Ongoing commitment to health & safety needed

GKN is a global engineering group and one of the key challenges it faces in health and safety terms is communication and awareness. It is an enormous task to communicate a consistent health and safety message to a workforce that is widely dispersed across the world, speaking 26 different languages and raised in cultures with differing approaches to safety.

Kate Everitt, ThinkSafe programme manager at GKN says: "If there is a lost time incident we investigate it and share the results with everyone. This includes making a presentation to health & safety professionals. We then build the lessons into our health and safety standards.”

The company is pushing out the slogan Don’t Walk By! in a bid to encourage employees to act on risky practices they observe, rather than being afraid to challenge or feeling that it is not their place to do so.

The company has created a wide variety of materials to promote its message, including a a multi-language e-brochure called Think Fork Truck, which offers guidance from both the driver and pedestrian perspective. GKN also has a Safety Corner at every one of its sites.

Furthermore, the company also creates animations to simply and vividly convey its safety messages. One of the animations was shown by GKN at the Safety Conference. It highlighted an incident when a pedestrian had a foot injured by a toppling load from a forklift.

The video simply and effectively highlighted how and where mistakes had been made - the forklift un-necessarily changed operator just prior to the incident; the forklift lifted the pallet with its forks in the middle and not through the gaps in the pallet designed to house the forks; and there were people ‘hanging around’ the vicinity when the accident occurred.

There were problems of a different sort at JCB, another of the speakers at the Safety Conference.

A number of incidents in 2005/06 prompted the company to look again at its well-established approach to health & safety.

JCB’s general manager for health & safety Chris Briggs explains: "We found we were producing assessments without controlling risks. Our risk assessments varied in quality, there were too many of them, and typically they were too long.

"We changed the task from risk assessment to risk control, we unified systems across JCB. Now risks are calculated by an IT system after parameters are inputted by employees. We focus on key risks and keep guidance brief, which encourages people to read it.” 

JCB also introduced a Stop. Call. Wait. message to employees, which is designed to empower them not to proceed if they have doubts about health & safety.

MHE supplier Briggs Equipment also recently re-cast its safety policy after it was found wanting.

Safety advisor at Briggs, Scott McGready explains: "We found our engineers didn’t want to report hazards, they felt they would be resented, seen as causing trouble. There was also a lack of faith that action would be taken, as people felt previous comments had fallen on deaf ears.”

Briggs Equipment changed the terminology of its safety initiative. Instead of focusing on hazards and risks, the Safety Gain programme encourages employees to see reporting on safety issues as a positive exercise welcomed by the company.

Labyrinth Logistics Consulting’s Ruth Waring made the point that people can get lost in the details with health & safety, and lose sight of the fact that it’s about human life.

She adds: "You also must be wary of a certain amount of ‘whack a mole’ if you don’t get people’s buy-in. You think you have solved a problem, but the solution can change things unpredictably. 

"One example is with key control designed to prevent lorry drivers leaving loading bays prematurely. We’ve found some drivers hand in their home keys, so they can have their lunch in the cab.

"In their minds, they are ‘complying’ - you asked for a key and they have given you one.  Management needs to take a step back, involve people, and get them to understand the initiative is about making them safer.”

Labyrinth Logistics Consulting runs a Safety Circle for end users, which operates under Chatham House Rules.

Ruth explains: "There is a culture of silence. Companies have great knowledge but don’t always share it, they fear it will be used against them. The Safety Circle allows people to talk freely about safety lessons they have learned, the nitty gritty, but company details are anonymised.”

The keynote speaker at the conference was Falklands War veteran Simon Weston OBE and his words of warning had chilling resonance for those who work in hazardous environments, but may be prone to complacency.

He said simply: "Don’t think - why me? Why not you? What’s so special about you?”