Kevin Furniss is speaking at the IOSH conference on why leadership comes first and not safety. He talks to Nick Warburton about Vodafone, London 2012 and the challenges he faces in his latest role at Dutch company AP Moller Maersk Terminals.
The level of success an organisation achieves depends on two deciding factors, confides Kevin Furniss. The first is the absolute desire and will of its leadership and the second is the quality of its talent. That, he explains, is the true test of success and what differentiates the market leaders from the rest of the pack.
Kevin is well positioned to make such a statement. As group director health, safety and wellbeing at Vodafone for nearly three years, he was instrumental in transforming the telecoms giant’s health, safety and wellbeing agenda and extending it beyond the workplace.
As he readily admits, much of the thinking behind it stemmed from his previous role as head of health, safety, environment and sustainability on the London 2012 Olympics programme.
“I took the learnings from a lot of that and worked out that it wasn’t always about the technical angle,” he explains.
“A lot of it was around the leadership and engagement and reducing this gap in the social interaction [between managers and employees]. It was that that was key rather than talking just about safety all of the time.”
Kevin had acquired an impressive CV when he joined Vodafone back in February 2011, having managed safety and health in contrasting sectors like engineering, manufacturing, construction and food processing.
Even so, he still needed to adapt to the new consumer-driven business culture that he found himself in. Kevin’s excellent working relationship with Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao, helped him drive the health, safety and wellbeing agenda forward.
“Vittorio said, ‘In our business, we have to be genuinely interested in people’ and that really got me thinking when I first started,” he recalls.
“How can I turn that philosophy into something that means the whole world to every leader in our business structure at whatever level they are, from a site supervisor all the way up to people running large independent operations in emerging parts of the world?”
As Kevin point out, when he first joined Vodafone, the safety agenda did not have the level of penetration in the organisation that was needed. This, he says, was because leadership was transactional.
“It was a tick-box exercise, it was — ‘we’ve done that, what do you want us to do next?’ rather than it being fully integrated into what they believed in.”
To kick-start the transformation to an agenda that was embraced in the workplace and beyond, Kevin first looked at how leadership interacted with Vodafone’s decision making, its change culture and coaching.
“A lot of it around people is the quality of conversations that leaders have with people,” he continues.
“It doesn’t matter how well you think you communicate, it’s removing the distance between you and the people, whether you want to call it engagement, feet on the street, managed visible leadership. It’s about how you connect with individuals on a personal level to inspire an emotional change in them.”
To overcome the hurdle of not having a specific safety programme in place, Kevin realised that he could position and link the safety agenda to Vodafone’s values and brand to get wider buy-in. That way, everybody would subliminally embrace safety.
“It was driving this common mentality that it was about the brand, that it was about the reputation and it was about getting more subscribers, more consumers,” he says.
“How you did that was when you start to look at it at the very base level, every individual who worked in Vodafone knew someone who was a customer€ﾦ the more you linked it, the more outreach you got, the more networking you did, then the more important it became.”
Kevin says that it’s essential that everybody speaks well of the brand. In doing so, the company can build its reputation and more consumers. This in turn adds more value and more profit and leads to a more successful business.
Shaping the way a global business like Vodafone approaches safety would be challenging in its own right. But Kevin was also trying to embed a new mind-set at a time when the telecoms giant was grappling with unprecedented change in the market.
To start with, technology was changing rapidly at a global level, with innovation driving the smart phone and mobile phone market at an incredible pace.
There were also the social issues that this technological revolution threw up. Suddenly, almost overnight, millions of people in communities in rural India, Africa and Asia had access to services that their parents’ generation could have only imagined. For Vodafone, this meant reaching a huge new consumer audience with its own unique needs and challenges.
Then, there was the global, economic downturn and how this affected the way consumers thought and purchased products and services.
“Having that as the three main challenges when dealing with change, then how do you apply the safety agenda and the health and wellbeing agenda to that?” he asks.
“You come back to the point that everybody is a customer€ﾦ and everybody gets connected to the brand because they want great service. If you want to build a better business, those consumers, when they work, will have families and will get connected to other people. They become your future employees or suppliers or business partners.”
