Are you too busy?

I’ve now reached a point where I can look back and reflect properly on something that, in the moment, felt like constant effort with very little return.

Over the past period, I have contacted well over 400 people regarding health, safety, and wellbeing services. I did it with one simple aim: to make sure people were aware, supported, and—most importantly—compliant with their responsibilities.

And yet, more often than not, I was met with silence.

At first, I told myself it was understandable. Everyone is busy. Emails get buried. Priorities shift. I work in this space, so I genuinely do understand the pressures people are under. But as the number climbed—100, then 200, then 400—I started to notice a pattern that was harder to ignore: not just busyness, but avoidance.

That’s where the reflection really begins.

Because I’ve had to ask myself a difficult question: when does “busy” stop being a valid reason, and start becoming a risk?

Health, safety, and wellbeing compliance isn’t something that sits neatly in the “when I have time” category. It’s not optional, admin. It’s not background noise. It’s the framework that keeps people safe, workplaces lawful, and organisations protected from very real consequences. And yet, despite that, I’ve often found myself wondering whether the urgency I feel is simply not shared.

Looking back now, I realise something important: I was measuring engagement through responses when I should have been measuring impact through awareness. Just because people didn’t reply didn’t necessarily mean the message didn’t land. It might have been read. It might have been noted. It might even have been acted on without acknowledgement.

But I’d be lying if I said the lack of response didn’t sometimes feel disheartening.

There were moments where I questioned my approach.

Was I too persistent?

Not clear enough?

Not relevant enough?

And there were other moments where I had to step back and remind myself: the responsibility doesn’t disappear just because communication is ignored.

What I’ve learned most from this experience is that compliance culture isn’t built on sending information—it’s built on valuing it. If health, safety, and wellbeing are genuinely priorities, then engagement has to reflect that. Not occasionally. Consistently.

I’ve also learned that silence can be misleading. It can feel like rejection when in reality it may simply be a delay, overload, or internal bottlenecks I can’t see. But even so, systems that rely on silence to function are fragile by design.

So I’ve started to adjust my thinking. Less emphasis on chasing acknowledgement, more focus on clarity, escalation routes, and ensuring there are multiple touchpoints rather than a single message that can be missed or ignored.

I don’t say this with frustration anymore. That part has faded with time and distance. What’s left is more practical, and honestly, more sobering.

Because ignoring communications about safety doesn’t make the risks go away. It just delays the moment they’re confronted.

So yes, I understand people are busy. I really do.

But I also find myself returning to the same question—quietly, persistently:

Are we too busy to ensure we are actually compliant?

And if we are, then perhaps the issue was never time in the first place, but priority.