08 December 2008
Jocelyn Dorrell

Nearly two years ago when Nigel Valvona joined Halcrow - which offers planning, design and management services to the utilities, transport, maritime and property sectors - it would be fair to say the health and safety team was working at full stretch.

Tasked with supporting more than 7500 employees working in 70 offices around the world, and with a Glasgow-based core team that was only three strong, it was perhaps inevitable that there was a UK bias in the company's health and safety focus, and that sending a consistent safety message out to the grassroots was a challenge.

But in little more than 18 months Valvona and his team have created a system they say overcomes cultural differences to ensure a good minimum level of safety standards throughout Halcrow's worldwide operations. It also seems to have secured much sought-after "buy-in", from the top of the organisation down to consultants working out in the field.

Their work was recognised in September, when Halcrow collected the RoSPA Scotland Trophy - the top award at RoSPA's annual occupational health and safety prize-giving north of the border - and was also commended in the Commercial and Business Services Sector of the awards. The judges said they were were particularly impressed by Halcrow's arrangements for ensuring workforce competence, communicating safety information, investigating incidents and reviewing corporate performance.

Jargon-free

In an expanding global operation, it can sometimes be hard to ensure that health and safety systems keep pace with operational developments.

"When I joined the company [as health and safety director] two years ago, I took on an initiative to raise the profile of safety across the group," explains Valvona. "We needed to make sure the safe systems of work and our safety ethos reflected our international standing."

With a remit to improve health and safety competence throughout the company's international operations, the team identified a set of common standards that would be adopted worldwide and which chimed with Halcrow's business ethos of "sustaining and improving the quality of people's lives."

The first hurdle in creating core safety values was to overcome the hugely diverse attitudes to safety in the group's worldwide locations.

"In some countries, safety is a very significant part of your day-to-day operations; in other countries we operate in, it's not a particularly high priority," he says. "In some locations, getting the job done is much more important to the clients than any safety consideration."

To overcome these differences, Valvona and his team created what they call the baseline: a minimum safety standard for work which every project across the world must meet. Where there are local legal requirements which go further than the baseline, as in the UK, these must of course be met or exceeded; but the baseline ensures a good minimum level of safety in countries where the rules are more lax, and promotes a coherent set of values throughout the firm's worldwide operations.

Coming to terms

To make sure their message travels well, the safety team thought carefully about the terminology they used. Buzzwords are out, so you shouldn't hear Halcrow staff talking about a "zero-tolerance" or "blame-free" culture.

"Zero-tolerance is a great one, until something goes wrong and it's the MD's fault, and you find you can be tolerant after all," notes Valvona. Similarly, "blame-free" is difficult to apply consistently, he says - where there's been a serious incident, it may be necessary to identify someone as being culpable - so Halcrow promises "fair" treatment instead. "Best practice" was also rejected, in favour of "good practice".

"It doesn't mean that we don't strive for - or often achieve - the best, but you have to think about the operational environment," he explains.

While Valvona's arrival started the development of a new safety framework, it didn't see an increase in the size of the Glasgow safety team. If the size of the department had increased, he argues, he still would have retained ownership of safety, when the goal was to provide guidance while promoting responsibility among all employees.

So instead of taking on new safety personnel from outside the organisation, they recruited from within, increasing the number of people who have safety as a function and in job titles. Before 2007, there were around 10 people who had a defined safety function in their roles; now there are around 130 with "very specific" safety duties.

"Everyone has safety responsibilities," acknowledges Valvona, "but accountability [among the 130] is crucial, or decisions get passed from person to person."

Every office worldwide now has two members of staff with defined safety roles: the regional director for the office and a health and safety coordinator (neither is a full-time safety role). In some cases, the director or coordinator will cover more than one office.

Each of the five business groups also has, as a minimun, a senior director with safety responsibilities and a health and safety coordinator. Halcrow has also increased the number of dedicated health and safety staff in its Middle East region of operation.

One good, one bad

With the new framework in place, the next step was to make sure it had strong support at the top, so it could be cascaded throughout the organisation without dilution.