It comes down to inspiring an emotional connection in those people to want to work for the company’s brand, he says. Not only is the company recognised as one that rewards but it is also one that cares about the wider community.
Kevin cites a number of examples to illustrate how Vodafone extended its safety, health and wellbeing beyond the workplace to do just this.
One is a driver app that was developed specifically for the Portuguese market to encourage young, new drivers not to use their phone while driving. He points to Vodafone’s work in India and Africa to promote road safety and reduce deaths.
“We don’t want you to put yourself in a position of risk because it damages our brand, it damages our ability to subscribe customers, and it damages you and your ability to earn money,” he explains. “That was the whole philosophy. It was taken across a lot of markets in different ways.”
Like many British health and safety professionals, Kevin has taken his vast skills bank and expertise to an overseas market. In January, he was appointed vice president at AP Moller Maersk Terminals, a Dutch business based in The Hague that operates 68 terminals worldwide.
“It’s very similar to Vodafone and it works in a lot of challenging places where you don’t have a mature culture, you don’t have the regulatory framework and you don’t have the back up,” he confides.
“Again, the entire ethos around what you are trying to do is built on brand, reputation, heritage and values. This business has a very strong heritage and a high regard for values.”
One of the main challenges Kevin faces is the disparity between the technological change and innovation that has taken place in the sector over the past 25 years and how the industry approaches the operation of terminals and the guidance it uses.
“The world has changed significantly€ﾦ and yet this sector still seems stuck in the 1980s,” he says. “The thinking behind how you operate the safe terminal has not changed in line with that.”
Fortunately, Kevin recognises that the challenges he faces now are the same ones that he was presented with when he worked in manufacturing in the 1990s.
“It’s effectively a high-hazard, process-based industry so you can apply a lot of your manufacturing knowledge to a very values-driven company,” he continues.
“Things like standardisation, simplification and operating with a certain level of speed become the norm. Fitting your values and culture into that becomes critical to success.”
While AP Moller Maersk Terminals is a Dutch company, its roots are partly Danish and the international nature of the business means that it has a unique safety culture.
Kevin says that there is a massive willingness to get things done safely. However, the company’s approach is quite transactional with a tendency towards prescription rather than a “think it out for yourself-type approach”.
“What I do and what I think works best is more transformational,” he says. “We have to figure it out a little based upon our values, leadership and who we are and what we try to be.”
Next month, Kevin will be speaking at the IOSH conference at ExCeL London where he will draw on his Vodafone experience and touch on his latest role. He wants delegates to think differently about safety.
“There’s a lot of traditionalism in the industry — when you think about what you have to do to make a company safe and how you do it,” he explains.
“I’ve come through the ranks. I’ve been at the lowest levels and worked my way through this. The more experience that I’ve got and the more mature I’ve got, I’ve realised that you can’t go and have a stand-up battle in the board room. For the last 15 years, I’ve been working in completely the opposite way — breaking safety down, not building up massive safety functions, and focusing on things that matter to a business.”
At Vodafone, he says, to illustrate his point, it was about winning consumers, talent management, and building a better brand.
“Anything I could do to embed, integrate and influence in that way got me far more traction than ever using safety as a standard or a flag bearer or whatever. It was a case of do business, don’t do safety.”
Kevin is careful to stress that his approach will not suit everyone. Some, he adds, will disagree with what he has to say. He has no truck with that. He’s happy for delegates to challenge him, so long as it’s a personal view.
“What they are not going to challenge me on is what we delivered at Vodafone,” he insists. “The results are there. You can go and read the sustainability report from the last two years and you can see the progress and the performance change. It was immense and was a massive step change.”
Kevin has made his mark on Vodafone. When he left in December last year, his boss’s parting words resonated with him.
“He said, ‘From what you’ve done here, you’ve absolutely demonstrated the true vision of leadership’. When you think about that, that’s all we really want to do,” he concludes.
“We are all just custodians of a brand or an organisation. We don’t own it; it’s not ours. The lasting comment I took away was ‘leadership is about the legacy that you leave behind’.”
Kevin Furniss will speak on “Leadership first, not safety first” from 11.15-11.45 at the IOSH 2014 conference, at ExCeL London on 18 June. Visit: www.ioshconference.co.uk
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