At the IOSH Conference: Crossrail’s director of health and safety, Steve Hails, on building a successful safety culture across a widespread workforce through effective leadership
As director of health and safety at Crossrail — Europe’s largest infrastructure project — it is my job to encourage a culture that embraces health and safety in a workforce exceeding 10,000, spread over forty different sites across London. This presents a significant challenge and requires effective leadership, with everyone engaged in delivering a world class railway.
Health and safety is the core value of Crossrail, and leadership is one of the six pillars of our health and safety excellence model. This focuses on ensuring that our Target Zero principles — we all have the right to go home unharmed everyday, we believe that all harm is preventable and we must all work together to achieve this — become a state of mind right across the project.
A fundamental part of delivering excellence in leadership has been the establishment of a Frontline Leadership Programme (FLP), focused on assisting those in supervisory positions at all levels from across the project, to become great leaders. Great leaders manage cost, schedule, quality, environment and, of course, health and safety, and therefore investing in FLP and those engaged in the programme not only ensures success for Crossrail, but also for future infrastructure projects.
The FLP was established in 2012, bringing Crossrail together with our tier one contractors to drive improvements through collaboration — another of Crossrail’s core values.
The collaborative approach, which initially took place at a senior level, enabled Crossrail to establish a number of key competencies for colleagues across the project to work towards, such as understanding people and decision making, to motivating others and communicating effectively.
In order to deliver success, each contract has identified suitable candidates to take part in the programme. Each participant is matched with a suitable mentor from their respective organisation, with their attendance and progress monitored to ensure improvement. The programme has now been running for approximately 18 months, with more than 150 supervisors and more than 80 mentors engaged in the programme. Feedback from those involved in the programme has been excellent so far, with many recognising the unique approach and that it is a valuable use of their time,
I believe that the collaborative approach that Crossrail and its supply chain has taken is an innovative solution to challenges of managing a widespread workforce. We share best practice to focus on developing leadership skills, which helps us engrain our health and safety principles not just in colleagues at the most senior level, but right throughout the project.
