Specialising in providing support for small to medium businesses, Tania Stone is a work, health and safety professional. TLS Safety Solutions helps businesses to understand how they can simply and effectively implement practical workplace health and safety processes. By consulting with and coaching you, our approach is to understand how you do business so we can develop processes that are tailored to you.

Get to know Tania in 5 minutes with this article…

1. What is your favourite thing to do when you’re not working? 

Fishing and kayaking! I love living near the water and currently live in a town with the Murrumbidgee River flowing through. Last year I finally got a kayak and whenever my partner and I get the chance we take the boat and the kayak out and spend our time fishing for Murray Cod, not that we catch much but I just love the peacefulness of the time spent on the water and in nature. I’m not much of shopper but I love shopping in fishing tackle shops and last year we went to Coffs Harbour where they have the largest fishing tackle store in Australia. We spent about 2 – 3 hours in there and I’ve probably got more fishing rods and fishing tackle than my partner. Once or twice a year we usually do a short trip to the coast somewhere and try and do a bit of ocean fishing too.

2. What’s your most-used productivity hack?

Scheduling my time. I use an online program to schedule my time for each day so that my days are structured and I’m not just swapping from one thing to the next. I can import the schedule into my calendar so I can see where I’m going to be / what I’m going to be doing at least a week or two in advance. I usually map out my schedule one – two months in advance in pencil on an A5 calendar and then transfer it across closer to each week into my online schedule. This also helps when I have casual employees working for me at different times of the year because I can schedule their time and they receive email notifications of their shift times. I then use the same app to track my time by clocking on and off to my shifts and I use that information for invoicing clients.

3. What’s the most exciting part of your job? 

I love helping others and my approach to safety is to coach and educate people on why safety is important and why certain processes are being implemented. I love it when I see people have that ‘a-ha’ moment when you actually explain to them the reason behind the controls being implemented, instead of just telling them ‘this is the control, you must implement it’. Most people just want to understand why they’re being asked to do something a certain way.

4. What motivates you at work?

Helping vulnerable people to be treated well and provided with a safe working environment is what motivates me. I’m inspired by people who value their workforce and listen to what their workers are telling them and include them in discussions about the processes they’re implementing.

I’m also inspired by people who give back, I’ve been very fortunate to know several incredible safety professionals who have helped me along the way and I’m now part of a couple of networks of safety professionals who are committed to helping each other out. It doesn’t matter to me if someone is the ‘competition’ as such, we all have the same goal and I love connecting with people and being part of groups who want to support each other.

5. What’s something you find challenging about your work

Working with people who aren’t genuinely committed to providing a safe working environment. I come across people who say all the right things but their actions don’t match their words. Changing someone’s perception towards safety and moving away from the ‘we have to get the job done’ or ‘'we’ve always done it this way and never had an issue’ attitude is always a challenge. Also connectivity issues. The technological options are amazing but often they just don’t work properly in remote environments where connectivity is limited.

6. When it comes to health and safety, what do you believe is a priority?

Integrating safety into everything people do, not having it as an add-on to an operational process. My business motto is ‘Safety, instinctively.’ A lot of businesses have ‘safety processes’, I believe they should be ‘operational processes’, and the safety component is a natural part of the process. Doing a pre-start check on plant or equipment for example should just be a natural part of using that item, not something that is done as an extra step. I think involving workers in the development of processes as well as training and education is vital for getting everyone engaged and supportive towards integrating safety into everything they do.

Topics: Find a Consultant

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TLS Safety Solutions' goal is to help businesses understand how they can simply and effectively implement practical workplace health and safety processes. By consulting with and coaching you, Tania's approach is to understand how you do business so she can develop processes that are tailored to you.

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