“Our biggest risk is complacency. We see it most often with our very experienced 'old guard'. They were brought up in an environment where you put out a couple of cones and everything’s fine."
~ Mike Moore
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2026 HammerTech Safety Leadership Award
Site Safety Evening of Celebration, Auckland
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Interview by HammerTech | 14 Min. Read |
Downer needs little introduction in Aotearoa. The engineering and infrastructure giant maintains over 40,000km of kiwi road a year.
Safety risks at this scale, think one trip around the world, are omnipresent in scope and complexity. Crews work metres from traffic. Protection often comes in a few cones and a truck.
National Road Marking Manager Mike Moore is responsible for keeping crews safe in environments where the margin for error is this small.
His approach? Practical. Act on what’s reported. Use data to remove repeat risk. Make sure safety holds up on the road, not just on paper.
We caught up with Mike fresh off his HammerTech Safety Leadership Award win at Site Safe's 2026 Evening of Celebration Awards: Recognising the Best in Health, Safety and Wellbeing.
From driving better outcomes to where things still fall short (and the moments where safety can quietly unravel), Mike shares the reality of safety on New Zealand’s roads.
Some of it may surprise you.
A: I’m the National Road Marking Manager for Downer. I'm based out of Auckland but we look after 22 maintenance contracts and a whole lot of projects across New Zealand. It’s a big operation.
Road marking is the white lines you see all over the roads. If I had to describe my job in a small phrase, it’s probably like herding wet cats.
We’re doing about 40,000km of work every year, which is more than going around the world. So it’s pretty sizable. Most of what we do is quite technical now and a lot of it’s computerised. But at the end of the day it’s still people out there on the road, doing the work.
A: There’s a couple of things.
I like to sleep at night. You’ve got to do everything possible to make sure everyone goes home. And safety is just the preeminent thing - [it underpins everything we do as a business].
We’re in a very, very dangerous business. You’ve got people standing on the road, and there’s not a lot protecting you apart from a few cones and a truck. So every time we can improve that process and get more safety for our guys, the better off we are.
A: It’s boots on the ground.
If you’re not seen, you can't properly learn about what safety is all about. You need to be able to engage individually. You can do the team stuff, but unless you’re talking to people one-on-one, you’re not going to get the proper feedback.
You have to build an environment where people feel safe to talk to you. They need to know they’re not going to have repercussions. They should feel rewarded for speaking up.
A: A couple of things come to mind.
Firstly, you need a feedback loop. If someone commits something to paper or puts something into one of our reporting apps, we’ve got to go back to them and explain what we’re doing and why. Otherwise they lose interest.
Secondly, you have to show that you’re doing something. Not just filing it away and saying that was a near miss. It's simple to me: if someone reports something and nothing changes, they’ll stop reporting. It just becomes more paperwork.
A: From a risk point of view, it’s probably the opposite of what most people think.
Our biggest risk is complacency. We see it most often with our very experienced 'old guard'. They were brought up in an environment where you put out a couple of cones and everything’s fine. In particular, if nothing’s ever happened to them over the years, it can increase their complacency.
But the new people come in, they’re inducted, they understand the risks, and they’re quite sensitive to traffic and everything else. Most of our near misses come from the old guard, not the new people. That’s something we’ve had to really focus on.
A: It doesn’t matter what that person’s position is. When you’re talking about safety, everyone’s just part of the same team.
One of the things we’ve done around the old guard issue is make them mentors. So they’re responsible for training the new people. That means they’ve got to go back and really think about how they’re doing things because the old standards don’t work anymore.
It’s helped shift attitudes and improve knowledge at the same time.
A: I think the biggest is the introduction of New Zealand Guide to Temporary Traffic Management (NZGTTM). It’s a risk-based approach. It’s gone back to the contract to determine what’s right and what’s not within certain parameters.
Since we introduced that, our people feel much safer.
We’re not putting out signs that don’t affect how people drive. Putting these out was some of our riskiest moments. We’re also closing roads where it makes sense, instead of trying to run traffic past everything.
Productivity has improved too so it’s a win-win. It’s probably the biggest step forward we’ve had in 15, 20 years.
A: Apart from NZGTTM, taking people off the back of trucks has helped too. That was an area where we had a disproportionate amount of incidents. By using the data we already have, we’ve managed to engineer out a whole lot of risk.
Not just from injury, but things like someone falling off a truck as well. Every time we have an injury, we look at the data and work out how we can eliminate it from the business permanently.
A: You’re flying blind without data. It’s not just collecting it. It’s what you do with it.
We’ve got great analyses coming out of our Zero Harm team, and we look at it all the time. Every time we have an incident, we look at what happened, but also how we’re going to do it differently next time - to change the methodology so we don’t put our guys in harm’s way again.
A: It's largely two-fold. Tech is obviously a big one. From a construction point of view, eliminating traffic controls is another key change.
We’re using things like robots for setting out big jobs now. This means no one is bending down, no one’s on the road, and it’s faster and more accurate than us humans could ever do it.
On the traffic control side, it’s much faster and safer to shut down a piece of road instead of running traffic past workers. As the public gets used to that, everyone will be better off.
A: Honestly? I didn’t really know what to expect!
For me, it just rubber stamped the work the team’s been doing. There’s a lot of people behind it. The Zero Harm team, the crews. It’s not something you do on your own.
The industry side matters too. Site Safe and HammerTech are really the unsung heroes too. They help get that work out there, so people can see the great work of site teams every day.
A: Any leadership role has to be a health and safety leadership role as well. They go hand in hand. You’ve got to build a relationship with your team so you understand each other, and make sure everyone knows what the expectations are.
People need to know they’re safe to speak up, stop jobs, do whatever needs to be done to keep safety front of mind.
At the end of the day, without safety, you don’t have a business. It's the one thing that can shut you down tomorrow. There’s not many things out there that can do that.
Sector: Infrastructure services and construction.
Focus: Transport infrastructure, utilities, and asset maintenance.
Footprint: Australia and New Zealand, with operations across 700+ sites.
Size: 30,000+ employees | $10B+ annual revenue.