nailed it! homecomings

The issue: Workplace safety

This example comes from: Worksafe Victoria

Strategic context: Worksafe Victoria wanted to reposition occupational health and safety as a community issue by emphasising that ‘everyone has the right to return home safe each day’. The ad, made in 2011, was one of a series aimed at men in their 20s and 30s. It helped change the safety culture in Victoria’s workplaces. To this day, work sites still display posters with wording like ‘Nothing you do today will be as important as coming home to your loved ones’.

The values it’s priming are: Benevolence (mature love)

What we love about it: This video departs from the normal framing of work safety issues. Usually, messages about the importance of safety at work go for shock value, often with very sad storylines or graphic images of injuries, aiming to prime Security values. These can work, but they can also make the viewer retreat as we don’t enjoy negative emotions and can self-select out of the scenarios with a ‘that wouldn’t happen to me’. This ad instead primes the Benevolence value of mature love, showing a vision of the world we want to motivate action. It establishes a new social norm, where everyone has the right to return home safe each day. By showing multiple families, it also reframes occupational safety as a community issue, not just a workplace one.

What we’d change: We’d like to see more diversity in the families represented, including seeing more of the families in the video having the mother as the returning breadwinner to challenge gender stereotypes.

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