JOMC

Programme: Positive safety leadership programme
Organisation: Kier Group
Employees: 12,000 worldwide
Industry: Construction
Location: Worldwide 

Background

Kier Group is a leading construction, development and service group specialising in building and civil engineering, support services, public and private house building, property development and the Private Finance Initiative.

Kier has a good reputation as one of the UK’s leading construction companies and is expanding internationally. Always looking for ways of improving the organisation, it decided that the next step in its evolution was to actively strengthen its overall safety culture.

John Morgan, Kier’s health and safety director, put the culture change project out to tender and the British Safety Council, in partnership with JOMC, won the contract.

Why the Positive Safety Leadership programme?

The company wanted to develop a safety culture change programme for the regional construction business in the UK, which employs 4,000 direct employees and thousands more in the contractor supply chain.

The objectives for this programme were:  

• Reduction in incidents and injuries specifically across both the employee and contractor supply chain
• Bring the contractor supply chain on board with the Kier Safety Vision
• Create a consistent culture across the employees and contractors
• Create a greater number of Health and Safety learning opportunities
• Create a measureable and sustainable change in Safety culture
• Train a number of key individuals in a discussion process that will allow Kier to track behaviours occurring on and off site
• Drive an improvement in conformance to key behaviours

The disparate and fluid nature of the workforce presents a challenge when trying to drive a positive change in safety culture, particularly when sustaining that change over the long-term.

In order to overcome this challenge and hit the objectives we worked with Kier to implement a series of stages as part of the programme, with the aim of leaving them with a sustainable process that they could own and drive themselves. These included:

• a safety culture assessment to test the current culture and benchmark it against the positive safety culture that Kier was looking for
• a steering group to establish and train a number of individuals to support and drive improvement over the long-term
• a Culture Based Safety (CBS) programme to create and communicate a strong vision for improvement across the business
• a Safe and Unsafe Acts (SUSA) individual engagement programme to help senior managers engage meaningfully with others in the business
• a lead trainer programme to train selected Kier employees to deliver CBS and SUSA workshops for the rest of the business.

Outcomes

Thanks to the programme, injury rates are reducing and the number of SUSA discussions are now driving upwards, helping to positively change culture and create a source of learning and improvement that Kier is feeling the benefit of. 

In total, Kier has now seen an overall reduction of almost 30% in their AIR over the last 12 months and the number of conversations is now over 45,000.

One of the other major benefits that Kier has seen has been the impact of the lead trainer aspect to the programme. Many of these trainers have become really passionate champions for positive safety culture improvement.

 “A big factor within safety culture is responsibility,” says John Morgan. “We tend to leave that out but you need to get people to accept their responsibility. Once you get that acceptance of responsibility, they will accept leadership"

“The culture change programme has enhanced that ten-fold. People have bought into it. They understand it, they appreciate it and they respect it. That is part of the overall package that has led us from where we were a few years ago to where we are now.”

Please download a copy of the case study (.pdf) or contact us for more information.