Safety leadership in retail doesn't happen in a boardroom

It happens in the seconds between a customer query at the checkout and a forklift reversing in the yard, with a team that's constantly new and under pressure.

Often the bigger risk is invisible: how safe people feel to speak up before something goes wrong. Benny Mathews calls this "unsafety", the instinct to stay quiet rather than flag a concern, which can turn a near-miss into something worse.

In this session, Benny, who leads the Health, Safety & Wellbeing strategy for Kmart and Target, builds on his psychological safety model by bringing it to the realities of the shop floor. Drawing on experience with constantly changing teams, he explores practical ways to build safety engagement across customer-facing frontline workforces.