News Pink Shirt Day: Why kindness has operational stakes in critical infrastructure work 15/05/26 On a job that doesn’t forgive distraction, looking after each other is more than a kindness. Our offices, depots, and sites are in pink today. So are a lot of other workplaces around Aotearoa. But the reason we mark it goes further than pink shirts and kindness. At 66kV, a single hair or speck of dust inside a cable joint is enough to make it fail – that’s the level of attention asked of our people every day of the year. So in trades like ours, the spirit of Pink Shirt Day is operational too. It’s part of how we support our people to deliver successful work safely. How we think about it At Connetics, we work to five Ways of Working. Two of them sit at the centre of how we think about today. Excellent Today asks us to bring our best to every job, and to support others to do the same. People Matter asks us to recognise the value everyone has, and to lift each other up. We don’t read them as two separate ideas – one operational, one cultural. We read them as the same truth, told from two angles. To bring your best to a 66kV cable joint you need the person beside you to be your wing person, to have your back, to support you. Pink Shirt Day puts that link in front of everyone, on the same day. Once a year, the country has the same conversation we try to have all year. “In our line of work, attention is a safety precursor. A crew member who can trust we are in their corner, who can speak up, and that they can bring their whole self to work – will deliver Excellent Today. We’ve got their back and they’ve got ours. Pink Shirt Day sits with healthy and safe at work for me. Every day, not just today.” – Tracy Evans-Tracy, Head of Risk, HSE & Assurance Process can do a lot. But not everything. Planning does a lot of the work: Tailgate RiskTalks, safety observers, your wing person – they make attention more likely. People can make a difference to what someone’s carrying in their head. The person who notices something isn’t right, or doesn’t feel right, still needs to feel they can speak up – to ask for a change, to stop the job, or just to feel they’re being looked out for. They need to be able to speak up without judgment, worrying about negative reactions, or being hassled later. In trades like ours, when we don’t get this right, the cost doesn’t stop with the people involved – it reaches our whole team, their families, people who were never on site, or in the room. Pink shirts are on across our sites and offices today. It’s a small symbol with a serious thought behind it. If we want the work to go right, we have to look after the people doing it, our people.
Home Page