CREATING SAFETY CONSISTENCY THROUGH AN SVP
The background
At the University of Sydney, safety goes far beyond hard hats and hazard signs. Staff and students work with live animals, radioactive isotopes, high-voltage equipment, and marine research projects. With 18 critical risks present every day across a campus of thousands, a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work.
The CHALLENGE
Each faculty had developed its own safety approach — effective locally, but inconsistent across the University. There was no single narrative around what safety meant, how it showed up, or why it mattered.
The challenge was to create a cultural throughline: a unifying framework that would resonate across disciplines, from undergraduates to academic leaders, and align with the University’s long-term strategy.
OUR approach
We co-designed the Safety Value Proposition (SVP) — a framework to bring clarity, consistency, and culture to a highly complex environment.
Aligned with the University’s 2032 Strategy, ensuring the SVP complemented existing priorities and made the safety strategy enduring, built into the foundations of the University rather than resting on any one person or team.
Structured around three pillars — People, Risk, and Excellence — anchoring commitments across Culture, Processes, and Systems.
Introduced gradually, embedding principles into safety leadership training, critical risk frameworks, and wellbeing initiatives.
Human-centred, reflecting the voices of staff and academics, using language and examples that felt genuinely ‘of the University’.
The SVP created a practical, usable tool, not just a statement of intent, helping people understand what to prioritise and how to act — while ensuring the University’s safety culture would last.
The impact
The SVP became a filter for decision-making and a foundation for long-term planning:
⟶ Guided teams in prioritising risks and shaping behaviours across roles and disciplines.
⟶ Embedded into programs and systems, making it a cultural foundation rather than a standalone initiative.
⟶ Supported the University’s next three-year health, safety, and wellbeing strategy.
⟶ Created a consistent, unifying narrative that works across complex risks, roles, and faculties.
For the University of Sydney, the SVP has turned a fragmented safety landscape into clarity amid complexity, with real impact at scale.
“I think what spoke to me about the concept [of an SVP], and about Everyday Massive as a provider, was that it was a very good mix of genuinely understanding safety and the core components of that, but also having that really deep skill set on leadership and culture and behaviour and how people show up at work.”
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