With this in mind, the team persuaded the company's chief executive to take (and pass) the IOSH Safety for Senior Executives course. He was followed by the board and the second senior executive management team. All of them attended public courses - a deliberate decision to ensure the directors and managers gained not just an overview of UK health and safety legislation, but also some insight into how other companies approach safety.

When the chief executive travels around Halcrow's offices worldwide, he now takes a safety checklist, and quizzes managers on the subject.

"Communication-wise that's very powerful," says Valvona, "because although he may ask a relatively simple question, it means that the senior managers he's meeting realise that he's interested in the answer.

"The first time, if they don't know, they can get away with it. But next time he asks them, they're going to want to know the answer."

As well as the chief executive's checklist, board members are asked to write a very brief, two-paragraph safety report every time they visit a site, noting one good thing and one bad thing they have noticed. Directors discuss the reports at board meetings. Valvona says some of them worry that the negative part "will turn people off".

"I'm concentrating on making them understand that when discussing the reports with people, they have to push the message that a negative comment is an opportunity for improvement, not being told off," he says - at least, this is the case the first time something is noted. If the same thing is spotted again, then they may need to "start ramping up the penalty."

Round the clock

Improving site safety awareness among a largely office-based workforce is a particular challenge. Consultants are usually only on construction sites as visitors, so take their lead from the contractors, not all of whom are as safety-conscious as they might be.

"Safety's not a significant part of consultants' academic training," Valvona points out, "so anything they learn, they learn when they come to us, or to any other consultancy or engineering organisation."

Valvona's team haven't changed the structure of employee training radically, but they have increased the amount and broadened the scope of the training on offer, and brought in extra courses for the 130 employees with new safety accountabilities. Training for the 130 varies, as the starting point for each staff member varies, but ranges from IOSH for Senior Executives (one day) to the NEBOSH Certificate (two weeks or distance learning).

There's also been a significant increase in training for staff in the Middle East, to meet the requirements of the new baseline standard.

When the safety team introduced the standard, they took the opportunity to modify and update the safety pages on the Halcrow intranet, which historically attracted few visitors.

Among other things, they made sure the text avoided UK bias, and replaced references to specific operating locations with references to regions; they included information to help staff who prepare bids, as much of this is generic; and they added updates from around the world, identifying a key safety representative for each region.

The average number of hits on the safety pages has since increased tenfold. The team also published a series of articles in the company magazine, leading staff through the developments, so they knew what was happening and what was planned for the future.

As they implemented the new framework, Valvona's team created a new identity for safety in the organisation, which is "24/7" - to convey not only the idea that Halcrow is a global company, operating around the clock, but also that what you do outside work has an impact on your safety.

Staff have access to a 24-hour emergency helpline, available all over the world, which they can call for assistance if they have a work-related safety problem or concern.

Global network

No organisation can be completely free of incidents and near-misses, and the best way of ensuring continuous improvement is through effective incident reporting and investigation. Of course, to be effective, reporting systems rely on staff input, so making sure the method of reporting is accessible is crucial.

A review of the incident reporting form at Halcrow revealed that it was longer than it needed to be and demanded insignificant information that didn't help pinpoint root causes. So the Glasgow safety team changed the form to make it much more simple and user-friendly. They also set targets for responding to incident reports.

Staff can leave information on a telephone helpline or email the safety team and will get a response within 24 hours. "We make sure everyone who calls is spoken to," says Valvona. "It's a very supportive process in terms of getting the information - even for minor injuries and near-misses."

Typically, encouraging people to report near-misses is difficult, but the company is very good at capturing third-party information.

Every single accident - whether it's RIDDOR reportable or not - is included in the monthly board report. The report also goes to the operations directors' committee and the chief executive's committee, and they take the information away and push it down the management chain. All incidents are investigated, and the information is published locally, regionally and internationally where relevant.

Where the safety team feels a more structured approach is needed, they transmit the information to the 130-strong global network of staff with safety responsibilities, so they can pass it on locally.

