The challenges and rewards of implementing a new safety culture

Briggs Equipment has recently launched its new safety initiative – the ‘BE Safe’ campaign – and Gavin Wickham, Briggs’ Operations Director, discusses the challenges of implementing a new safety culture as well as the rewards.

Implementing any new workplace culture can be daunting and time consuming with lots of challenges. However, with patience and determination, any struggles are far outweighed by the end results.

During late 2012 after acquiring Barloworld Handling UK, the number of people we employed doubled to over 1,300, and we soon realised that we had two different safety cultures. Developing the BE Safe campaign aims to generate a new ‘stop and think’ culture to motivate employees to think about their own personal safety.

It also addresses what could be called, a ‘blame’ culture within businesses. It’s often the case that employees tend to blame the organisation they work for when there is an accident and changing this attitude was a challenge we needed to look at. Instead of having health and safety as separate, defined entity within the business we have taken a more integrated approach making it part of every employee’s belief system.

Engineers can get a lot of pressure from customers to repair machines quickly, but we are empowering them to speak up about any concerns they may have. Employees need to develop strong self-belief to question their own safety, For example, they need to have the confidence to be able to ask themselves if they are capable to perform certain repairs, or work safely in a particular environment and then speak up if they feel they can’t.

Communication is the key factor, which can be a real challenge when a business has different levels of management. We have developed a direct line of communication from engineer to board to discuss safety risks and actions that need to be taken to remove those risks. This is facilitated through a number of health and safety champions in the field who then report directly to the board.

We’re very passionate about transparency when it comes to risks and threats to our workforce, enabling senior managers to be constantly responding to issues raised. If any accidents do occur, the board and senior managers will meet to discuss the incident focusing on what has been learned and how to reduce the risk of it happening again, rather than just investigating the causes and directing blame. This is a more proactive approach to safety, helping to ensure that all our employees go home safe after each working day.

The safety of our employees is our utmost concern and we all feel it personally, at an emotional level, if anyone does get injured. At the heart of our philosophy is letting employees know that we care, and that we’re prepared to take any actions we possibly can to stop them getting hurt at work.

Briggs Equipment

Tel: 01543 430 455

www.briggsequipment.co.uk