Refurbishing and maintaining buildings involves many of the same risks as constructing them in the first place. But if managing the safety of building services workers in large commercial properties is job enough, it becomes almost impossible when most are lone workers scattered around residential housing estates, with no supervisor in sight.

This is why since 2004, key stake-holders at Kier Building Maintenance, including health and safety and HR staff, line managers, employees and the unions - led by occupational psychologist Helen Sully - have used some innovative means to reinforce the health and safety message, involving workers in making decisions, from helping to choose safety equipment to appearing in home-made training videos, to encourage them to help protect themselves.

Kier Building Maintenance is a division of the huge Kier construction group and employs more than 3000 people, including plumbers, electricians, gas fitters, glaziers and carpenters, who provide repairs and maintenance.

The health and safety project focused on workers in Kier Sheffield and Kier Islington. Kier Sheffield LLP is a PPP (public/private partnership) set up by Kier and Sheffield City Council to repair and maintain more than 53 000 local authority houses and flats on a 10-year contract. Kier Sheffield's workforce of 1200 transferred from the council in 2003 under the TUPE Regulations, protecting their old terms and conditions. Similarly, Kier Islington is a 10-year joint venture between the firm and the London borough, providing repairs and maintenance to over 30 000 council properties in north London. Some 600 Islington employees transferred to the new organisation.

Out and about

For both of these groups of transferees, the work involves visiting housing estates, often alone, and sometimes at night, to carry out emergency and catch-up repairs, refurbishment and routine maintenance. Kier Sheffield has 900 operatives scattered round the city, each entering about four or five different properties each day.

For this reason, explains Sully, "We haven't implemented a traditional health and safety behavioural programme, based around carrying out so many observations per day, because for the building maintenance repairs industry this would be impossible. It's difficult for supervisors to get out there and observe, so when our people leave the depot they've got to be encouraged to take more responsibility for themselves."

To find out what kind of risks workers were likely to face, Kier Islington convened a series of focus groups to discuss health and safety issues with operatives. Meanwhile, at Kier Sheffield, anyone who had reported a RIDDOR accident during the previous year was asked to describe, confidentially, the events leading up to the accident to help the company pinpoint the contributing factors. Sully also travelled in the Kier vans to visit the estates where operatives work, to help her better understand their working environment.

"When you visit a site you can see what factors people have to contend with," says Sully. "For example, removing a gas boiler from the 19th storey of a large block of flats: how does the person get the equipment up the stairs and how do they interact with tenants and the general public? We want to encourage individual responsibility but we also have to ensure that as a company we provide individual support and competences."

The firm interviewed 16 people who had been in accidents during the previous year, asking them questions such as: "Did you have the correct PPE available?" and "What type of support did you receive after the incident?"

Do the right thing

The data from these interviews led Sully and her team to the conclusion that 88% of the RIDDOR accidents were related to some form of human error. Typical accidents included an employee distracted by a member of the public while nailing a piece of timber in, turning round while still hammering and smashing their finger.

This kind of incident, argues Sully, underlines the point that you can reduce human error by raising awareness about appropriate and inappropriate behaviours. However, she adds, you can't ignore the external elements that contribute to accidents, such as the practicalities of using health and safety equipment when working in the field. As Ray Curry of Sypol recently argued in these pages (see HSW December, page 28), the obstacles to safe behaviour need removing before people are asked to change their habits.

In traffic-congested Islington, for example, maintenance staff had difficulty finding parking spaces, so they often had to park half a mile away from the properties they were repairing. To save time, instead of making two trips they would load up and carry precariously big loads of equipment. Once this problem was highlighted, the company persuaded the council to authorise 80 parking permits for Kier vans.

"This shows that there are things we can do as an organisation to improve safety, not just behavioural things," says Sully.

On their trolleys

It also emerged that many gas-fitters were sustaining back injuries while removing gas boilers, despite health and safety managers' instructions that they should use trolleys to move the boilers.

"There was a trolley back at the depot, but you had to book it out," says Sully, "and human behaviour means people will do things that are quick, easy and natural to them. If you're in a rush, you won't spend 15 minutes getting a piece of equipment that might help you, you're more inclined to pick it up to just get it out of the way.

"So we went for flat-pack aluminium trolleys that fit into the back of everyone's vehicles. They're always at hand, are lightweight and easy to use, and importantly they're available all the time, as part of the kit in the back of the van."

To further encourage people to use the trolleys, a group of staff were provided with a range to try out and asked to choose the one they felt was best suited to their tasks. Some trolleys were better at going over steps, others more suitable for carrying particular weights. Helping to choose their equipment made the boiler-fitters more comfortable about giving the trolleys a go.

The same principle was applied to choosing new safety gloves, which had been previously supplied in a one-type-fits-all fashion.

