Nathan Hight co-founded Safe365 in 2016 to give businesses a way to measure their health and safety maturity. The aim is to move them from reacting to incidents toward managing risk before anyone is hurt.
Nathan says director knowledge and management knowledge are two of the lowest maturity areas across the thousands of businesses in the Safe365 data. We talk about why New Zealand's harm statistics haven't moved, how lag data doesn't reward proactive risk management, taking the product to the UK and the conversation every practitioner has with leaders about the return on safety. His advice on self-assessment is to be honest about where you sit, there's nothing to gain by scoring the house down.
What we cover in this episode
- What strong safety leadership looks like in practice
- Why businesses are reactive by design
- The maturity areas that score lowest
- Lag data versus lead indicators
- Benchmarking: how do we compare
- The return on safety
- Wellbeing and ISO 45003
- Honest self-assessment over a high score
Episode chapters
- 0:00 What makes strong safety leadership
- 1:01 Meet Nathan Hight
- 4:05 Where the Safe365 idea came from
- 6:08 Why businesses are reactive by design
- 9:12 Director and management knowledge
- 12:12 Why NZ's stats haven't moved
- 14:15 Lag data and incentives
- 17:19 Taking Safe365 offshore
- 24:26 What the data shows on harm reduction
- 28:31 Benchmarking
- 30:34 The return on safety
- 32:37 AI and freeing people up
- 33:38 Wellbeing and ISO 45003
- 39:47 What keeps Nathan going
- 44:52 Honest self-assessment
- 48:56 Wrap up
Connect with Nathan Hight
Safe365: safe365.co.nz
Free tool for this episode
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About the host
Matt Jones is the founder of Advanced Safety and a HASANZ-registered health and safety consultant. He's a Professional Member of NZISM, holds a Graduate Diploma in Occupational Safety and Health and founded the New Zealand Health and Safety Professionals community. His book is Raise the Standard: Why Good Organisations Go Blind and How Leaders Restore Visibility.
Guests share their own views and experience. This page is general information, not legal advice. Latest update: 13 November 2026