"We never use one method of communication; we use several. So if people don't read the emails, they can pick up the information from the intranet. And if they don't pick it up on the intranet, they'll get it through a management briefing," explains Valvona.

"We encourage people to include the right level of safety information at the relevant meeting ... Every office has a nominated person to receive safety information."

For safety's sake

Valvona supports the truism that a genuine commitment to safety at board-level is important if you're to be successful in developing a positive safety culture. But he says whether you get that sort of commitment (and that sort of board) isn't just the luck of the draw; it's something you can influence.

"Whenever I've talked to the main board directors, I haven't talked to them about safety for safety's sake - I've talked about safety's impact on the business.

"If you turn to a director and say, 'I want to introduce a baseline for safety standards throughout the company', their immediate thought is going to be: 'How much is this going to cost me? What time is it going to take? Why do I have to do it?'"

Instead, Valvona says, the starting point should be emphasising that the firm's staff are its assets, and it's important to protect them. The second argument is that clients' expectations are high and Halcrow needs to meet those expectations.

He acknowledges that this latter argument, while powerful in the UK, holds less sway abroad where clients' safety expectations may be very different. Here, he says, it's important to stress that the impact of an accident in one part of the world can reverberate throughout the group.

"We're now in age where information travels in minutes, not days or weeks," he points out. "People are very conscious of what goes wrong, and the bigger the organisation becomes, the more the media will take an interest. So what we do in one country may affect a job somewhere else. Talking to directors in those terms - managing risk, managing your assets, the return you're going to get - is much more effective than saying: 'The Health and Safety at Work Act says you must!'

"If you speak the right language, and you present something in the way they expect to be dealing with it, you stand a much, much better chance of them saying yes."

Proof of the importance of the organisation's top executives lending support came when Valvona's team decided to revamp the company induction film. The old video lasted about 20 minutes and featured forklift trucks, warehousing and various other things that weren't relevant to Halcrow's activities. Working with the firm's internal communications team, Valvona produced a new film in-house, which lasts about six minutes.

The new DVD features a one-minute introduction from the chief executive, followed by a three-minute explanation of the safety framework by Valvona. The film emphasises the importance of personal responsibility for safety with the message: "If you're not told about safety, your job is to ask."

Shortly after the film was distributed, Valvona canvassed staff to see how it had been received. Despite only a short appearance at the start of the DVD, employees universally referred to it as "the chief executive's film" - which shows how powerful his input was, concludes Valvona.

Managing expectations

Embedding the new framework hasn't all been plain sailing, concedes Valvona, and the safety team has had to learn from mistakes along the way. The roll-out of a driver training package (Halcrow employees clock up 16 million business kilometres each year) that was six months in the making had to be delayed because of insufficient consultation with people in the business - an important lesson in avoiding complacency, he reflects: "Just because everything has been going well, don't assume it will keep going well."

But strong leadership and a real understanding of the workforce have brought significant progress in a short time: the company accident frequency rate (AFR) which, at 0.05, was already low compared to industry standards, has fallen to 0.02 (calculated as the total number of accidents/total number of man hours worked x 100,000).

Equally important though, says Valvona, is having realistic aspirations. "I started in January, and in March I presented to the board. I said, 'To do this is going to take three years, and we're going to do it slowly - we're not going to rush something in, get everybody to do it for three months, then forget all about it.'

"This way, you're changing the culture, not just the processes," he says. "For the future, we're looking to consolidate what we've done already.

"We do have a number of initiatives we're looking at for next year, but they all build on what we've got at the moment, to continue to raise subconscious awareness of safety.

"The aim is to integrate safety as part of employees' day-to-day tasks without them realising it's there. So people doing design work, for example, manage the risks without even thinking about managing the risks, and make decisions based on safety elements as part of the natural design process.

"That's where we're heading."

The image accompanying this article was supplied by and is copyright of Cliff Pointon.

Categories:
Professional Skills, Transport, Utilities, Article, Safe systems of work, Safe systems of work