Over the last couple of decades, the Workplace Health and Safety Show has evolved from a trade show tacked onto occupational health and safety (OHS) conferences to an independent entity. But is it any good? I spent a few hours there last week to find out.
The Workplace Health and Safety Show is a two-day event that travels to major Australian capital cities each year. Its origin was as a trade show that accompanied OHS conferences, offering a clearly commercial counterpoint to the regulators and academic presentations at the conferences. The challenge in attracting conference delegates was that they had usually paid big money to attend the conference and needed to make a trade-off between their commitment to the conference and the opportunity to stroll the trade show. Other than lunchtime, the conferences rarely allocated enough time for the trade shows, which are an important part of demonstrating the practical application of many of the concepts presented at the conference.
Over time, the trade show began offering its exhibitors opportunities to present their products and thoughts on small stages, often (unsuccessfully) competing with the noise from the trade show. Every so often, the trade stages included short presentations from some of the conference presenters, which were confusing. Often, it was possible to gain just as much knowledge from trade show presentations, almost as a precis of the longer conference talks.
Once disconnected from conferences, the Workplace Health and Safety Show has been able to offer a full program of guest speakers on, often two stages. In some ways, this provides a mini-conference for those who cannot devote two or three days to an OHS conference or fork out over a thousand dollars.
The Workplace Health and Safety Show offers a digital and extensive program, listing speakers often in “summits” with titles such as “High Risk Safety Summit,” “Workplace Wellbeing Summit,” or “Safety Leadership and Culture Summit.” These events are mainly attended by exhibitors, but also feature panels of specialists in the relevant fields. Stripped of commercialism, the insights gained from these sessions can be as valuable as those from conference presentations, and the summits have less formality than conferences.
Occasionally, the stages feature high-profile presenters who are part of the professional and commercial speaker circuit. Melbourne hosted Patrizia Cassaniti, who spoke about workplace safety. Patrizia has developed into a very professional speaker, whose presentation gains additional impact from videos of the aftermath of her son Christopher’s death in a scaffolding collapse, which reinforces her personal experience at the time.
The exhibitors were a mix of Chinese and Asian manufacturers of personal protective clothing and sellers of Information, Communication, and technology (ICT) risk assessment and occupational health and safety (OHS) management programs. The ICT programs all looked the same, with the same aims – locking companies into a dependence on their software. They try hard to justify the high expense of their programs, weaning companies off various Excel spreadsheets or existing antiquated products.
Some of the larger exhibitors from previous trade shows were missing. There were fewer forklift and equipment exhibitors, for instance. There was only one safety footwear provider that I could see. Vacuum lift and trolley solutions for manual handling remained but were less showy than in the past. Terry Wong, of Move4Life, was a good example of how a small company has become sustainable and expanded into new ICT products.
Lone worker technologies seemed to be more prevalent, but the number of first aid trainers and sellers remained about the same.
Corporate health and well-being sellers were present but not as prominent as expected. This could be because Victoria is yet to add psychological health as an overt obligation in its OHS laws, or it could be that the Human Resources sector may be an easier sell than to OHS.
The Workplace Health and Safety Show is worth attending in several contexts. If you are a small business with limited OHS training budgets, the “summits” can be good value, but be selective and do your homework on the speakers before attending. If you are an OHS person, the show is like walking through an OHS supplier catalogue, if there were still such a thing. You may collect a couple of business cards, stress balls, and have one or two conversations with exhibitors, but unless you have purchasing authority, the show offers an enjoyable stroll through the exhibits. If you do go, be sure to grab one of the “event magazines”. It is a substantial catalogue of the speakers and exhibitors, and could be a good quick reference guide.