"With the only real choice of glove being either a wet or a dry glove", explains Sully, "...if a user found the gloves unsuitable for a task, they'd simply take them off. Previously with the gloves on offer, there was no real care about the task at hand. Launching the glove trial, we needed to ask, 'what was this person actually doing?' 'Does the glove being offered really suit that job?'"

Easy as ABC

In revamping glove provision, as in the rest of the project, Sully and her team applied the ABC model of behaviour modification. The theory goes as follows: behaviour (the B in the middle) is provoked and preceded by "antecedents" (the A) - more simply described as triggers - and followed by consequences (the C).

Though behaviour may be partly triggered by safety signs, rules and information, ABC advocates argue, it's actually knowledge of the consequences that will most often determine what you do. While you might notice a 60-miles-an-hour speed-limit sign when driving, you might not slow down until you see a police car behind you, when you'll become aware of the consequences of not doing as instructed.

So when encouraging people to wear PPE, you first have to decide what triggers to put in place, such as supplying it, telling people they need to use it and making sure anyone instructing them sets a good example by wearing it.

The consequences element in this case would be that, following a risk assessment, employees are required to wear PPE for certain tasks and may be in trouble with management if they neglect to do so.

"What Kier has done is to provide the right triggers in the environment," says Sully. "So people are aware of gloves and are able to access the right ones and we've now got a glove policy as the consequence, so people know it's mandatory to wear the right glove for a particular task."

For the trials, Kier worked with Marigold, which provided a wide range of gloves, trialled by operatives at five depots over four weeks. Triallists completed a feedback form on how comfortable and user-friendly various gloves were and whether they helped them get the job done. Kier held a focus group at the end to discuss the feedback and chose the gloves most suitable for each task.

Once the trial was over, Marigold made glove boards (a common sight at major construction sites) for each depot, with information about each glove, what it is most suitable for, a hand-measurement guide so people can ensure they order the right size and even a sample of each type of glove attached by Velcro onto the board, so users can try them on. The boards provide another visible trigger to encourage employees to wear gloves.

"If you give people the opportunity to choose something," argues Sully, "they're much more likely to wear it. That has become part of our culture, encouraging people's opinions because they're the ones using them."

Raise the alarm

User trials also preceded the issue of ID alarm cards to help combat an increase in public aggression towards staff. These are identity cards workers can wear around their necks which have an SOS button they can press to make immediate contact with a call centre that records the conversation and, if necessary, alerts the police. Wearers who find themselves in hostile situations can call for help discreetly without alerting the aggressor.

Kier piloted the ID cards with its out-of-hours team, many of whom routinely work in housing estates where even the police only visit in pairs.

The Amicus, UCATT and GMB unions actively encouraged the trial; union reps were sent for training on card use and came back in to train the workforce.

Aside from the focus groups, interviews and site visits, the company also conducted a safety attitude survey, which revealed both strengths and areas for development within the business.

From an exercise to shadow supervisors giving toolbox talks it emerged there was an opportunity to improve their delivery, as many were simply reading straight from a sheet.

"There is a system saying that people have received a toolbox talk on, say, scaffolding," says Sully, "but how many people will take away and act on that information, based on the way it's been presented? It's not a criticism of our front-line managers, but it was apparent there was a way we could develop toolbox talks. Managers hadn't been given training on conducting a group meeting or how to influence people's behaviour, which trainers are used to doing - and really a toolbox talk is a training session."

Public speaking

Aside from training managers on presentation skills (to avoid the "flat" tone of delivery that many slipped into before), once every two months managers replace a standard toolbox talk with a behavioural one, geared more to creating discussion and encouraging employees to share experiences.

As with the safety equipment trials, Kier led with a behavioural safety pilot, asking front-line managers to try out interactive sessions before rolling them out to the rest of the workforce.

"The first one is about cutting corners," says Sully, "looking at what causes people to cut corners and what are the consequences?

"For instance, with one RIDDOR incident, a guy didn't remove the radiator brackets when he was going to put up wallpaper because he wanted to get home to see the football on TV. When he started to take the old wallpaper off, because he hadn't removed the bracket, he sliced his hand on it. This kind of scenario raises awareness of things that happen every day."

The company is also fostering a culture of recognition and reward by rewarding people who do behave safely. A "don't walk by" campaign encourages staff to report workplace hazards with the incentive that, at the end of each quarter, there is a draw for one of them to win a "red letter day" such as a spa or balloon trip. More recently there was a prize draw for four people to win £100 for responding to the safety attitude survey and providing suggestions for improvements.

To really reinforce the message, Kier has produced a series of DVDs covering key themes flagged up in the RIDDOR interviews, including cutting corners and being distracted by tenants and the public.

"By involving our own workforce as the actors," says Sully, "there is a real feeling of being part of safety at Kier, and when people watch it they can see people in our shirts with the same accents and we can have a laugh about the stupid things people do. But there's a serious message: we're trying to get away from the image of health and safety being boring - [saying] 'this is your life'."