By Richard Byrne, BSc (Hons), CMIOSH, PIEMA
Often a great deal of attention is focused in the safety press on the excellent work clients and tier 1 contractors are doing to improve safety – and understandably so, they are after all in a unique position to influence the thinking and practices of a huge number of organisations and individual workers. With all this going on you could be fooled into thinking that all safety improvement activity in the construction supply chain is driven solely by the bigger players in the field. Having been a client, worked for a main contracting organisation in the service sector and now within the construction materials supply chain it is easy see that this is not the case. Indeed experience shows that even those organisations further down the supply chain have best practices that others in the industry (at whatever level) can learn from – here is one example that I have personal experience of.
Keyline is one of the largest suppliers of civils, heavy building materials and drainage solutions in the UK with a nationwide network of branches. They supply thousands of product lines to trade professionals and specialist contractors supplying many of the UKs biggest construction projects.
Two years ago they were faced with the safety problems, lots of organisations face:
Over the course of the last 24 months they have completely overhauled their approach to safety, building on the sound foundations already in place to deliver some outstanding performance and cultural change. Here we will look at three critical areas in their Safety Strategy.
We all know that the best people to help improve safety are those that do the job, but sometimes making the leap of faith can be quite a risk for some people and organisations. Keyline decided though that it was a risk worth taking, particularly as the people making safety decisions at Board level had been out of ‘real branch life’ for some time. Keyline’s Managing Director, Kieran Griffin, asked his Board to go out into the branch network and find examples of how to prevent or reduce the need to lift or carry things, bearing in mind that their accident experience and risk profile shows that manual handling is a big challenge for them. When the Board reported back, I got involved and added a playful twist! They had to ‘pitch’ the things they had come across in the style of the BBC TV programme Dragons’ Den; our ‘dragons’ were yard colleagues and drivers. If they voted to say they were in, the way of working or equipment suggested really was best practice, and Kieran then committed to rolling it out consistently across the branch network. This approach has now become the model of engagement within the business and helps drive the ‘bottom-up’ approach so many of us in the profession are keen to establish.
Building on the success of Dragons’ Den, they introduced a network of regional safety forums that bring together over 60 colleagues from around our branch network every three months – these colleagues have a real say on what Keyline do when it comes to improving safety and how they do it. This is having a really positive effect not only on safety, but on helping people see other career paths and showcase their talent in a different way.
As I’ve mentioned manual handling is a real problem in Keyline’s sector, and we all know it can affect the well being of colleagues and not just their work performance. Rather than simply just retrain people in safe lifting and handling techniques, which is often the default response to this sort of challenge, Keyline decided that they needed to do things in a radically different way, taking the winning idea from the Dragons Den. Keyline then invested nearly £1m in a new piece of kit that dramatically reduces, if not removes, the need for colleagues to lift heavy ‘grey’ products like kerbs and slabs. Through this one piece of innovation suggested by their front line colleagues the Keyline business has reduced the amount our colleagues lift by 78%. Not only that but they have seen a decline in related accidents and an increase in productivity.
Like many multi-site operations, Keyline is only as strong as its weakest link. With a nationwide network of branches delivering Monday to Friday across the country they have some areas of weakness – it’s inevitable. Rather than waiting for these weak links to show themselves, in whatever way they do, Keyline are taking a more strategic approach and have introduced an ongoing (safety) leadership programme. Safety is in brackets because it started out as a safety programme but they very quickly realised it was just about leadership; safety, sales or operations – the subject doesn’t matter. This programme is helping managers tackle all sorts of problems in a better way than before, getting better outcomes quicker. Not only that but it provides more information for the Board’s succession and talent planning – making safety a key criteria in promotion decisions.
You may well be reading this and saying so what? I would be. Since introducing their Safety Strategy Keyline has achieved some impressive safety performance on what was arguably already existing industry leading numbers, compared to 2014:
All of this is good, but the real human benefit cannot be overstated. To demonstrate this here is just one example that a colleague from Keyline’s Kirkby in Ashfield branch said to me when I asked what difference the new grab mentioned above has made to his job, he said: “he goes home and doesn’t ache anymore”.
The other thing that never fails to strike me with these sorts of case studies is that whilst it is explained in the context of Keyline, it doesn’t matter which industry you work in what we’ve talked about here can apply anywhere, you sometimes just need a spark of an idea to get things going.
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