Safety Climate Tool

A construction company with specialist experience in: • industrial and commercial new builds and

refurbishments

• temperature controlled storage, warehousing and logistics

• hygiene critical industries: food and drink, personal care and pharmaceutical.

• Established in 1979, with an annual turnover in excess of £60million

• Primarily undertake the Principal Contractor role from simple refurbishments and extensions to full design and turnkey schemes

• 100 employees working with professional teams and over 4000 sub-contractor partners

• Average of 25,000 personnel through our sites annually

• Three offices in the UK with national coverage – we work everywhere!

‘The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisations health and safety management’ HSE Advisory Committee

What is culture?

The two phrases are often heard together referencing the same ideas so there is no right or wrong answer. However… Climate is often what you can see, of the perceptions held in an organisation at a given point in time or, the way things are done around here and; they are often measurable. Culture is the underlying shared values, beliefs and habitual working practices that influence health and safety performance, they are not always clearly visible and not always measurable.

What is the difference between culture and climate?

• For Chalcroft it was to quite simply cut through the ‘noise’ of what we thought our people believed, their views and opinions

• It was to gather clear and precise information on what our employees

thought in a managed, scientific and measurable format • To simply provide us with the information to make changes and improve ‘the

way things are done around here’

Why measure your ‘climate’?

• When we first started looking into surveys and measuring climate tools it was found that many were either too complicated, overpriced or insufficient

• Our team attended many courses, presentations and seminars to see what

was out there and considered whether we should create our own • The key theme that we wanted to maintain for whatever was to be

implemented was for it to be simple, but effective

The search…

• When we first came across the SCT the key aspects of it that jumped out were:

- Price

- Online and paper

- Respected and recognised provider

- Industry benchmarking

- Set questions tailored to draw clear and definitive answers

- Results are easily interpretable and can be broken into demographics/departments

- Licence is valid for 5 years

HSL Safety Climate Tool:

• Questions and answers are tailored around eight key factors:

- Organisational commitment

- Health and safety orientated behaviours

- Health and safety trust

- Usability of procedures

- Engagement in health and safety

- Peer group attitude

- Resources for health and safety

- Accident and near miss reporting

SCT Questions:

• Some questions are positive led ‘There are good communications here about health and safety’ and those that have a negative slant ‘management sometimes turn a blind eye to health and safety procedures being broken’. This ensures there is no focus or lead to respondents always answering positively.

• There are set questions around the eight factors but also the ability to include ‘open questions’ for employees to respond to. You can choose up to six open questions.

• Examples of Chalcroft’s open questions for this years survey are:

- Please provide any suggestions that you feel would give the biggest improvement to health and safety within Chalcroft? - What are the positive things you see at Chalcroft about health and safety? - What are the negative things you see at Chalcroft about health and safety?

SCT Questions:

• Simple and succinct reports on the data are provided: - Anonymous

- Unfavourable, Neutral, Favourable responses

- Responses broken down by department/positions, office/site location, age, gender, type of work, time employed

- Industry average comparison

- Provide an executive summary

- Extracts most favourable and unfavourable responses

- Provides priorities for improvement and suggestions

SCT Report:

Your performance in context: The following chart shows your SCT score for Organisational commitment, compared with HSL’s benchmarking data.

High - your result (3.80) is above HSL’s benchmark score of 3.68, and is considered high. You are performing above average, and efforts should be made to maintain this standard.

Industry average:

3.80

Resources for health and safety The Resources for health and safety factor is comprised of a number of statements. The findings for Chalcroft Ltd (All Respondents) are presented below.

7 : Resources for heal th a nd safety overa ll 11.6% 24.3% 64.1%

T he heal th a nd safety equ ipm e nt (e.g. PPE) works wel l3.6% 23.6% 72.7%

Peopl e can al ways get the equi pm ent n eede d to foll ow the heal th and safety 5.4% 16.1% 78.6% p rocedu res

T here are al ways eno ugh peo ple avai la ble to get the j ob don e safel y 30.9% 23.6% 45.5%

Suffi ci ent resources are avai lable for heal th and safety here3.6% 18.2% 78.2%

I can ge t m ore p eopl e to do a j ob if I need the m for safety reasons 14.5% 40.0% 45.5%

Unfavou rab le Neutra l Favourab le Your most favourable and unfavourable aspects of Resources for health and safety are:

This chart shows favourable responses by position.

People can always get the equipment needed to follow the health and safety procedures (78.6% agree/strongly agree)

There are always enough people available to get

the job done safely (30.9% disagree/strongly disagree)

Overall

Administration

General/Site Operative

Contracts Manager or Quantity Surveyor

Site Manager

Director, Manager(other), EHS

39.1%

64.1%

77.1%

81.8% 64.0% 63.3%

• Communication - Let employees know before hand what it is, what its for and send reminders leading up to its issue. Get them engaged and anticipating its arrival. • Results - Be prepared. You may not like what you are going to get back. • Action - Be prepared. You have to act. This may mean a detailed review of processes and procedures, training, additional resources but primarily; an investment in time and money.

Before you launch:

• What we are doing do differently:

- Better early notification of the SCT being issued - Greater push on getting all employees to complete - Be better prepared to take action from the results

This years SCT:

• Carried out a Behavioural Safety course tailored around the responses from the Safety Climate Tool

• Implemented a Behavioural Safety questionnaire used after every injury or significant event

• Undertook workshops broken down into departments where improvement was required as a result of the SCT responses

• Launched key campaigns and introduced a Good Compliance Green Card for rewarding positive behaviours/actions

• Did see a reduction in employee and subcontractor injuries

• Employed additional EHS dedicated resources

What we did:

Thank You

CFO – ‘What happens if we invest all this time and money into our employees and they leave?’ CEO – ‘What happens if we don’t and they stay’