Motor Trades Care (MTC) is excited to announce its partnership with safety culture experts Sentis, to deliver an industry-first safety education program to empower leaders across the automotive sector.

Anthony Gibbs, CEO at Sentis commented: “We are excited to welcome MTC as an Official Sentis Partner as we continue to engage like-minded businesses and their leaders to join us in creating healthy and empowered workplace cultures, and on our mission to change the lives of individuals and organisations for the better, every single day.”

Leadership is a Safety Essential

Great leadership is the foundation of any successful business and leaders should role-model the actions and behaviours expected of others. Inspiring people to work safely and authentically, and encouraging their team members to care for their health and wellbeing, is just one of the many facets essential to great leadership.

Over the last 18 months, MTC has completed Protect and Care Programs with customers across different sectors of the automotive industry. A key trending observation from these programs was that most businesses did not have a dedicated resource to help them with Work Health and Safety (WHS). Consequently, it was apparent that businesses place a significant reliance on their leaders, including business owners, managers and supervisors, to drive a great safety culture. However, in many cases, they may not be equipped to do so effectively.

Part of the Solution

An important insight from the Protect and Care Programs has been that the automotive industry needs support to build their safety leadership capability and to set up their leaders for success. MTC’s goal is to provide a safety leadership program as a benefit not only to the members of the Motor Traders Association of NSW (MTANSW), but for the entire automotive industry in NSW.

The Leading Safely Program will give a return on investment by providing a value-for-money, industry-specific, attitudinal evidence-based safety leadership training and education program that most leaders in the industry would not otherwise be able to access.

The Solution Design

The Leading Safely Program is specifically designed to develop leaders’ capability to help team members remain safe in the workplace. It is a collaborative design, bringing together the MTC’s automotive industry WHS expertise and the vast safety leadership and culture change experience of Sentis, which makes the approach highly relevant and applicable to the industry. MTC’s aim is to deliver a program that will be impactful whilst keeping business operation interruption to the absolute minimum.

The Program will be delivered over six weeks and will include a mix of self-paced online learning modules, a Safety Leadership Self-Assessment, and two facilitated webinar sessions, requiring a total of seven hours to complete the training. One-on-one coaching sessions (50 minutes) will also be available for leaders who feel they would benefit from additional support from an experienced consultant.

Trevor Ballantyne, General Manager, Operations, said: “Our aim is to deliver a program that will not only be impactful, but that will also keep operation interruptions to a minimum, and partnering with Sentis on the Leading Safely Program allows us to achieve both these goals.”

“More than that, we’re thrilled to be able to offer a program to that supports the automotive industry to build safety leadership capability and set leaders up for success.”

Accessing the Program

The Program build is well underway and we are making great progress on content development. Our aim is to complete the content design and to deliver a pilot Program by the end of February 2021 and then launch the Leading Safely Program to the automotive industry from March 2021.

MTC will provide further information about the Program cost and registration process closer to the launch date in early 2021.

For more information about the coming Program please contact us.