Last month Berkeley Homes East Thames won the Sir George Earle Trophy at the RoSPA awards. SHP caught up with managing director of the division, Karl Whiteman, to discover how the firm won the coveted trophy.Karl Whiteman: The Sir George Earle Trophy is the pinnacle of the RoSPA Awards, and is internationally regarded as the premier performance award for occupational health and safety. To be declared the winner not just of the housebuilding and property development sector category but of the Sir George Trophy is a real privilege and it’s fantastic to see our commitment to health and safety recognised in this way.
The award is presented to the best sector award winner (which itself is awarded on the basis of a detailed submission) following a site visit and subsequent interview with the award’s adjudication panel. The panel assesses a wide variety of qualities and attributes including director leadership on health and safety, various occupational health and wellbeing initiatives, and involvement of the local community on construction sites, among other criteria.
When selecting the winner of the Sir George Earle Trophy, judges focus on how each of the 21 individual sector award winners reviews their occupational health and safety performance and sets priorities and targets. In our case, the judges were also particularly complimentary of the passion of Berkeley Homes East Thames’ senior leadership team in upholding robust and effective health and safety standards and practices.
Berkeley Homes East Thames’ approach to local engagement, with initiatives ranging from collaborating with the London Wildlife Trust to hosting ‘have a go’ workshops with local schools which showcase life on some of Europe’s biggest regeneration developments were also emphasised.
The construction industry is facing a challenging period in recruiting skilled workers. Encouraging the next generation of builders and developers, especially by demonstrating best practice, is at the heart of our approach – so it was particularly heartening to have these activities acknowledged.
KW: We believe that a safe working environment is not one in which there is an absence or a low number of serious injury incidents, but is the result of active participation by management and staff in identifying hazards and taking positive action to eliminate or control them.
All meetings within the Berkeley Group, from Board level to project meetings, have health and safety literally at the top of the agenda. As part of the monthly Board meeting a full health and safety board report is produced, providing accurate information on the company’s performance over the previous month to ensure that senior management is informed in formulating the business’ health and safety strategy.
Berkeley’s Board of Directors is actively involved in the development of the health and safety policy and it is personally signed both by myself, as Board Director, and our Group Managing Director.
On a divisional level, our Operations Director Andy Carson acts as the champion for Berkeley Homes East Thames’ operational health and safety alongside his normal role. Having our operations director lead on this area enables him to ensure health and safety is considered at all times during production and that the correct decisions are being made throughout a development’s lifecycle.
KW: On any given day approximately 1,200 people work with over 200 supply chain members. We are committed to making sure all our employees and stakeholders, from site to board level, can safely return home to their families each night.
We ensure that every individual who works on our sites is provided specific training for the works they are expected to carry out during the next six months. This is led by their line managers to ensure the right training is provided at the right time, and means that health and safety is considered a priority at every level of the business.
In parallel, we make sure a risk assessment is undertaken for every significant activity on site, so that a safe system of work can be put in place and all high-risk activities are properly planned and managed.
As a result, not only do our staff feel safe within their working environment, whether that features machinery, working at height or simply being based on a live building site, but they can also carry out their tasks more efficiently.
Our contractors are subject to scrutiny in respect of health and safety competency and have to demonstrate an adequate level of performance and understanding. We evaluate this through a competency questionnaire and only then are the contractors deemed approved to work on our sites.
KW: We start engaging with children from a young age and work in partnership with local schools in and around our developments in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
Earlier this year we welcomed 30 students from Thomas Tallis School to our Kidbrooke Village development to take part in a ‘have a go’ day, giving students hands-on experience of brickwork, block work, drainage and tiling – all to our rigorous health and safety standards.
We’ve held competitions for primary children to design the site hoardings for their new school building that we’re delivering as part of Kidbrooke Village, making sure the children feel involved in the construction that they see every day and inspiring them to see the scheme in a new light.
We hope to open the eyes of the children and young people to careers they may not have considered before. Our aim is to ensure that students have an appreciation for the variety of jobs and skills that are open to them in the construction sector and to challenge existing stereotypes that they may have.
KW: The wellbeing of our workers on site is one of our main priorities and among our initiatives we offer counselling, flu vaccinations and advice to all our employees. In recent months we’ve been raising awareness around high blood sugar levels among our construction staff – often caused by irregular eating habits developed when working on site – and we have implemented free breakfasts to tackle the issue.
We employ United Medical Services to provide wellbeing clinics for our staff. Their employees carry out regular health surveillance rounds, and in the past have detected employees who were showing early signs of a possible stroke.
It’s important to us that health and safety isn’t just associated with accidents or injury and we’re proud that we can make such a positive impact on our employees’ general health.
KW: We’ll never stop looking at how we can improve our health and safety practices and how we can contribute to wider change within the industry.
We have been invited to become an active member of RoSPA’s National Occupational Safety and Health Committee (NOSHC) for the next 12 months, which will allow us to learn more about health and safety best practice and help other businesses benefit from what we have achieved already.
Health and safety isn’t our only concern. Last year we committed to becoming the first major carbon positive housebuilder in the UK, aiming to reduce our operational carbon emissions by 10 per cent to help tackle what is an enormous global challenge.
The Berkeley Group is also implementing large-scale vocational training as part of its commitment to having 1,500 people across its workforce in an apprenticeship or training by April 2018.
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
If you are committed to do better; you are likely to achieve the results.
Why not appreciation on it, we like to underplay in England sometimes.
Excellent – Well Done Berkley Homes!!