way.

After more than twenty years working around safety, that might be one of the most important things I've learned.

Wellbeing isn't a poster on the wall.

It's what happens when somebody notices the person standing in front of it.