Health, Safety and Wellbeing – Building our culture
As a growing organisation with a strong health and safety record, we have taken this further by implementing a greater cultural approach to Health, Safety and Wellbeing. With team members working on sites, in offices and remotely, we needed to ensure that we built on the respective needs of our people, whilst putting ourselves on a path of continuous improvement.
This includes an honest appraisal of ourselves, and ensuring our cultural approach makes a meaningful difference to our team and wider stakeholders. It is also important that there is management buy in to have senior endorsement and encourage the investment of time and energy into what is a long-term programme. Luckily, at Reheat our directors are fully behind the team to take a sustainable approach to build on our existing practices to ensure we have an even stronger culture for the years ahead.
Before reading on, I must stress that we are a culture in progress (no business should consider themselves the finished article!), and what I have outlined below is simply an example of our positive experience that we wish to share in the hope that it encourages other businesses to think about developing their culture.
1. Build on existing health and safety, and give Wellbeing its place
Whilst Reheat already has Health and Safety well and truly established (and an exceptional safety record) we wanted to make sure the excellent work we do for our site-based and office work was carried into a broader, cultural approach to Health and Safety, with an even more proactive approach which set out long-term goals. We also felt it was important to include Wellbeing, which encompasses quality of life (acknowledging social, economic, and environmental conditions) and enabling our team to feel they have sense of meaning and purpose - which has an inextricable link to our values.
2. Form a diverse committee
As a result of taking a cultural approach, we formulated a Health, Safety and Wellbeing committee to guide our progress. It was important to us that it was not just the ‘usual suspects’, only consisting of those in operational roles. Rather, we have a committee made up from a blend of team members and departments, including junior team members and communications.
This ensures the voice of our committee reflects all aspects of the business. You will be pleasantly surprised at just what great ideas, thoughts and opinions come out from a diverse group, particularly those who may not necessarily have a background in health, safety, or wellbeing. We also keep the committee open to anyone who wants to join for a meeting and have input, and we always have at least one non-committee team member invited to join the group, rotating this between departments. The Committee's actions are also made available to everyone in the business so we can be kept accountable.
3. Benchmark yourself
To build our culture, it made sense to benchmark ourselves and measure progress against an established model. There are appropriate benchmarking mechanisms that already exist, such as The Hudson Safety Culture Maturity Model[1] or the Safety Culture Maturity® Model (designed by the Keil Centre)[2].
To begin the benchmarking process, we formulated a compulsory, anonymous survey for all employees to complete. Whilst the models are heavy on Safety, we incorporated Health and Wellbeing throughout. It’s important to get this right, as the survey should be your benchmark to conduct annually. We then use the survey results to help benchmark how we stand up against industry recognised, culture-based models and inform our Roadmap.
4. Create a Roadmap
From the benchmarking results and all other Health, Safety and Wellbeing initiatives, we created a Roadmap which sets out our route forwards. The Roadmap captures every bit of survey feedback, and any other actions, projects, programmes, and initiatives that contribute to the development of our Health, Safety and Wellbeing culture.
The Roadmap should then contain all the actions and milestones for the Health, Safety and Wellbeing committee to work through and implement. The idea is that, as the actions are completed and milestones are hit, the business is then moving further along the Roadmap until the next benchmark takes place. This then informs if the progress has been successful and supporting the development of the broader health, safety, and wellbeing culture.
5. Communicate progress and encourage dialogue
Once the Roadmap has been established, keep everyone in your business updated – and do it consistently. We communicate the Roadmap and any changes to it monthly, alongside our broader communication. The business also hosts a weekly team meeting, where we update on health, safety and wellbeing and provide a forum for feedback or discussion. The Health, Safety and Wellbeing committee is also open to any suggestions and feedback from the team at any time to enable dialogue and for everyone to have a voice.
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[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753505001190
[2] https://www.hse.gov.uk/research/otopdf/2000/oto00049.pdf
