FEATURE
NO WASTE OF TIME
FCC Environment explains how it has raised the standards of safety within the organisation, and how it hopes to work with the wider waste and resource sector to ensure continual industry-wide improvements.
Workplace safety has always been of paramount importance to us all at FCC Environment, however, there has been a step change in the cultural attitude towards safety in the workplace over the last 10 years. This has filtered down from FCC Environment’s Chief Executive, Paul Taylor to the operatives working at the front-end of the business, with a clear commitment
from everybody to ensuring that staff go home safe and sound at the end of each day.
Over the course of this 10-year period, we have completely over-hauled our management system and internal auditing regime. In addition to this, we have undertaken safety climate surveys in 2012, 2014, 2017 and 2020, feeding information from these into a series of three-year health and safety improvement plans, with a plan completed and implemented after the data from each survey had been collated and analysed.
These plans focused on combatting issues raised throughout the surveys and saw the introduction of a number of initiatives to enhance workplace safety. Among these, we introduced a bespoke behavioural- based safety process, reviewed and revised internal health and safety training, and introduced a hugely successful one-day ‘basic’ health and safety course to enable all staff to have the knowledge to reinforce their skills and to enable a safer working environment. Underpinning these initiatives was improved communications with safety representatives, worker engagement and regular leadership visits and self- assessments, ensuring that the plans were being implemented consistently and correctly.
The net result of these plans has been a positive and progressive impact on the maturity of the overall safety culture within the organisation. We saw this exemplified in 2018 when FCC Environment became the first waste management company operating within the UK to be accredited to the new ISO 45001 standard.
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Key to our success in this field, I believe, is the fact that we share our knowledge and experiences openly and willingly, with the aim of betterment in areas where there may be recognised shortcomings. We use learning points from historic events to aid with developing better, more meaningful, and effective responses to questions, situations and events which may arise.
We understand that the health and safety team cannot be everywhere, all the time. To that end we use various media – whether it be physical, digital, and virtual – to maintain a presence within the workplace and ensure we reach people with our safety messages.
Over the past 10 years, the huge strides we have made with our health and safety regime have been recognised with a number of distinguished industry accolades, including the British Safety Council International Safety Award (Distinction), British Safety Council International Safety Award (Best in Sector), British Safety Council Five Star Audit, British Safety Council Sword of Honour, International Institute of Risk and Safety Management Risk Excellence Award (Barry Holt Award for Outstanding Risk Management Practice) and the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management Risk Excellence Award (President’s Commendation).
It is important to us that we use our learnings and successes to raise standards and safety for our colleagues working across the wider waste and resource sector, as well as taking on learnings from our peers to ensure we remain at the vanguard of industry. Actively working with sector bodies such as the Environmental Services Association (ESA) and the Waste Industry Safety and Health forum (WISH), we have given significant input to sector guidance produced by WISH on a range of workplace safety- related issues.
Internally, our focus now is to seek out small incremental gains to continually improve the way in which we manage the ongoing health, safety and wellbeing of our workforce and the workplace itself. It is only right that we continue to check and benchmark that our ongoing improvements are in line with best practice from around the world.
www.fccenvironment.co.uk www.tomorrowshs.com
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