Safety features at the heart of everything we do whether this be at a depot, retail site, office location or customer premises our colleagues always strive to be safe and considerate – a core company value.
To mark World Day For Safety And Health At Work on the 28th April I spoke to Ian Glasper, HSE Business Partner to understand how our colleagues work safely every day.
Tell me a bit about the safety team’s priorities?
The key thing for us is to make sure colleagues don’t become complacent, we have people who have been with us in similar jobs for a long time, they are very good at what they do but its human nature to potentially become complacent about a task that you do regularly. As a team we are always looking for new ways to embed our safety messages whether it’s through initiatives like the “Golden Rules”, “Safety F1rst” and “Safety Essentials” or new ways to engage our colleagues across all of our depots and sites.
As a team we have a safety conversation is this something every site does?
Yes, every depot, office and site has a quarterly safety conversation as part of their team catch up’s and the depots hold a monthly depot safety briefing. This encourages people to discuss safety topics whether this be fire safety at home or at work or near misses/incidents which have occurred. It’s good to share information and best practice and remind people of what could happen if safety isn’t at the forefront of our minds. All incidents/near misses are reported through our well worker system and a thorough root cause analysis conducted to ensure we learn from such occurrences. The safety conversations, depot briefings and safety bulletins are presented in a way which encourages debate and discussion as this is the best way for us to embed our message and engage colleagues. We use case studies so people really relate to the situation and think “wow that could have been me”.
Our managers conduct quarterly site safety visits what’s the main purpose of this?
Our depot supervisors conduct daily, weekly and monthly site safety checks to make sure everything is safe and as it should be, but this is an opportunity for someone not familiar with the site to cast a fresh pair of eyes on the depot and conduct a thorough safety audit. On average 200 senior site safety visits are conducted per year. This reaffirms that safety is everyone’s responsibility – whether you work in Operations, Sales, or otherwise; it also gives managers a great opportunity to talk to colleagues and really understand practices on site, and reinforces that everyone and anyone can intervene if people feel something isn’t safe.
A quick example of where we’ve made a safety improvement recently is in Team Energy, where a near miss report highlighted that engineers were drilling into customers’ walls to install CO alarms (to protect the customer against carbon monoxide fumes) – we nearly hit an electrical cable that hadn’t been wired correctly with the drill bit – as a result of the investigation into the incident, engineers now fix the CO alarms with an adhesive pad, removing the need to drill into customer’s walls and the risks that entails.
This has given us some great insight into Certas Energy’s commitment to the health and safety of our colleagues, customers and partners – thanks Ian and the team!
